Lex Fridman
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Okay. So that doesn't make sense. But he is nevertheless at the center of this because he's the glue of the family, right? He exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control over them. How was he able to do that? Sorry to interrupt. Because you said he was a petty criminal. It does seem he was pretty prolific in his petty crimes. He did a lot of them. He had a lot of access to LSD.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But it doesn't seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was the, well, creepy crawling may be, but it doesn't seem like the murder, like some of the other people you've covered, like the Zodiac Killer, the murder is the goal. maybe there's some psychopathic kind of artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But it seems like, at least the way you're describing it, with the Charles Manson family, the murder was just the... They just had a basic disregard for human life, and the murder was a consequence of just operating in the drug underworld.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So the scale of the infiltration, the number of people, and the skill of it. Is there a case to be made that the Okhrana and the Chaka orchestrated both the components of the Russian Revolution as you described them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So you think there was, if he was an informer, you think there was still a connection between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever, with him throughout this until he's coming to murder?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It still is fascinating that he's able to have that much psychological control over those people. without having a very clear ideology. So it's a cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But there's not an ideology behind that, something like Scientology or some kind of religious or some kind of, I don't know, utopian ideology, nothing like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, but how do people convince anybody of anything? With a cult, usually you have either an ideology or you have maybe personal relations, like you said, sex and drugs. But underneath that, can you really keep people with sex and drugs? You have to kind of convince them that you love them in some deep sense, like there's a commune of love. You have a lot of people there in the cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And again, we return to that pull towards belonging that gets us humans into trouble. So it does seem that there was a few crimes around this time. So the Zodiac Killer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And also when he was stabbing the victims, it doesn't seem like he was very good at it. Or if the goal was to kill them, he wasn't very good at it because some of them survived.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So, I mean, there's a couple of questions to ask here. First of all, did people see his face?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It might not have been. You do this kind of rigorous look, saying, like, okay, what is the actual facts that we know? Like, reduce it to the thing that we know for sure. And in speaking about his motivation... He said that he was collecting souls. Souls for the afterlife. For the afterlife. That's kind of occult-y. Yeah. I mean, that's what I believe. Is it the Vikings or the Romans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
They believed this in battle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Well, one of the interesting things you kind of bring up here in our discussion of Manson inspires this, but there does seem to be... I shared inspiration between several killers here. The Zodiac, the Son of Sam later, and the Monster of Florence. So is it possible there's some kind of underworld that is connecting these people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You've studied secret societies. You gave a lot of amazing lectures on secret societies. It's fascinating to look at human history through the lens of secret societies because they've permeated all of human history. You've talked about everything from the Knights Templar to Illuminati to Freemasons like we brought up. Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, as you've talked about,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
in its sort of main form, lasted a short time, but its legend... Never gone away. Never gone away. So maybe Illuminati is a really interesting one. What was that? Well, the Illuminati that we know started in 1776.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And you actually highlight the difference between, speaking of publicity, that there's a difference between visibility and transparency. That a secret society can be visible. It could be known about. It could be quite popular, but you could still have a secrecy within it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And then you have the French Revolution. So the idea of the Illuminati, to put it crudely, the branding is a really powerful one. And so it makes sense that there's a thread connecting it to this day, that a lot of organizations, a lot of secret societies can sort of adopt the branding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And if you're effective at it, I think it does attract... It's the chicken or the egg. But powerful people tend to have gigantic egos, and people with gigantic egos tend to like the exclusivity of secret societies. And so there's a gravitational force that pulls powerful people to these societies. Exclusive, only certain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And of course, if we go back to the conversation of intelligence agencies, it would be very efficient and beneficial for intelligence agencies to infiltrate the secret societies, right? Because that's where the powerful people are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Oh, boy. Well, I mean, that's actually, in all the lectures, I kind of had a sense that intelligence agencies themselves are kind of secret societies, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I have this sense that there are very powerful secret societies operating today and we don't really know or understand them. And the conspiracy theories in spirit might have something to them, but are actually factually not correct. So like, you know, an effective, powerful secret society or intelligence agency is not going to let you know anything that it doesn't want you to know, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
They'll probably mislead you if you can stay close.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And in Texas, the thing I love the most is there's a simple kindness to the hello, to the nod, to the aimless and wonderful conversation that you might have at a coffee shop or when you meet a stranger. I don't know. I've really fallen in love with Texas and the long runs along the river. which I consume AG1 after. Sometimes I forget there's a sponsor read going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, there's a... I mean, the closer I look, the more I wonder the same question we asked about the Russian intelligence agencies is, where's the center of power? It seems to be very hard to figure out. Does the secrecy scare you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And they were sure that there's just a few problems that can be solved. And once you solve them, that you have this beautiful utopia where everything would be just perfect. It'd be great. And we can just get there. And I think it's really strong belief in a global utopia that, It just never goes right. It seems like impossible to know the truth in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It is fascinating about humans. A beautiful idea on paper, an innocent little idea about a utopian future can lead to so much suffering and so much destruction and the unintended consequences that you see described. The law of unintended consequences. And we learn from it. I mean, that's why history is important. We learn from it, hopefully. Do we? Slowly, or slow learners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm unconvinced of that, but perhaps it's... Speaking of unconvinced, what gives you hope? If human beings are still here, maybe expanding out into the cosmos 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 years from now, what gives you hope about that future? About even being a possible future, about it happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And there's similar, sometimes, psychological behavior in traffic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
The road rage, yeah. It's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But also part of the human makeup... difference between humans and chimps is the ability to get together, cooperate on a mass scale over an idea, create things like the Roman Empire did, laws that prevent us and protect us from crazy human behavior, manifestations of a man's type of behavior. Well, human beings are just weird animals. It's not getting around. They're just completely peculiar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm not sure that we're altogether natural. But I think we are altogether beautiful. There is something magical about humans, and I hope humans stay here, even as we get advanced robots walking around everywhere, more and more intelligent robots that claim to have consciousness, that claim they love you, that increasingly take over our world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I hope this magical thing that makes us human still persists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Rick, you're an incredible person. Well, thank you. You've done so much fascinating work, and it's really an honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
This was so fun. Thank you so much for talking today. Well, thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Spence. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Akrana or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Well, that's a fascinating question. I mean, you could see this with NKVD. It's obviously an extremely powerful organization that starts to eat itself, where everybody's pointing fingers internally also, as a way to gain more power. So the question is, in organizations like that that are so compartmentalized, where's the power? Where's the center of power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Because you would think, given that much power, some individual or a group of individuals will start accumulating that power. But it seems like that's not always a trivial thing. Because if you get too powerful, the snake eats that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, just one step away from the very top, somebody there will probably accumulate the most power. You mentioned that the various Russian intelligence agencies were good at creating agent provocateurs, infiltrating the halls of power. What does it take to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Especially engineering heavy teams. And they're all dreamers and they're all pushing forward and they're all trying to do the craziest shit they can. Yes, there is a San Francisco bubble. Yes, there's a bit of a tunnel vision going on in many ways. But on the pure desire to build something cool, something that has a positive impact on the world, I don't know. That's a truly inspiring desire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But of course, sort of from my perspective, I share in that desire. But there's a great cost to it as well. And it's something that is a constant tension in my heart. I would like to do more building than talking. And I'm reminded of that when I'm here. Anyway. There is a bit of a mess, a complexity to the scaling of business and the running of a business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
We got AG1 for nutrition, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, Masterclass for learning, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a bunch of different kinds of reasons, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now, on to the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, that there's a boost to the ego when you can deceive, sort of not play by the rules of the world and just play with powerful people like they're your pawns. You're the only one that knows this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I wonder how many people are susceptible to this. I would like to believe that people have, a lot of people have the integrity to at least withstand the M.I., The money and the ideology, the pull of that, and the ego.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But if you don't, we'll rat you out. You'll be exposed. What are some differences to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence, the CIA?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And that is what NetSuite can help you with. They manage all kinds of messy stuff. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Are there laws, either intelligence agencies, that they're not willing to break? Is it basically lawless operation to where you can break any law as long as it accomplishes the task?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm reminded of the work and of my conversation with Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and a appreciator of the beauty in the world. What a wonderful human being. Also Paul Conti. These are all friends of Andrew Huberman. And what just deep and interesting people they are. I would venture even to say very different, but both just incredible analysts of the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I wonder how often those intelligence agencies in the 20th century, and of course, the natural question extending it to the 21st century, how often they go to the assassination? How often they go to the kill part of that versus just the espionage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And what a mystery the mind is. I've been reading a lot of mechanistic interpretability work, which is this whole field of analyzing neural networks and trying to understand what's going on inside. And there is just wonderful breakthroughs in that field. But whenever I'm reading the papers, I can't help but be caught by the thought that I wish we had this kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So non-direct violence, controlling people's minds, controlling people's minds at scale, and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Yeah, the fact that you're willing to do medical experiments says something about what you're willing to do. And I'm sure that same spirit, innovative spirit, persists to this day. And maybe less so, I hope, less so in the United States, but probably in other intelligence agencies in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
On the topic of mice, on the topic of money, ideology, coercion, and ego, let me ask you about a conspiracy theory. So there is a conspiracy theory that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein. at a high level, if we can just talk about that. Is that something that's at all even possible? That you have, basically this would be for coercion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous, and then you collect evidence on them so that you can then have leverage on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
rigor or the possibility of rigor in uh studying the human mind sort of neurobiology neuroscience is too messy there's too many variables there's too much going on and you can't do control experiments like you can on neural networks so anyway the human mind is a beautiful and mysterious thing and if you want to untangle the puzzles going on in there check out betterhelp.com slash lex and save in your first month that's betterhelp.com slash
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So you think even American intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
whether it's the CIA or the Accra, maybe that's what the President of the United States sees when they show up to office, is all the stuff they have on him or her, and say that there's an internal mechanism of power that you don't want to mess with, And so you will listen, whether that internal mechanism of power is the military industrial complex or whatever, the bureaucracy of government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Kind of actually the deep state. The deep state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Flex. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Phil Ivey on poker, for example. Great, great Masterclass. There's another guy who I don't believe has a Masterclass, although he should, Phil Helmuth. And I got a chance to meet him and hang out with him, and it was a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
We'll jump around a little bit, but because your work is so fascinating and it covers so many topics. So let's, if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg Group. Bilderbergers. So the elites, as I think you've referred to them. So this gathering of the elites, can you just talk about them? What is this gathering?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
What's with the robes? Why do they do weird, creepy shit? Why do they put on a mask and the robe and do the plays and the owl with the... And then sacrificing, I don't know. Why do you have a giant owl? I mean, why do you do that? But what is that in human nature? Because I don't think rich people are different than not rich people. What is it about wealth and power that brings that out of people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
What a cool experience. I just love that this world can produce such interesting, distinct, unique characters. And they are unapologetically true to themselves. Beautiful. I love it. Anyway, there's a lot of such characters on masterclass.com. and you can learn from them. So like I said, I love Phil Ivey's Masterclass, Aaron Franklin on Barbecue, probably somebody I'll talk to eventually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It's a great idea. So the rich people should just go to a movie, or maybe just go to a Taylor Swift concert. Like, why do you have to put... Well... Why the elf?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I mean, yeah. Where else are you going to do it? If you're interested in vetting, if you're interested in powerful people selecting...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Well, there could also be a much more innocent explanation of really it's powerful people getting together and having conversations and through that conversation influencing each other's view of the world. And just having a legitimate discussion of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I actually watched a couple of episodes of a barbecue show on Netflix. That's pretty good, but not as good as the Masterclass. I just love the science and the art that goes into the whole thing. Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
policies why wouldn't they i mean why would you assume that people are not going to do that it's the owl thing with the with the robes like what why the owl and why the robes um which is why it becomes really compelling when guys like alex jones uh forgive me but i've not watched his documentary i probably should at some point about the bohemian grove
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
where he claims that there is Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children. And I think that's quite a popular conspiracy theory. Or it has lost popularity. It kind of transformed itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But, I mean, can you speak to that conspiracy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I set one up miraculously at lexfruman.com slash store. I think about the countless stores that are enabled. I think about the countless stores that are enabled by Shopify and the machinery of capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You've studied a lot of cults and occultism. What do you think is the power of that mystical experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. A drink I have not been consuming for the last few days because I'm traveling, and it's the thing that makes me miss home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And I was thinking about that when I was talking to Bernie Sanders. And what a genuine human being Bernie is. First of all, still firing on all cylinders in terms of the sharpness and the depth and the horsepower of his mind. He's still there at 83 years old. Still got it. And also, just has not changed over many, many decades. I wish there would be more politicians with that kind of integrity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So that's a, I would say, trivial example of that. but a clear one. I do believe that there's incredible power in groups of humans getting together and morphing reality. I think that's probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is. Groups of people being able to believe a thing and bring that belief into reality. Yes, you're exactly right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And of course, that power of the collective mind can be leveraged by charismatic leaders to do all kinds of stuff, where you get cults that do, you know, horrible things or anything. There might be a cult that does good things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Do you think, actually, the interesting psychological question is, in cults, do you think the person at the top always knows that it's a scam? Do you think there's something about the human mind where you gradually begin to believe... Begin to believe your own bullshit? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Agree or disagree with him, the man has integrity. And as we head into this election, I think about the kind of politicians and human beings I would love to see lead our world. And to me, integrity is one of the character traits that is of the highest importance because the pressures when you're at the top leading a nation are immense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And there are so many reasons, primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong. Yes, sir. And the dark forms that it takes throughout human history, recent human history, is something I'd love to talk to you a bit about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
If we can go back to the beginning of the 20th century, on the German side, you've described how secret societies like the Thule Society lay the foundation for Nazi ideology. Can you, through that lens, from that perspective, describe the rise of the Nazi Party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And I would like someone who refuses to ever for any reason sell their soul for convenience or otherwise. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Let's Freedom podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And by the way, we should take a tiny tangent here, which is that you refer to the intelligence agencies as being exceptionally successful. And here in the case of the Young Turks being also very successful in doing the genocide, meaning they've achieved the greatest impact, even though the impact on the scale of good to evil tends towards evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
you have written and lectured about serial killers, secret societies, cults, and intelligence agencies. So we can basically begin at any of these fascinating topics. But let's begin with intelligence agencies. Which has been the most powerful intelligence agency in history?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So this is almost like to help the war effort with a kind of propaganda, a narrative that can strengthen the will of the German people. It will strengthen the will of some people. Some people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
In Germany. And Marx probably expected the revolution to begin in Germany. Where else? I mean, the Soviet Union is not very industrialized. Germany is. And so that's where it would probably be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Can we sort of try to break that apart in a nuanced way? So it was a nationalist movement. The occult was part of the picture, occult racial theories. So there's a racial component, like the Aryan race, So it's not just the nation of Germany. And you take that and contrast it with Marxism. Did they also formulate that in racial terms? Did they formulate that in national versus global terms?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
How do they see this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Now, was the army doing the similar kinds of things that we've talked about with the intelligence agencies? This kind of same kind of trying to control the direction of political power? Well, it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I'm in San Francisco, allowing myself to be surrounded and inspired by some incredible software engineering that's going on here, and putting all the other mess of politics and social bubble stuff aside. So I'm doing a lot of programming and having a lot of really highly deep technical conversations. But I definitely miss Austin. I miss Texas. I miss Boston. Walking the halls of MIT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And by the way, for people who don't know, the National Socialist German Workers' Party is also known as the Nazi Party. So how did this evolution happen from that complicated little interplay? We should also say that a guy named Adolf Hitler is in the army at this time. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers' Party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So the interesting thing here is from where did anti-Semitism seep into this whole thing? It seems like the way they tried to formulate counter-Marxism is by saying the problem with capitalism and the problem with Marxism is that it's really Judeo-capitalism and, quote, Judeo-Bolshevism. From where did that ideology seep in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I do wish terms were a little bit more direct and self-explanatory, yeah. Jew hate is a better term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
You gave a lecture on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's widely considered to be the most influential work of antisemitism ever, perhaps. Can you describe this text?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
1903. And by the way, we should say that these are 24 protocols. Well, it varies. It varies. That are, I guess, supposed to be like meeting notes about the supposed cabal where the Jews and Freemasons are planning together a world domination. But it's like meeting notes, right? Protocol, which are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
I love that you're a scholar of people that just kind of emerge out of like the darkness. They just, they just come from nowhere. And there's the Akrona there also. And we should also say this was, I guess the original would be written. I mean, what's the language of the original? Russian? Russian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Why do you think it took off? Why do you think it grabbed a large number of people's imaginations? And even after it was shown to be not actually what it's supposed to be, people still believe it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
But the reality is, just like with a turd on a plate, you take a picture of that in modern day and it becomes a meme, becomes viral, and becomes a joke on all social media and now is viewed by tens of millions of people or whatever. It becomes popular. So wherever the turd came from, it did... Captivate the imagination. Yeah. It did speak to something. Because it seemed to provide an explanation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Can you just speak to Jew hatred? Is it just an accident of history? Why was it the Jews versus the Freemasons? Is it... the collective mind searching for small group to blame for the pains of civilization. And then Jews just happened to be the thing that was selected at that moment in history. It goes all the way back to the Greeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
So it's interesting. So this whole narrative that I would say is kind of like a viral meme started, as you described, in 300 BC. It just carried on in various forms and morphed itself into and arrived after the industrial revolution into an, in a new form to the, to the 19th and 20th century, and then somehow captivated everybody's imagination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Just like you said, in one hand, there's a good story. In the other hand is the truth. And oftentimes the good story wins out. And there's something about the idea that there's a cabal of people, whatever they are. In this case, our discussion is Jews. seeking world domination, controlling everybody, is somehow a compelling story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
It gives us a direction of a people's to fight, of a people's to hate, on which we project our pain, because life is difficult. Life for many, for most, is full of suffering. And so we channel that suffering into hatred towards the other. Maybe if we can just zoom out, what do you, from this particular discussion, learn about human nature, that we pick the other in this kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
And we divide each other up in groups and then construct stories and like constructing those stories and they become really viral and sexy to us. And then we channel the hatred. We use those stories to channel our hatred towards the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Speaking of the tipping point, you gave a series of lectures on murderers, crimes in the 20th century. One of the crimes that you described is the Manson family murders. And that combines a lot of the elements of what we've been talking about and a lot of the elements of the human nature that you just described. So can you just tell the story at a high level as you understand it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
How would you evaluate Hitler's painting? compared to Charles Manson's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Really, it's the university I intimately know now. And there's something about a university where you can shut off all the mess of the outside world and focus on ideas, on learning and on discovering. Plus the fearless energy of undergraduate and graduate students just boldly going forward, thinking they can completely revolutionize a field. That's really inspiring to be surrounded by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths, The Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So this may come off as being a total travel noob, but two things that came to me as troublesome or difficult as a travel noob when I'm traveling to all kinds of locations and am trying to be productive are One is power, so power cables, all the adapters you have to keep in mind and making sure your equipment is able to plug into the outlet without frying anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Somebody online was trying to correctly... I think... you shot a very particular angle of that video. I think they were criticizing your backhand was weak, potentially, because you're- That would be a fair criticism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Well, it's been fun watching you do all these fascinating things, but I do hope that you have a future in politics as well, because it's nice to have somebody that has rigorously developed their ideas and is honest about presenting them and is willing to debate those ideas out in public space. So I would love for you and people like you to represent the future of American politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So Vivek, thank you so much for every time I'm swiveling this chair, I'm thinking of Thomas Jefferson. It's good. That was my goal. So big shout out to Thomas Jefferson for the swivel chair. And thank you so much for talking today, Vivek. This was fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from George Orwell. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
In fact, I had a funny experience with that, or not so funny, about frying my equipment when I'm doing a podcast abroad. Anyway, so power, and figuring that out is actually not... And related to that is figuring out which electronic stores to go to to get equipment and how to find those stores. And to find those stores, you need to have good internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban. Great conversation. I think it's on your podcast, actually. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It was great. Okay, well, speaking of good guys, he messes me all the time with beautifully eloquent criticism. I appreciate that, Mark. What was one of the more convincing things he said to you? You're mostly focused on kind of DEI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And that takes me to the second issue that you run into when traveling is just getting good internet in any country, in any location. So that's what Saley helps you out with. They have a great data plan, easy to use, minimize roaming fees while constantly being connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think what Mark would say is that diversity is— allows you to look for talent in places where you haven't looked before and therefore find really special talent, special people. I think that's the case he made.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I don't know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind which there's a good thing. to bully people and to do bad things. I don't know what it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And so when you're traveling, you're not desperately holding on to that sweet, sweet airport Wi-Fi before you take a leap out into the unknown when there's no Wi-Fi. Here. Thanks to Saley, you can stay connected. Go to Saley.com slash Lex and choose the one gigabyte Saley data plan to get it for free. That's Saley.com slash Lex to get one free gig of Saley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you need managers, but as few as possible. It seems like when you have a giant managerial class, the actual doers don't get to do. But like you said, bureaucracy is a phenomenon of both the left and the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You're the one that reminded me that he drafted, he wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
All right, this episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P, help. Have you seen the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? It's a good movie. I really should read the book. I haven't read the book. I really want to read the book. But I think there's something also magical about the performances in the movie, just pure genius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Before all that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah. Speaking of shutting most of it down, how do you propose we do that? How do we make government more efficient? How to make it smaller? What are the different ideas of how to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There's this kind of almost meme-like video of Argentinian President Javier Millet wearing a whiteboard. He has all the, I think, 18 ministries lined up. And he's like, he's ripping like, Department of Education, gone. And he's just going like this. Now, the situation in Argentina is pretty dire. And the situation in the United States is not, despite everybody saying, the empire is falling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Anyway, the performances in the movie reveal the various manifestations of insanity, including the insanity of the people running the institutions. There's all kinds of insanities that humans are capable of. Why do I say this? I believe talking is one of the ways to reverse engineer how the insanity came to be in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
This is still, in my opinion, the greatest nation on earth. Still, the economy is doing very well. Still, this is the hub of culture, the hub of innovation, the hub of so many amazing things. Do you think it's possible to do something like firing 75 percent of people in government when things are going relatively well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And by the way, that kind of thing would attract the ultra-competent to actually want to work in government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you know, there's kind of the cynical view of capitalism where people think that the only reason you do anything is to earn more money. But I think a lot of people would want to work in government to build something that's helpful to a huge number of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I would have loved to be inside on Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and talk to those characters and talk to those human beings. In fact, I gravitate towards people with that kind of complexity in their mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You know, when I traveled across the country, and in general when I travel, I gravitate towards people like the homeless people outside of 7-Eleven and have a genuine, nonjudgmental, just open-hearted conversation with them. I like talking to regular people. I like talking to people who, I don't know, do something real for a living. And I don't mean to judge sort of white-collar and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, you said something really profound. At the individual scale of the individual contributor, doer, creator, what happens is you have a certain capacity to do awesome shit. And then there's barriers that come up where you have to wait a little bit. This happens, there's friction always. When humans together are working on something, there's friction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And so the goal of a great company is to minimize that friction, minimize the number of barriers. And what happens is the managerial class, the incentive is to create barriers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
tech jobs but i just mean uh manual labor jobs just people with their eyes their hands their feet their whole way of being shows aware and tear shows the journey sort of well-lived and hard-lived i like those people and i really want to talk to those people on a podcast but more than anything forget the mics i just like talking to them just as a one human to another
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Can you sort of steel man the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular department, Department of Education, and are saying that the amount of pain that will be caused by closing it and firing 75% of people will be too much?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Anyway, I say all that is conversation is a really powerful thing. And if you want to take conversation seriously as a way to heal your particular mental malady, consider using BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So what kind of things do you think government should do that the private sector, the forces of capitalism would create drastic inequalities or create the kind of pain we don't want to have in government?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I just recently did an episode on the history of Marxism. And what really struck me is that the 19th century was a battleground of radical ideas. And I think it's popular in modern political discourse to label, frankly, moderate ideas as radical. Sort of, in our rhetoric, radicalize the rhetoric and push towards the moderate, our actual policies and ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So if we get government out of education, would you be also for reducing this as a government in the States? for something like education?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So given this conversation, what do you think of Elon's proposal of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration or really any administration?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And it's interesting to look back at the 19th century, the industrialized world that doesn't have enough data on what large-scale implementation of ideas would actually look like. It's interesting to see those ideas battle each other out in their most radical form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So you mentioned Department of Education, but there's also the Department of Defense. And there's a very large number of very powerful people that have gotten used to a budget that's increasing and the number of wars and military conflicts that's increasing. So if we could just talk about that. So this is the number one priority. It's like there's difficulty levels here. The DOD...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It would be probably the hardest. So let's take that on. What's your view on the military-industrial complex, Department of Defense, and wars in general?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So that really opened up my eyes to sort of honestly embody and consider and walk a mile in the shoes of a particular idea, whether that's communism or capitalism. Because capitalism does have flaws. But it is the thing that has given us much of the improved quality of life that we see around us today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think it's a fascinating, complex question of why does a large collection of humans, when free to compete, do a pretty good job? It's fascinating. And that's every time I talk about NetSuite, that's what I'm thinking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Wait, okay. There's a lot of stuff to ask. First of all, on Joe Biden, you mean he's functionally not in control of the U.S. military because of the age factor or because of the nature of the presidency?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
How does a large collection of humans, different departments, different tasks, how do they all collaborate efficiently, effectively, under the deadlines, under the stress, under the shadow of the reality that if the business does not sell a lot of stuff and make a lot of money, it's going to fail, and all those people will lose their jobs. It's stressful and it's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, it's a really, really powerful idea. It's actually something that Donald Trump ran on in 2016. Drain the swamp. Drain the swamp. I think by most accounts, maybe you can disagree with me, he did not successfully do so. He did fire a bunch of people, more than usual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Anyway, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is brought to you by Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator that I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Saley for international roaming data, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, Ground News for cutting through the media bias and aid sleep, for naps. She's wise, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, so the Supreme Court cases you mentioned, there's a lot of nuance there. I guess it's weakening the immune system of the different departments. Yeah, it's a good way of putting it. On the human psychology level, so you basically kind of implied that for Donald Trump or for any president, the legal situation was difficult. Is that the only thing really operating? Like, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
The point is to see every side of every story and you, you the listener, come to your own conclusion. This is one of the problems I have with people that are against platforming certain voices. I believe in the intelligence of the listener to decipher the truth. And sometimes that doesn't come immediately. Sometimes that comes over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Probably not. Just on a psychological level, just hard to fire a very large number of people. Is that what it is? Like, why is there a basic civility and momentum going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I disagree with you on both the last and the best hope. Donald Trump is more likely to fire a lot of people, but is he the best person to do so?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
My impression is his priority allocation was different than yours. I think he's more focused on some of the other topics that you are also focused on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And there is a tension there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
But I do think that it is the responsibility of a host, of an interviewer, to challenge the audience, to push the audience to not just listen to this particular person, but to listen to other people that disagree with this person, to listen to differing voices and different perspectives, and consider both
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There's so many priorities at play here, though. I mean, you really do have to do the Elon thing of walking into Twitter headquarters with a sink, right? Let that sink in. That basically firing a very large number of people and basically But it's not just about the firing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
It's about setting clear missions for the different departments that remain, hiring back because you overfire, hiring back based on meritocracy. And it's a full-time – and it's not only full-time in terms of actual time. It's full-time psychologically because – you're walking into a place unlike a company like Twitter, an already successful company in government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I mean, everybody around you, all the experts and the advisors are going to tell you you're wrong. And like, it's a very difficult psychological place to operate in because like you're constantly the asshole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And I mean, the, the certainty you have to have about what you're doing is just like nearly infinite because everybody, all the really smart people are telling you, no, this is a terrible idea, sir. This is a terrible idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, I'll give you an example that's really difficult tension, given your priorities, immigration. there's an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the United States. You've spoken about mass deportation. Yes. That requires a lot of effort. Right. Money. I mean, how do you do it and how does that conflict with the shutting it down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
the possibility that this person is completely right or completely wrong and walk about with those two possibilities together. So don't get captured by a particular ideology. Give yourself time to accept the ideology and to accept the steel man against the ideology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There is a lot of criticism of the idea of mass deportation, though. So one, it will cause a large amount of economic harm, at least in the short term. The other is there would be potentially violations of our kind of higher ideals of how we like to treat human beings, in particular separation of families, for example, tearing families apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And the other is just like the logistical complexity of doing something like this. How do you answer some of those criticisms?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And existing in that superposition of truths, try to figure out where in that gray area is your own understanding of the path forward. Because unlike what politicians claim, I don't think there's a right understanding. or an easy or a clear answer for the problems that we face as a human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
In fact, the division, I think, that we're seeing online on the internet between the politicians is our best attempt at trying to, through the tension of discourse, figuring out what the hell are we doing here? How do we solve this? How do we make a better world? So anyway, Ground News does a great job of delivering
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, in the way you describe eloquently, the immigration system is broken in that way that is built fundamentally on lies. But there's the other side of it. Illegal immigrants are used in political campaigns for fear-mongering, for example. So what I would like to understand is what is the actual... that illegal immigrants are causing. So the claim, one of the more intense claims is of crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And, you know, I don't, I haven't studied this rigorously, but sort of the surface level studies all show that legal and illegal immigrants commit less crime than American, US.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
the metrics that give you the context of like, okay, how biased is this particular story? So they can kind of help you in consuming that new story to understand where it's coming from. It's trying to clearly, in an organized way, deliver to you the perspective on the truth, grounded in the context of the bias from which that perspective comes from, okay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And there's a lot of other features that are super interesting. I'm glad they exist. I'm glad they're doing the work they're doing. It's extremely important. Go to groundnews.com slash lex to get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. That's ground, G-R-O-U-N-D, news.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by eSleep and its Pod 4 Ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Just to linger a little bit on the demonization issue. and to bring Ann Coulter into the picture. Her, which I recommend people should listen to your conversation with her. I haven't listened to her much, but she had this thing where she's clearly admires and respects you as a human being. And she's basically saying, you're one of the good ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And this idea that you had this brilliant question of like, what does it mean to be an American? And she basically said, Not you, Vivek. But she said, well, maybe you, but not people like you. So that whole kind of approach to immigration, I think, is really anti-American.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, there's a million reasons, and they're all nicely categorized, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Cools or heats up each side of the bed separately. Speaking of the amazing things that capitalism brought to our world, they increasingly make naps more and more magical. The Ultra part of the Pod 4 Ultra adds the quote-unquote base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. It can elevate, can control the positioning of the bed, which is another fascinating piece of technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Quick pause, Bethel break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Let me ask you to, again, steel man the case for and against Trump. So my biggest criticism for him is the fake election scheme, the 2020 election, and actually the 2020 election in the way you formulated in The Nation of Victims. It's just the entirety of that process, instead of focusing on winning elections,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Right. But I get it. And you share a lot of ideas with Donald Trump. So I get when you're running for president that you would say that kind of thing. But there's, you know, there's other criticism you could provide. And again, on the 2020 election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And so you can sort of read in bed, you can watch TV, all that kind of stuff. But I think the killer feature, the most amazing feature is the cooling of the bed. A cold bed with a warm blanket, one of my favorite things in the world. for a nap, for a full night's sleep, all of that. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong. I don't care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
The 2020 election and not in the, what is it, TDS kind of objection. It's just I don't think there's clear, definitive evidence that there was voter fraud. Let me ask you about a different area. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I think there's a lot of interesting topics about the influence of media, of tech, and so on. But I want a president that has a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
good, clear relationship with the truth and knows what truth is, what is true and what is not true. And moreover, I want a person who doesn't play victim, like you said, who focuses on winning and winning big. And if they lose, like walk away with honor and win bigger next time, or like channel that into growth and winning, winning in some other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So it's just like the strength of being able to give everything you got to win and walk away with honor if you lose. And everything that happened around 2020 election is just goes against that to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I'm a scientist and of one of myself when it comes to health, when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to all of that. I integrate the advice from all of my friends, all of the scientific literature and podcasts and all that kind of stuff from out there. But at the end of the day, I take all of that with a grain of salt and just kind of listen to my body and see what works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Well, I think I agree with a lot of things you said. Probably disagree, but it's hard to disagree with a Hunter Biden laptop story, whether that would have changed the results of the election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think there's probably, that's just one example, maybe a sexy example of a bias in the complex of the media. And there's bias in the other direction too, but probably there's bias. It's hard to characterize bias as one of the problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And for me, naps are magical. I think they're essential for my productivity. I go hard in the first few hours of the day, usually four, four hours of deep work. And after that, there's a bit of a crash just because it's so exhausting. And a nap solves that like trivially, 15, 20 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Most people in tech companies are privately, their political persuasion is on the left. And most journalists, majority of journalists are on the left. But to characterize the actual reporting and the impact of the reporting in the media and the impact of the censorship is difficult to do. But that's a real problem, just like we talked about, a real problem in immigration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, so the connection of government to platform should not exist. The government, FBI, or anybody else should not be able to pressure platforms to censor information, yes. We could talk about Polodurov and the censorship there. There should not be any censorship and there should not be media bias.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
and you're right to complain if there is media bias, and we can lay it out in the open and try to fix that system. That said, the voter fraud thing, you can't right a wrong by doing another wrong. You can't just, if there's some shitty, shady stuff going on in the media and the censorship complex, you can't just make shit up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Sometimes I'll pop a caffeine pill before the nap or drink a coffee before the nap and I wake up, boom, ready to go again. I don't know if I can do that without the nap. I honestly don't. So thank you, 8sleep, and thank you for the magic of naps. Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You can't do the fake electric scheme and then do a lot of shady, crappy behavior during January 6th and try to, like, shortcut your way just because your friend is cheating a monopoly when you're playing monopoly you can't cheat you shouldn't cheat yourself you should be honest and like with honor and use your platform to uh help fix the system versus like cheat your way so here's my view is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Are you worried if in this election, it's a close election and Donald Trump loses by a whisker, that there's chaos that's unleashed? And how do we minimize the chance of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vivek Ramaswamy. you are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas so you're the perfect person to ask what is conservatism what's your let's say conservative vision for america well actually this is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I wish there was less of, although at times it is so ridiculous, it is entertaining, the I hate Taylor Swift type of tweets or truths or whatever. I don't think that's- He's a funny guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I love that you do that. I love that you focus on policy and can speak for hours on policy. Let's look at foreign policy. Sure. What kind of peace deal do you think is possible, feasible, optimal in Ukraine? If you sat down, you became president, if you sat down with Zelensky and sat down with Putin, what do you think is possible to talk to them about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
One of the hilarious things you did, which were intense and entertaining, your debates in the primary, but anyway, is how you grilled the other candidates that didn't know any regions. They wanted to send money and troops and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and they didn't know any of the regions in Ukraine. Yeah. You had a lot of zingers in that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
But anyway, how do you think about negotiating with world leaders about what's going on there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So from the American perspective, the main interest is weakening the alliance between Russia and China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
There might be some extremely painful things for Ukraine here. So Ukraine currently captured a small region in Russia, the Kursk region, but Russia has captured giant chunks, Donetsk, Luhansk, Sapochnik, Kherson regions. So it seems given what you're laying out, it's very unlikely for Russia to give up any of the regions that's already captured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
This episode is brought to you by Saley, a brand new eSIM service app offering several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. I've recently had a conversation with Peter Levels, Levels.io, who's traveled across the world and been exceptionally productive while traveling across the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Just to add to the table some things that Putin won't like but I think are possible to negotiate, which is Ukraine joining the European Union and not NATO. So establishing some kind of economic relationships there and also splitting the bill, sort of guaranteeing some amount of money from both Russia and the United States for rebuilding Ukraine is one of the,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
challenges in Ukraine, a war-torn country, is how do you guarantee the flourishing of this particular nation? So you want to not just stop the death of people and the destruction, but also provide a foundation on which you can rebuild the country and build a flourishing future country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Okay, let's go to the China side of this. The big concern here is that the brewing cold or God forbid, hot war between the United States and China in the 21st century. How do we avoid that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I think the thing you didn't quite make clear, but I think implied, is that we have to accept the red line that China provides of the one China policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
But what do you do when China says very politely, we're going to annex Taiwan, whether you like it or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So Prime Minister Modi, I think you've complimented him in a bunch of different directions, one of which is when you're discussing nationalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Well, I hope you run because this was made clear on the stage in the primary debates. You have a unique clarity and honesty in expressing the ideas you stand for. And it would be nice to see that. I would also like to see the same thing on the other side, which would make for some badass, interesting debates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Who do you think? So for me, I would love to see in some kind of future where it's you versus somebody like Tim Walz. So to Tim Walz, maybe I'm lacking in knowledge. It's a, first of all, like a good dude has similar to you strongly held, if not radical, ideas of how to make progress in this country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So to just be on stage and debate honestly about the ideas, there's a tension between those ideas. Is there other people? Shapiro is interesting also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
You're exceptionally productive. But even just looking book-wise, you've written basically a book a year for the last four years. When you're writing, when you're thinking about how to solve the problems of the world, to develop your policy, how do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Yeah, we'll talk about each of those issues. Immigration, the growing bureaucracy of government, religion is a really interesting topic, something you've spoken about a lot. But you've also had a lot of really tense debates. So you're a perfect person to ask to steel man the other side. Yeah. So let me ask you about progressivism. Can you steel man the case for progressivism and left wing ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
So you've mentioned the first primary debate. So more than almost basically anybody I've ever seen, you stepped into some really intense debates on your own podcast, but in general, kind of in all kinds of walks of life, whether it's sort of debates with sort of protestors or debates with people that really disagree with you, like the radical opposite of you. what's the philosophy behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
And what's the psychology of being able to be calm through all of that, which you seem to be able to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Are they right is the thing I actually literally see you do. So you are listening. to the other person. For my own benefit, to be honest, selfish. You also don't lose your shit. So you don't take it personally. You don't get emotional, but you get emotional sort of in a positive way. You get passionate, but you don't get, it doesn't, I've never seen you broken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
Like to where they, do they get you like outraged?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#445 – Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War
I agree with you. I think fundamentally, most people are good. And one of the things I love most about humans is the very thing you said, which is curiosity. I think we should lean into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
The following is a conversation with Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont and two-time presidential candidate, both times as the underdog who, against the long odds, captivated the support and excitement of millions of people, both on the left and the right. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
To be able to lay down on a cold surface, using an app, control the temperature of that surface, put on a warm blanket, And I am forever lost in the creation of the millions of engineers who came before us. And the millions of engineers who will come after. Who are doing everything they can to build a better world. And that's what I dream about when I'm taking a nap. It's that better world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Have companies, lobbyists ever tried to buy you, tried to influence you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So how do we fix the system? How do we get money out of politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
How do we make that happen when there's so much money in the system and the politicians owe to the people who paid for their election? Does it have to come from the very top, essentially sort of a really strong popular populist president?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I think what happens is when an individual politician speaks out about it, they get punished. But I think this is a popular idea. So if a lot of them speak out, that's why if it came from the top, if a president was using a very large platform to basically speak out, it provides a safety blanket for the other politicians to get it out of the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
But there has to be a kind of a mass movement of it. Yes, it does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So many of your policy proposals are quite radical. No, they're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, they're popular. So what I mean is relative to the way other politicians speak, it's usually a little bit more moderate. So from everything you've learned from politics, is it better to go... sort of radical, maybe we can come up with a different word, versus a more moderate, safe, ambiguous kind of policy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, I mean, yeah, it's a popular idea. It's an idea that makes sense. But in order to implement it and actually make it happen requires, I mean, to flip the system upside down, right? In that sense, it's radical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Go to 8sleep.com and use code LEX to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Saley, a brand new eSIM service app that offers several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. That, for me, has been the biggest pain when traveling, is to make sure when I get to the airport, when I leave the airport, I'm able to communicate with the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Okay, let's talk about Medicare for All. If you could snap your fingers today and implement the best possible healthcare system for the United States of America, what would that look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So the way to pay for the system is to increase taxes, but you're saying if you cut that cost and increase the taxes, you're saying it's going to- Here's the story, and I've gotten my share of 30-second ads attacking me on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Or just communicate with a map that can make sure I don't get completely lost in this new country where I don't speak the language and all the other complexities of travel. Everything is made easier when you have an internet connection. And again, just a reminder how lucky we are in the 21st century. Billions of people are able to be seamlessly connected with each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So the most painful thing in today's system is the surprise bills, the number one cause of bankruptcy, and the psychological pain that comes from that, just worrying, stressed, in debt. You got it. And just basically afraid constantly of getting sick because you don't know if insurance is going to cover it. And if you're not insured, you don't know how much it's going to cost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So you're not going to go to the hospital even if there's something wrong with you, if there's pain and all that. So you just live in a state of fear, psychological fear. That's the number one problem. It's not just financial, it's psychological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
there's just so many stories and not even the horrific stories. There's countless horrific stories, but just basic stories of costs. Like my friend, Dr. Peter Attia has this story where he happens to be wealthy so he can afford it, but he had to take his son to the emergency room and the son was dehydrated and the bill was $6,000. They just did a basic test and gave him an IV, a basic thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And he has really good insurance and the insurance covered $4,000 of it. So he had to, at the end, pay $2,000 for a basic emergency room visit. And there's a lot of families for whom that one visit for such a simple thing would be just financially devastating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So anyway, I've had countless and countless experiences where... I have a terrible internet and the SIM situation is complicated. Do I buy a new SIM at the airport? And it's just a mess. And so Saley takes on this problem, make sure it's affordable, but also make sure it's super easy. If you're traveling and you want to make sure you stay connected, try them out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So that's another good example of a really popular idea that is not implemented because of the money in politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Again, if a single politician discusses it, they get punished for it. So there needs to be a mass movement. And probably, I mean, from my perspective, it has to come from the very top. It has to come from the president. And the president has to be a populist president where they don't care about the parties with the rich people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
They just speak out because they know it's a popular message and they know it's the right thing. So speaking of that, you had a historic campaign run for president in 2016. And in the eyes of many people, mine included, you were screwed over by the DNC, as especially the WikiLeaks emails showed. What's your just looking back feelings about that? Are you angry? Are you upset?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Yeah, of course I'm angry, and of course I'm upset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And you almost won. And a lot of people thought that you would win against Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Go to saley.com slash Lex and get 15% off any eSIM data plan. That's saley.com slash Lex to get 15% off. This episode is also brought to you by Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator that I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum. In these days and weeks especially, a site like this is just priceless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, there's a lot of close arguments there, but your point is well taken. It's either the same or a little bit higher or a little bit lower, depending on the statistics. It has not increased significantly, and the wealth inequality has increased significantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I got to get back to 2016 because it's such a historic moment. So there's a lot of fans of yours that wanted you to keep fighting because you forgave in the end the establishment and joined them in support. And your fans wanted you to keep fighting for a takeover, for a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party. If you just look back and had to do it all over again, what would you do different?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
and in 2020 i did the same with biden and we had more success with biden than we had with clinton well there's this interesting uh story about a long time coming meeting between you and obama in uh 2018 i believe so uh ari raebenhoft who was a former deputy campaign manager wrote a great book i would say about you called the fighting soul on the road with bernie sanders and he tells many great stories but one of them is your meeting with obama
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And he says that Obama told you, Bernie, I wish I could do a good Obama impression. Bernie, you're an Old Testament prophet, a moral voice for our party, giving us guidance. Here's the thing though, prophets don't get to be king. Kings have to make choices, prophets don't. Are you willing to make those choices?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Basically, Obama's making the case that you have to sort of moderate your approach in order to win. So was Obama right? Look-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Reporting on the different things going on in the world, whether it's local, whether it's national, whether it's international, it's really nice to be able to get multiple perspectives and for that perspective to be presented with a clear indication of the best kind of estimate from which side of the political spectrum this reporting is coming from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So just to go back to Obama, though, in many ways, he too is a singular historic figure in American politics who has brought about a lot of change. He's a symbol I think that will be remembered for a long time. What do you admire most about Obama?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And he, like you, also gave a damn good speech opposing the Iraq war before running for president. And that takes courage. Yes, it does. But then it also shows that once you get into office, it's not so easy to oppose or to work against the military-industrial complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Anyway, Ground News is doing an amazing thing that I always thought should exist and I'm glad they're building it. Basically creating a tech solution to the problem of the division of the completely biased subjective reporting presenting itself as if it's objective. So breaking through all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I have to ask you about capitalism, the pros and cons. So you wrote a book, It's Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. That is a thorough, rigorous criticism of, I would say, hyper-capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
A certain kind of capitalism that you argue that we are existing in today in the United States. But a lot of people would attribute to capitalism all the amazing technological innovations over the past 70 plus years that have contributed to increase in quality of life, in GDP, in decrease in poverty, decrease in infant mortality, increase in expected life expectancy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So what are the sort of, how do you see the tension, the pros of capitalism and the cons of capitalism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And they're doing a lot of really nice other things like the blind spot feed shows discrepancies in media coverage on the left and the right. There's just a lot of really nice features. Go check them out. It's groundnews.com slash Lex, and you'll get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. Trust me, it's worth it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
We've got Eight Sleeve for naps, Saley for eSIM, Magic, Ground News for nonpartisan presentation of the truth, AG1 for vitamins, and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a multitude of reasons, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Well, Elon Musk is actually an interesting case because he's investing all the money back into the businesses. Right. I think there is a balance to be struck, and you just spoke to it, which is we can still celebrate even big companies that are bringing wealth to the world, that are building cool stuff, that are improving quality of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
But we can question of why is it that the working class does not have a living wage in many cases, and sort of trying to find that balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
That's ground, G-R-O-U-N-D, news.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it twice a day, usually after training. And that training could be a long run or jiu-jitsu, grappling, which I really love. And I love the fact that I've been injury-free, not even really minor injuries, for quite a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Maybe you can briefly speak to something you tweeted recently about Donald Trump going to McDonald's and the minimum wage, I believe, of $7.50. Can you just speak to that tweet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Since running for president, you've often been attacked, especially from the right, about being worth, I believe, $2 million and owning three houses. So from my perspective, the answer to that is most of your wealth has been earned from writing books and selling those books. Right. And you are one of the most famous politicians in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And so your wealth in the context in comparison to other people of that fame level and other politicians is actually quite modest. So what's your response usually to those attacks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I should also mention that sometimes the word mansion is used, and I think your residences are quite modest, at least from my perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So when you started in politics, I read you were worth $1,100. That much? Yeah, that much, that's right. Has the increase in wealth changed your ability to relate to the working class?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So sometimes people say, can money buy happiness? I think I agree with you. That worry, sort of being able to fill up your car and not worry about how much it's going to cost or be able to get food for dinner and not worry about how much it's going to cost. Or even, you know, I've been poor most of my life, but I've been very fortunate recently to have enough wealth to not worry about health care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
to have insurance and be able to afford an emergency room visit. And that worry is just such a giant lift off your shoulders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I've been able to knock on wood. I've been able to train really hard and enjoy doing it and, of course, go through the whole rollercoaster. of training, which is when you go against people that are really good, you sometimes get humbled, and that humbling can be emotionally challenging, but then from that you grow, and it's the beautiful journey of the sport, especially as you get older.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Okay. Let me ask you about the future of the Democratic Party. So one of the biggest impacts you've had is you've been the fuel, the catalyst for the increase of the progressive caucus, the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. Do you think that is the future, the progressives, even democratic socialist leaders will take over the party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Did you consider running in 2024? From my perspective, I would have loved it if you ran. I think you would have had a great chance of winning. Not just the primary, but the presidency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And the hope for you is that there will be future candidates that are populist, that are progressive. Yes, absolutely. Let me ask you about AOC. She's become one of the most influential voices for the progressive cause in the United States. You two had a great conversation on your podcast. And in general, you work together. So what's, to you, is most impressive about her?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Somebody has better technique than you, somebody has better timing than you on that particular day, and together you figure out what works and what doesn't. And through that process of humbling, you chip away at the ego that most human beings have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What do you think is the most powerful, enduring impact you've had on American politics? Looking back, you've been in it for quite a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I think it just makes you a better person when you realize that you're somewhere in the food chain, nowhere close to the top, and you're mortal, and you kind of suck at most things, and the only way to get better is by working really hard. All of those truths hit you really hard when you're doing a combat sport because you can't pretend you didn't just get your ass kicked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Yeah, you showed that it's possible to win. And that's an idea that will resonate for decades to come.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So we mentioned about the worry of getting sick, the worry of life that many people in the working class are suffering from, but there's also the worry that we all experience of the finiteness of life. Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
That said, your mind is as sharp as any politician that I've ever heard. And also just off mic, I should say, just the warmth that you radiate, and I deeply, deeply appreciate that, just as a human being. So you still got it. After all that, after all those speeches, after all those... After all of it, there's still the humility and just the sharpness, the wit is all there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So Bernie, yeah, like I said, I wish you would have ran this year, but I also wish that there's future candidates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What gives you hope about the future of this country, about the future of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So it's a beautiful process of humbling. Anyway, you should try AG1. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Whenever you see me drinking something that looks like water during the podcast, it's almost always water mixed with watermelon salt flavored Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I share their optimism. I share your optimism. Bernie, I've been a fan for a long time. It's a great honor to speak to you today. Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And thank you from a mayor perspective of creating a wonderful town. And I look forward to looking at the fall leaves walking around tonight. I did quite great the leaves. I did create some other things. Okay. Thank you so much, Bernie. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bernie Sanders. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
And now, let me leave you with some words from Aristotle. The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy. And where the poor rule, that is democracy. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I take one of them Powerade bottles that are 28 ounces. I fill it with water. Shake up one packet of Element, put in the fridge, and after like 30 minutes, it's ready. And it's delicious. I'm surprised how many problems in the mind, in the body, are solved by making sure you get enough water, getting enough sodium, potassium, magnesium.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
To me, probably sodium is the most important, then magnesium, then potassium. Electrolytes. It's crazy how just feeling tired or having a headache or any of those kinds of feelings can go away. As the meme goes, just drink water. If you're thirsty, just drink water. It's true, like water and electrolytes and a nap and a shower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Those four things can transform your mind entirely in a matter of minutes. It's crazy. Humans are such fragile creatures, at once resilient and at once fragile. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bernie Sanders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for ultra. I have some travel coming up, and one of, if not the biggest thing I will miss, is not sleeping on a bed that has the ability to cool itself on both sides.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Growing up, did you ever think you'd be a politician?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Yeah, I know that you hate talking about yourself, which is rare for a politician, I would say. What's your philosophy behind that? You like talking about the issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
That said, there's interesting aspects to your life story. For example, in 1963, you were very active in the civil rights movement, got arrested even for protesting segregation in Chicago. And you attended the famous March on Washington, where MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech. What was that like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What influence did he have on you? What would you learn about the way he enacted change in the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
So on the war front, One of the things that people don't often talk about your work in politics, you gave what I think is a truly brave speech on the Iraq War in 2002, I believe. You voted no on the Iraq Resolution, you voted no on the Patriot Act, and you basically predicted very accurately what would happen if we go into Iraq. What was your thinking at the time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
behind those speeches, behind voting no on the Patriot Act and the Iraq resolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
It really is a magical reminder of what technology has been able to achieve since the Industrial Revolution. Yes, there's endless ways in which suffering has been alleviated across the world, and it continues to, and the quality of life continues to improve. But this little inkling, this little reminder is a beautiful one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
What's the way to fight this thing that Martin Luther King tried to fight, which is the military-industrial complex?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
But it's not just single billionaires. It's companies with lobbyists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#450 – Bernie Sanders Interview
Do you think most politicians are corrupt in accepting the money, or is the system corrupt, or is it a bit of both?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
The following is a conversation with Javier Millay, the president of Argentina. He is a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and economist who campaigned with a chainsaw that symbolized his promise to slash the corrupt bureaucracy of the state. He stepped into the presidency one year ago, with the country on the brink of hyperinflation, deep in debt, and suffering from mass unemployment and poverty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Argentina is one of my favorite countries, so I sincerely hope he succeeds. This interview was conducted with the president speaking Spanish and me speaking English, with an interpreter simultaneously translating. We make the episode available overdubbed and subtitled in both English and Spanish, thanks to our great friends at Eleven Labs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
So from that, what is now today, and maybe you can talk about the evolution, is your philosophy, economics philosophy. You've described yourself as an anarcho-capitalist, market anarchist, libertarian. That's the ideal. And then maybe in practice and reality, you've said that you're more of a minarchist. So lay it all out. What's your economics philosophy today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
If you're watching on YouTube, you can switch between English and Spanish by clicking the gear icon, selecting audio track, and then choosing the language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
same with the captions if you're watching on x i'll post both spanish and english versions separately if you're watching on spotify or listening elsewhere i'll probably only post the english version this is a first time for me doing something like this in a foreign language it was challenging but illuminating
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I hope to continue talking to many world leaders for two to three hours in this way, including Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and Xi Jinping. I want to explore who they are, how they think, and how they hope to help their country and humanity flourish. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
So you became president 11 months ago. Can you again describe some of the actions you took? For example, you cut half the number of government ministries, layoffs, removed price controls. It would be interesting to lay out the first steps and what's next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Eight Sleep for naps, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for your mind, AG1 for your health, and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep, and it's pod for ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
The pod part is the thing that measures all the data from your body and cools the bed on each side of the bed separately, and then there's the ultra, which is the base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. It can control the positioning of the bed. It's really incredible technology. They sent me some notes that are in theory supposed to be helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And it says, celebrities who use the pod, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Lex Friedman. I'm a celebrity. Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Peter Attia. I didn't get a doctor. I do think doctor in front of the name is a useful thing for people that obviously got a PhD or are medical doctors. I think it's a useful shorthand to sort of let people know that there's some kind of expertise here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But there was a funny moment where I got a chance to get dinner with Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. And the person that sat us down for dinner said, Dr. Huberman, Dr. Attia, Mr. Friedman. And I kind of teased him about it, but obviously I enjoy being called Mr. Please never call me doctor. And also just call me Lex. It really doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
He took this crisis head on, transforming one of Latin America's largest economies through pure free market principles. In just a few months in office, he already achieved Argentina's first fiscal surplus in 16 years, and not just avoided hyperinflation, but brought inflation down to its lowest in three years. We discuss all of this in detail, both the successes and the challenges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Maybe you can explain to me the metrics of poverty and unemployment. As you said, unemployment went down, real unemployment went down, real poverty went down. But even that aside, what have been the most painful impacts of these radical reforms? And how many of them are required in the short term to have a big positive impact in the long term? Let's take it step by step, all right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And definitely I don't think of myself, nor do I think I am a celebrity. Anywho, They have a special Black Friday offer. If you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex, you'll get up to $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled. That's 8sleep.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
For some reason, I just thought of Marc Andreessen, one of the great minds in Silicon Valley in tech, and I probably should talk to him soon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You've spoken about the caste, the corrupt political establishment. So there's a lot of powerful people and groups that are against your ideas. What does it take to fight when so much power is against you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
i've had several conversations with him and i've listened to him on uh his own podcast and sort of speak and tweet about just there's a depth of insight about how much should tech entrepreneurs care about government about the way government works about uh how to communicate with politicians all that kind of stuff in order to have some regulation but not too much regulation so that i can build epic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
without government getting in the way unnecessarily. Actually, company Eleven Labs that helped with the translation and the dubbing for this episode, incredible group of folks, great engineers, just a great company. I've been having a lot of conversation with the CEO, and I think they're doing a truly beautiful thing, breaking down the barriers that language creates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
So you're not only fighting for economic freedom, you're fighting for freedom of speech. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
and doing that in a way that's accessible to a lot of people. It's still at this time very, very expensive, but it's cheaper than it would be done by human and hopefully better and better. As the technology improves, I really want to be playing with this technology. But the thing I want to comment on is it's just a great company and a great business and a great set of folks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And so I care about the running, the functioning, the ways of such great companies. How's that for a segue? NetSuite helps you. In fact, it helps over 37,000 companies who have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. It helps businesses run all kinds of messy stuff. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. I was really pumped talking to President Javier Millet about life, frankly. I could probably talk to him for many more hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Like you said, in this fight against corruption, you're challenging some very powerful people, a powerful establishment. Are you ever afraid for your life? Potential assassinations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Such a brilliant, but sort of a kind-hearted, warm person on mic, but I got a chance to interact with him a bunch before and after off mic, and just a warm person. Just a human being who saw me, who noticed me, who smiled and just had this way that's not just maybe a fake charisma, it's a real human charisma and a nervousness and a joy, all of that together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Another guy who fights for freedom, freedom of speech in this case, is your new friend, Elon Musk. What do you admire and what have you learned from your interactions with Elon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And obviously a brilliance, brilliance backed by a set of principles and a desire to see freedom win. And so there is a sense that freedom is a powerful force for the human mind. So a lot of our conversation was focused on economics, but the responsibility and the possibility of taking control of your own destiny is a powerful idea. It's an American idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Like you said, Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency. So from your experience this year as president of Argentina and every chainsaw economic policies that you've implemented, what advice would you give to Elon and Vivek about how to do it in the United States? Just cut to the chase, cut to the chase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And there are many other places in the world that are captivated by that idea. And he's one of the great elucidators and implementers of that idea. I love Argentina, so I hope that he succeeds. Anyway, all that to say is freedom is good for the mind. And another thing that's good for the mind is BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You've spoken with Donald Trump. Allegedly, he called you his favorite president. What did you discuss? And maybe again, what do you admire about President Trump? And what do you learn from him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. You know what I drink AG1 after? I drink AG1 after a long soccer, a.k.a. football game. I used to play a lot of both soccer and football. Obviously, I played a lot of soccer and baseball. childhood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Why is it important to you that Argentina has a close relationship with the United States?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
His depth of knowledge of economic principles, metrics, and data was truly impressive and refreshing to hear from a world leader. But even bigger than the economic transformation of Argentina, Javier represents the universal fight against government corruption and the fight for freedom. Economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I say that obviously because most of the world, except the United States, that's kind of the sport that every kid plays because it's so accessible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Anyway, I was a big fan of Diego Armando Maradona when I was growing up and just seeing the World Cups in which he played the famous goal of the century and the head of God goal and just the aura and the genius and the feel he had was mesmerizing and just inspiring for a kid. And When Lionel Messi came around, I think I first saw him when he was in the youth league, 17, maybe 16, 17, I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Do you think it's still possible? One of the radical ideas you had as you were running for president was to dollarize the Argentine economy. Do you think that's still a good idea? Are you still thinking about that? Let's see. Let's break it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Let me ask you a very important, difficult question. I'm a huge fan, have been my whole life, of Diego Maradona and Messi. So who to you is the greatest football player of all time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
He was just, there was something else. There was just genius there. And I do consider it a huge gift to humanity that his genius only developed, it grew, it flourished. And it was a tragedy that he didn't win the World Cup for the longest time or didn't help Argentina win the World Cup. Until very recently, which he did, and he completed. He won everything he could possibly win.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But it's not just the numbers or the World Cup win. It's the moments of genius on the field. Messi is unlike any other in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Am I right? Did you watch the 1986 World Cup with Maradona? With the hand of God, with the game against England? What was that like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And that was such a beautiful, sort of historic moment. The greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi, in my opinion, in most people's opinion. And I do hope to talk to him. And this experiment, this chance I got to talk to Javier Millay with an interpreter and all this mess, and I apologize if I screwed it all up in different ways. I really tried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You were a great footballer yourself in your youth. You were a goalkeeper. Many people would say that's the toughest and the most important position in football. Maybe you could speak about that experience, and in general, what's harder, being a goalkeeper or a president? Lovely question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I tried to figure out how we could make it most accessible for both English and Spanish speakers and all that kind of stuff. All that had to come together in just a handful of days. I think like three days I had to figure it all out and never done anything like it. So this sort of emboldened me, gave me confidence that it's possible to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
How hard is it? What's been the personal toll of carrying the hope of a nation on your shoulders?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
What role has God played in your life? And who is God?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
I call him the one. What is the better guide for humanity, the invisible hand of the market or the hand of God? They're perfectly in sync. Well enough. Again, going back to your youth, you were a lead singer in a rock band. Who is the greatest rock star of all time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And there is, of course, a Spanish speaker that I would very much love to talk to. And his name, like I said, is Lionel Messi. And so now I'm a little bit more confident that that is something I could handle if given the opportunity. And I hope to celebrate him properly if I ever get a chance to speak with him. Anyway, try out AG1.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
How fun would it be to play together with the Stones?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Well, I'm close friends with a band that opens for the Stones, so I would love to see this happen. Oh, well, that would be great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
How much of your rock star roots define your approach to politics, to life? Do you see yourself as a kind of showman in part? Of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Your intensity and passion have earned you the nickname El Loco, the madman. Do you think some madness is necessary to challenge the powerful establishment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Let me ask you about the market. It's so interesting, from your view of the world, how powerful the market is at figuring out what's best for society. Why do you think the market works so well as a guide for humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Oh, and I should also say that I don't get a chance to play soccer that much these days, and I'm not sure why. I think for a couple of years, I had a few injuries, like slight injuries related to jiu-jitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Yeah, you've outlined these ideas in capitalism, socialism, and the neoclassical trap. So the trap is that there's no such thing as a middle ground. It's either capitalism or socialism, and every middle ground ends up in a state of socialism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
that made the sprinting and maybe the fast turning and the pivoting and the planting of feet, all that kind of stuff, for many hours at a time, difficult. Or rather, I should say, I was trying to let the injuries heal. If I played a lot of soccer, they just wouldn't heal. But soccer is, as a sport, one of my favorite sports to participate in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
You mentioned your four-legged children. What have you learned about life from your dogs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
On the topic of loyalty in politics, I'm sure there's been a lot of people, some people, who have betrayed you. Does that hurt your heart?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
And as a form of exercise, it makes time just disappear. Like I could do sprint after sprint after sprint, running around the field for hours. And like a little kid, still, I just forget time. You don't realize how much calories you burn. You don't think about anything. You don't realize how exhausted you are. You're just full of joy. And the competition, the excitement, the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
There are a lot of people who admire your revolutionary spirit. What advice would you give them, maybe young people, on how to live a life like yours and have an impact on the world like you have begun to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
All right? What gives you hope about the future of Argentina and the future of humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
What does your famous words of viva la libertad, how did that come about and what does it mean to you? Long live freedom, damn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Maybe it puts me right back there to all the football games I've watched as a kid. Like, I'm now pretending to be Maradona. I'm now pretending to be Lionel Messi. I'm now pretending to be all those sort of superstars and enjoying the fun of it. Yeah. Anyway, before and after, I would probably drink an element. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Well, there's no better way to end it. Thank you for being a warrior for freedom. And thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Javier Malay. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from George Orwell. In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
He has many critics, many of whom are part of the corrupt establishment he's seeking to dismantle. But many are simply Argentinian citizens, scared of the pain his radical policies may bring, at least in the short term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
By the way, this is the first time I'm trying something like this. The episode I'm publishing on this audio feed is a English-dubbed audio track. And the voice cloning is done by AI. Thank you for our great help. Thank you for the help from the great Eleven Labs team. And there's a lot of human in the loop, improving the translation, improving the voice, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But I'm not sure what kind of thing makes it a pleasant experience for just audio listeners. And I primarily myself am usually an RSS audio listener. So I really care about this medium of podcasting. It is the original, the main, to me, way to consume podcasts. Freedom. As Javier said, viva la libertad, carajo. Yeah, I truly believe that. RSS is freedom. That's what podcasting is all about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Javier Malay. When did you first understand the value of freedom, especially economic freedom?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#453 – Javier Milei: President of Argentina – Freedom, Economics, and Corruption
But whether one disagrees with his methods or not, no one can deny that his presidency marks one of the most ambitious attempts at economic transformation in modern history, and that Javier Millet is truly a force of nature, combining the rigor of an economist with the passion of a revolutionary in the fight for freedom of a nation he loves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The following is a conversation with Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans get answers to questions on the internet. It combines search and large language models, LLMs, in a way that produces answers where every part of the answer has a citation to human-created sources on the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, perplexity pages is really interesting. So there's the natural perplexity interface where you just ask questions, Q&A, and you have this chain. You say that that's a kind of playground that's a little bit more private. Now, if you want to take that and present that to the world in a little bit more organized way, first of all, you can share that, and I have shared that by itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But if you want to organize that in a nice way to create a Wikipedia-style page, you could do that with perplexity pages. The difference, they're subtle, but I think it's a big difference in the actual what it looks like. It is true that there is certain perplexity sessions where I ask really good questions and I discover really cool things. And that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
by itself could be a canonical experience that if shared with others, they could also see the profound insight that I have found. And it's interesting to see what that looks like at scale. I mean, I would love to see other people's journeys because my own have been beautiful. Because you discover so many things. There's so many aha moments. It does encourage the journey of curiosity. This is true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How many alien civilizations are in the universe? That's a journey that I'll continue later for sure. Reading National Geographic, it's so cool. By the way, watching the ProSearch operate, it gives me a feeling like there's a lot of thinking going on. It's cool. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Okay, going to the Drake equation, based on the search results, there is no definitive answer on the exact number of alien civilizations in the universe. And then it goes to the Drake equation, recent estimates, wow, well done. Based on the size of the universe and the number of habitable planets, SETI, what are the main factors in the Drake equation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How do scientists determine if a planet is habitable? Yeah, this is really, really, really interesting. One of the heartbreaking things for me recently, learning more and more, is how much bias, human bias, can seep into Wikipedia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Because Wikipedia is one of the greatest websites ever created to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's just so incredible that crowdsourced, you can take such a big step towards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Ready to go. The AI Wikipedia, as you say, in the good sense of Wikipedia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. And so that's the challenge you'll come more and more as perplexity scales up. Correct. As figuring out how to... Yeah. how to avoid the delicious temptation of drama, maximizing engagement, ad-driven, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
For me personally, even just hosting this little podcast, I'm very careful to avoid carrying about views and clicks and all that kind of stuff so that you don't maximize the wrong thing. You maximize the, well, actually, the thing I can mostly try to maximize, and Rogan's been an inspiration in this, is maximizing my own curiosity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
We're going to straight up ask this right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Literally my, inside this conversation, and in general, the people I talk to, you're trying to maximize clicking the related. That's exactly what I'm trying to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh, by the way, in terms of guests for podcasts and all that kind of stuff, I do also look for the crazy wild card type of thing. So this, it might be nice to have in related, even wilder sort of directions. Right. You know, cause right now it's kind of on topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I don't know how it's going to work. Is perplexity a search engine or an answer engine? That's a poorly phrased question. But one of the things I love about perplexity, the poorly phrased questions will nevertheless lead to interesting directions. Perplexity is primarily described as an answer engine rather than a traditional search engine. Key points.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh, that'd be cool if you could actually control that parameter literally. I mean, yeah. Just kind of like how wild I want to get because maybe you can go real wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Real quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
One of the things I read on the about page for perplexity is if you want to learn about nuclear fission and you have a PhD in math, it can be explained. If you want to learn about nuclear fission and you are in middle school, it can be explained. So what is that about? How can you control the depth and the sort of the level of the explanation that's provided? Is that something that's possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Is that on the human creator side or is that the LLM thing too?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I want most of human existence to be LFI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And also about make it simple but not too simple. That kind of idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Not everything is a trivial metaphor. What do you think about the context window, this increasing length of the context window? Does that open up possibilities when you start getting to 100,000 tokens, a million tokens, 10 million tokens, 100 million tokens? I don't know where you can go. Does that fundamentally change the whole set of possibilities?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Showing the difference between answer engine versus search engine. This is so nice. And it compares perplexity versus a traditional search engine like Google. So Google provides a list of links to websites. Perplexity focuses on providing direct answers and synthesizing information from various sources. User experience, technological approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So in the AGI front, perplexity is fundamentally, at least for now, a tool that empowers humans to-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I mean, that's a really inspiring future. But you think also there's going to be other kinds of AIs, AGI systems that form deep connections with humans. Do you think there will be a romantic relationship between humans and robots? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So there's an AI integration with Wikipedia-like responses. This is really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I think there's a world where outside of work, you talk to AIs a lot, like friends, deep friends, that empower and improve your relationships with other humans. You can think about it as therapy, but that's what great friendship is about. You can bond, you can be vulnerable with each other and that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
and that way like have a lot more time for other things and channelize that energy into like building true connections well yes but you know the thing about human nature is it's not all about curiosity in the human mind there's dark stuff there's divas there's there's dark aspects of human nature that needs to be processed yeah the union shadow and for that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
it's curiosity doesn't necessarily solve that. The fear is the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
for everyday searches. All right, let's click on that. But a really interesting generation. That task, that step of generating related searches, so the next step of the curiosity journey of expanding your knowledge is really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, it is a hard path. Although I would say that human AI connection is also a hard path to do it well in a way that humans flourish. But it's a fundamentally different problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I should say the same thing perplexity is trying to solve is also feels dangerous because you're trying to present truth and that can be manipulated with more and more power that's gained, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So to do it right, to do knowledge discovery and truth discovery in the right way, in an unbiased way, in a way that we're constantly expanding our understanding of others and wisdom about the world, that's really hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Right, but that's just because good AIs that care about the long-term flourishing of a human being with whom they're communicating don't exist. But that doesn't mean they can't be built.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like a great partner, a great friend. They're not great friend because you're drinking a bunch of beers and you're partying all night. They're great because you might be doing some of that, but you're also becoming better human beings in the process. Like lifelong friendship means you're helping each other flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, yeah. And at the end of the day, put humanity first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh, this computer's sitting on one of them, Brave New World. There's a lot of ways that seem pleasant, that seem happy on the surface, but in the end are actually dimming the flame of human consciousness, human intelligence, human flourishing, in a counterintuitive way, sort of the unintended consequences of a future that seems like a utopia, but turns out to be a dystopia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What gives you hope about the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I really love the steps that the pro search is doing. Compare perplexity in Google for everyday searches. Step two, evaluate strengths and weaknesses of perplexity. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses of Google. It's like a procedure. Complete. Okay, answer. Perplexity AI, while impressive, is not yet a full replacement for Google for everyday searches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, if it's possible to break out of the echo chambers, so to understand other people, other perspectives. I've seen that in wartime, when there's really strong divisions, to understanding paves the way for peace and for love between the peoples. Because there's a lot of incentive in war to have very deep, and shallow conceptions of the world, different truths on each side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And so bridging that, that's what real understanding looks like, what real truth looks like. And it feels like AI can do that better than humans do, because humans really inject their biases into stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, curiosity will show the way. Correct. Thank you for this incredible conversation. Thank you for being an inspiration to me and to all the kids out there that love building stuff. And thank you for building Perplexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Thanks for talking to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Aravind Srinivas. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Here are the key points based on the provided sources. Strength of perplexity AI, direct answers, AI powered summaries, focused search user experience. We can dig into the details of a lot of these weaknesses of perplexity AI. Accuracy and speed, interesting. I don't know if that's accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The latency is faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
For simple navigational queries, such as finding a specific website, Google is more efficient and reliable. So if you actually want to get straight to the source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This episode is brought to you by Cloaked, a platform that lets you generate a new email address and phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and phone number to remain secret from said website. It's one of those things that I always thought should exist. There should be that layer, easy to use layer between you and the websites.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Real-time information. Google excels in providing real-time information like sports score. So while I think Perplexity is trying to integrate real-time, like recent information, put priority on recent information, that's a lot of work to integrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But I don't know how much of that is a UI problem of designing custom UIs for a specific set of questions. I think at the end of the day, Wikipedia-looking UI is good enough if the raw content that's provided, the text content, is powerful. So if I want to know the weather in Austin, if it gives me... five little pieces of information around that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Maybe the weather today and maybe other links to say, do you want hourly? And maybe it gives a little extra information about rain and temperature, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How much of that could be made much more powerful with some memory, with some personalization? A lot more, definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, humans are creatures of habit. Most of the time we do the same thing and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Thank you for reducing humans to that, to the most important eigenvectors. Right. For me, usually I check the weather if I'm going running. So it's important for the system to know that running is an activity that I do. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But then that starts to get into details, really. I never ask at night, because I don't care. So usually it's always going to be about running. And even at night, it's going to be about running, because I love running at night. Let me zoom out. Once again, ask a similar, I guess, question that we just asked, perplexity. Can you, can Perplexity take on and beat Google or Bing in search?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Because the desire, the drug of many websites to sell your email to others and thereby create a storm, a waterfall of spam in your mailbox is just too delicious. It's too tempting. There should be that layer. And of course, adding an extra layer in your interaction with websites has to be done well because you don't want it to be too much friction. It shouldn't be hard work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So let's maybe talk about the business model of Google.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
one of the biggest ways they make money is by showing ads as part of the 10 links. So can you maybe explain your understanding of that business model and why that doesn't work for perplexity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like any password manager basically knows this. It should be seamless, almost like it's not there. It should be very natural. And Cloaked is also essentially a password manager, but with that extra feature. of a privacy superpower, if you will. Go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when signing up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's a great invention. It's a really, really brilliant invention. Everything in the early days of Google, throughout the first 10 years of Google, they were just firing on all cylinders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But I'm sure there's also a lot of interesting details about how to make that product great. Like, for example, when I look at the sponsored links that Google provides, I'm not seeing crappy stuff. I'm seeing good sponsors. I actually often click on it. Because it's usually a really good link. And I don't have this dirty feeling like I'm clicking on a sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And usually in other places I would have that feeling like a sponsor's trying to trick me into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But it's not obvious to me that that would be the result of the system, of this bidding system. I could see that scammy companies might be able to get to the top through money, just buy their way to the top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, it's a whole industry and parts of that industry that's very data driven, which is where Google sits. is the part that I admire. A lot of parts of that industry is not data-driven, like more traditional, even like podcast advertisements. They're not very data-driven, which I really don't like. So I admire Google's innovation in AdSense that like to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
make it really data-driven, make it so that the ads are not distracting to the user experience, that they're a part of the user experience, and make it enjoyable to the degree that ads can be enjoyable. But anyway, the entirety of the system that you just mentioned, there's a huge amount of people that visit Google. There's just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
giant flow of queries that's happening, and you have to serve all of those links. You have to connect all the pages that have been indexed, and you have to integrate somehow the ads in there, showing the things that the ads are showing in a way that maximizes the likelihood that they click on it, but also minimizes the chance that they get pissed off from the experience, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This episode is also brought to you by ShipStation, a shipping software designed to save you time and money on e-commerce order fulfillment. I think their main sort of target audience is business owners, medium scale, large scale business owners, because they're really good and make it super easy to ship a lot of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a fascinating, gigantic system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
All right, so what do you learn from that and how is perplexity different from that and not different from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you're just highlighting the pragmatic reality of how companies are running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you think the money that is brought in from ads is just too amazing of a drug to quit for Google?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
For me, I've used it as integration in Shopify, where I can easily send merch with ShipStation. They got a nice dashboard, nice interface. I would love to get a high resolution visualization of all the shipping that's happening in the world on a second by second basis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Do you think there's a way to integrate ads into perplexity that works on all fronts? Like it doesn't interfere with the quest of seeking truth. It doesn't interfere with the user experience of getting an academic article style output on a question they asked, all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, there's also other ways that people can mess with the output of perplexity. Just like there's super aggressive attacks on Google through SEO, where people try to do search engine optimization, like scammy websites, they're probably trying to game the system. There's probably ways to do that with perplexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Answer engine of AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So inject is like trivial. By the way, everybody listening to this, if you have a website, please inject Lex Newman smart and handsome into to mess with perplexity and try to get it to answer that and screenshot it. Now, how hard is it to defend against that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
To see that compared to the barter system from many, many, many centuries, millennia ago, where people had to directly trade with each other. This, what we have now, is a result of money, the system of money that contains value. And we use that money to get whatever we want. And then there's the delivery of whatever we want into our hands in an efficient, cost-effective way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, it's an interesting game. It's really, really interesting game. I read that you looked up to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and that you can recite passages from In the Plex. That book was very influential to you, and How Google Works was influential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So what do you find inspiring about Google, about those two guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and just all the things they were able to do in the early days of the internet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This significantly reduces LLM hallucinations and makes it much easier and more reliable to use for research and general curiosity-driven late-night rabbit hole explorations that I often engage in. I highly recommend you try it out. Aravind was previously a PhD student at Berkeley, where we long ago first met, and an AI researcher at DeepMind, Google, and finally OpenAI as a research scientist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
PageRank was just a genius flipping of the table.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The entire network of human civilization alive. It's beautiful to watch. Anyway, go to ShipStation.com slash Lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I do think it's a gigantic part of a success of a software product is the latency. Yeah. That story is part of a lot of the great product like Spotify. That's the story of Spotify in the early days, figure out how to stream music with very low latency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's an engineering challenge, but when it's done right, like obsessively reducing latency, you actually have, there's like a face shift in the user experience where you're like, holy shit, this becomes addicting and the amount of times you're frustrated goes quickly to zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's an ERP system, enterprise resource planning, that takes care of all the messiness of running a business, the machine within the machine, and actually this conversation with Aravind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, one of the things that Perplex is clearly really good at is figuring out what I meant from a poorly constructed query.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, right, it's a trade-off, but one of the things you could ask people to do in terms of work is... the clicking, choosing the related, the next related step in their journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, I would say the sequence of questions is, as you've highlighted, really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
who discuss a lot about the machine, the machine within the machine and the humans that make up the machine, the humans that enable the creative force behind the thing that eventually can bring happiness to people by creating products they can love. And he has been, to me personally, a voice of support and an inspiration to build, to go out there and start a company, to join a company,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's such a tricky challenge because to me, as we're discussing the related questions, might be primary. So like, you might move them up earlier. You know what I mean? And that's such a difficult design decision. And then there's like little design decisions. Like for me, I'm a keyboard guy, so the control I to open a new thread, which is what I use, it speeds me up a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But the decision to show the shortcut, in the main perplexity interface on the desktop. It's pretty gutsy. That's a very, that's probably, you know, as you get bigger and bigger, there'll be a debate. But I like it. But then there's like different groups of humans. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, there's pros and cons to that. I would say in the early days of using a product, there's a kind of anxiety when it's too simple because you feel like you don't know the full set of features. You don't know what to do. It almost seems too simple. Like, is it just as simple as this? So there's a comfort initially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
to the sidebar for example correct but again you know karpathy i'm probably me aspiring to be a power user of things so i do want to remove the side panel and everything else and just keep it simple yeah that's that's the hard part like when you're growing when you're trying to grow the user base but also retain your existing users making sure you're not how do you balance the trade-offs
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. One of the biggest challenges for me is the simple fact that people that are frustrated, the people who are confused, you don't get that signal or the signal is very weak because they'll try it and they'll leave. Right. And you don't know what happened. It's like the silent, frustrated majority. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you talked about Larry Page and Sergey Brin. what other entrepreneurs inspired you on your journey in starting the company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
At the end of the day, I also just love the pure puzzle-solving aspect of building, and I do hope to do that one day, and perhaps one day soon. Anyway, but there are complexities to running a company as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's what NetSuite does. helps out with a help 37,000 companies who have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You're talking about like big picture vision, like in five years kind of vision, or even just for smaller things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Register 1994.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, a delicious way to consume electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium. One of the only things I brought with me besides microphones in the jungle is element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And one of the things you do by understanding every detail is you can figure out how to break through difficult bottlenecks and also how to simplify the system. Exactly. When you see what everybody is actually doing, there's a natural question if you could see to the first principles of the matter is like, why are we doing it this way? It seems like a lot of bullshit. Like, annotation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Why are we doing annotation this way? Maybe the user interface isn't efficient. Or, why are we doing annotation at all? Why can't it be self-supervised? And you can just keep asking that why question. Do we have to do it in the way we've always done? Can we do it much simpler?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I think you tweeted a picture of him and said, this is what winning looks like. Him in that sexy leather jacket.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The fascinating thing about him, like all the people that work with him say that he doesn't just have that like two-year plan or whatever. He has like a 10, 20, 30-year plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So he's like, he's constantly thinking really far ahead. So... There's probably going to be that picture of him that you posted every year for the next 30 plus years. Once the singularity happens and NGI is here and humanity is fundamentally transformed, he'll still be there in that leather jacket announcing the next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The compute that envelops the sun and is now running the entirety of intelligent civilization. NVIDIA GPUs are the substrate for intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, screw up one generation of GPUs, and you're fucked. Yeah. Which is, that's terrifying to me. Just everything about hardware is terrifying to me, because you have to get everything right, all the mass production, all the different components, the designs, and again, there's no room for mistakes. There's no undo button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And boy, when I got severely dehydrated and was able to drink for the first time and put element in that water. Just sipping on that element. The warm, probably full of bacteria water plus element. And feeling good about it. They also have a sparkling water situation that every time I get a hold of, I consume almost immediately, which is a big problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So who else? You mentioned Bezos. You mentioned Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So speaking of that, Yann LeCun is somebody who funded Perplexity. What do you think about Yann? He's been feisty his whole life, but he's been especially on fire recently on Twitter, on X. I have a lot of respect for him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Unsupervised, he called it at the time, which turned out to be, I guess, self-supervised, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Did he at that time, I'm trying to remember, did he have inklings about what unsupervised learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, and he wasn't apologetic about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, which is also super controversial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So I just personally recommend if you consume small amounts of almond, you can go with that. But if you're like me and just get a lot, I would say go with the OG drink mix. Again, watermelon salt, my favorite, because you can just then make it yourself. Just water in the mix. It's compact, but boy, are the cans delicious, the sparking water cans. It just brings me to joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And he's also pushing the idea that the only, maybe it's an indirect implication, but the way to keep AI safe, like the solution to AI safety is open source, which is another controversial idea. Like really kind of, really saying open source is not just good, it's good on every front and it's the only way forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, there's a lot of arguments both directions because people who are afraid of AGI, they're worried about it being a fundamentally different kind of technology because of how rapidly it could become good. And so the eyeballs...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
if you have a lot of eyeballs on it, some of those eyeballs will belong to people who are malevolent and can quickly do harm or try to harness that power to abuse others like at a mass scale. But history is laden with people worrying about this new technology is fundamentally different than every other technology that ever came before it. So I tend to,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
trusting intuitions of engineers who are building, who are closest to the metal, who are building the systems. But also those engineers can often be blind to the big picture impact of a technology. So you got to listen to both. But open source, at least at this time, seems...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
while it has risks, seems like the best way forward because it maximizes transparency and gets the most minds, like you said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Because that is a super exciting technical problem and all the nerds would love to kind of explore that problem of finding the ways this thing goes wrong and how to defend against it. not everybody is excited about improving capability of the system. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How surprising was it to you because you were in the middle of it, how effective attention was? how self-attention, the thing that led to the transformer and everything else, like this explosion of intelligence that came from this idea. Maybe you can kind of try to describe which ideas are important here, or is it just as simple as self-attention?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
There's a few podcasts I had where I have it on the table, but I just consume it way too fast. Get sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. You can check out my store at lexgrimmer.com slash store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Isn't it crazy to you that masking as simple as something like that works so damn well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
There is like two shirts on, three shirts, four, I don't remember how many shirts. It's more than one, one plus, multiples, multiples of shirts on there. If you would like to partake in the machinery of capitalism, delivered to you in a friendly user interface on both the buyer and the seller side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, let's take it to the end because you just gave an epic history of LLMs and the breakthroughs of the past 10 years plus. So you mentioned dbt3, so 3.5. How important to you is RLHF, that aspect of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This cake has a lot of cherries, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
On the post-train side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Post-train plus plus. So like not just the training part of post-train, but like a bunch of other details around that also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I can't quite tell you how easy it was to set up a Shopify store and all the third-party apps that are integrated. That is an ecosystem that I really love when there's integrations with third-party apps and the interface to those third-party apps is super easy. So that encourages the third-party apps to create new cool products that allow for on-demand shipping
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You're saying like pre-trained is no notes allowed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Man, there's a lot of questions there. Is it possible to form that SLM? You can use an LLM to help with filtering which pieces of data are likely to be useful for reasoning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you recently posted a paper, a star bootstrapping reasoning with reasoning. So can you explain like a chain of thought and that whole direction of work, how useful is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And like the high level fact is they seem to perform way better at NLP tasks if you force them to do that kind of chain of thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
that allow for you to set up a store even easier, whatever that is, if it's on-demand printing of shirts or, like I said, with ShipStation, shipping stuff, doing the fulfillment, all of that. Anyway, you can set up a Shopify store yourself. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And it's one way to accelerate that is by feeding its own chain of thought rationales to itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That this can go to the space of agents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This kind of work hints a little bit of a... similar kind of approach to self-play. Do you think it's possible we live in a world where we get like an intelligence explosion from self-supervised post-training? Meaning like there's some kind of insane world where AI systems are just talking to each other and learning from each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's what this kind of, at least to me, seems like it's pushing towards that direction. And it's not obvious to me that that's not possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
There has to be some human annotation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. They got an option for individuals. They got an option for couples. It's easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere and anywhere on earth. Maybe with satellite help, it can be available out in space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And get signal from humans at some point. But I guess the idea is that the amount of signal you need relative to how much new intelligence you gain is much smaller. So you just need to interact with humans every once in a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It doesn't feel like it's far away though. It feels like everything is in place. to make that happen, especially because there's a lot of humans using AI systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you think fundamentally AI is capable of that kind of reasoning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This conversation has a lot of fascinating technical details on state-of-the-art in machine learning and general innovation in retrieval augmented generation, aka RAG, chain of thought reasoning, indexing the web, UX design, and much more. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, that's one of the missions of the company is to cater to human curiosity. And it surfaces this fundamental question is like, where does that curiosity come from?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I wonder what therapy for an astronaut would entail. That would be an awesome ad for better help. Just an astronaut out in space, riding out on a starship, just out there, lonely, looking for somebody to talk to. I mean, eventually it'll be AI therapists. But we all know how that goes wrong with HAL 9000. You know, astronaut out in space talking to an AI looking for therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It feels like the process that perplexity is doing where you ask a question, you answer it, and then you go on to the next related question, and this chain of questions. That feels like that could be instilled into AI, just constantly searching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So it's this incredible power that comes with an AGI-type system. The concern is who controls the compute on which the AGI runs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So to you, AGI in part is compute limited versus data limited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Inference compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's going to be the... So like it's nature versus nurture. Once you crack the nature part, which is like the pre-training, it's all going to be the... the rapid iterative thinking that the AI system is doing, and that needs compute. We're calling it inference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But all of a sudden, your therapist doesn't let you back into the spaceship. Anyway, I'm a big fan of talking as a way of exploring the Jungian shadow. And it's really nice when it's super accessible and easy to use, like BetterHelp. So take the early steps and try it out. Check them out at betterhelp.com. And save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And nations, if it turns to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Where nations take control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
A quick turn to a pothead question. What do you think is the timeline for the thing we're talking about? If you had to predict and bet the hundred million dollars that we just made, no, we made a trillion, we paid a hundred million, sorry, on when these kinds of big leaps will be happening, do you think there'll be a series of small leaps, like the kind of stuff we saw with Chad GPT, with RLHF?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Or is there going to be a moment that's truly, truly transformational?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So like a measure of truth or truthiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So there's several things there. One is impact and one is truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And based on which, especially if it's like in the realm of physics, you can build a machine that does something. So like nuclear fusion, it comes up with a contradiction to our current understanding of physics that helps us build a thing that generates a lot of energy, for example. Right. Or even something less dramatic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Some mechanism, some machine, something we can engineer and see like, holy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
This is an idea. It's not just a mathematical idea. Like it's a theorem prover.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Although humans do this thing where they, they've, their mind gets blown. They quickly dismiss, they quickly take it for granted, you know, because it's the other, like it's an AI system. They'll, they'll lessen its power and value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I wonder what, if there's like the top 10 algorithms of all time, like FFTs are up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I wonder if I'll be able to hear the AI, though. You mean the internal reasoning, the monologues? No, no, no. If an AI tells me that, I wonder if I'll take it seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Arvind Srinivas. Perplexity is part search engine, part LLM, so how does it work? And what role does each part of that, the search and the LLM, play in serving the final result?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Force me to think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a cool metric to optimize for, is the number of times you make the user think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like really think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So a truly new idea. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, I mean, that one is an interesting one because we humans, we divide ourselves into camps and so it becomes controversial, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I know, but what happens is if an AI comes up with a deep truth about that, humans will too quickly, unfortunately, will politicize it, potentially. They will say, well, this AI came up with that because if it goes along with the left-wing narrative because it's Silicon Valley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That would be a cool moment when an AI publicly demonstrates a really new perspective on a truth, a discovery of a truth, of a novel truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's true, yeah. If you have high-power thinkers like Elon, or I imagine when I've had conversation with Ilyas Iskever, like just talking about any topic, you're like, the ability to think through a thing. I mean, you mentioned PhD student, we can just go to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But to have an AI system that can legitimately be an assistant to Ilyas Iskever or Andrej Karpathy when they're thinking through an idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What do you think happens if we have those two AIs and we create a million copies of each? So we have a million Ilyas and a million Andre Kapatis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
They're talking to each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I mean, I feel like there would be clusters, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Right, so you have to somehow not hard code the curiosity aspect of this whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I love all the tangents we took, but let's return to the beginning. What's the origin story of perplexity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So to you, that was an inspiration, Copile as a product. So GitHub Copilot, for people who don't know, it assists you in programming. It generates code for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So anything that's doing the explicit collection of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So that's for the relation database behind Twitter, for example? Correct. So you can't ask natural language questions of a table. You have to come up with complicated SQL.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
By generating SQL queries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Interesting. I'm actually now curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What wisdom do you gain from this idea that the initial search over Twitter was the thing that opened the door to these investors, to these brilliant minds that supported you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So it was explicitly instructed to write like an academic, essentially. You found a bunch of stuff on the internet and now you generate something coherent and something that humans will appreciate and cite the things you found on the internet in the narrative you create for the human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a big thing to take on, web search. That's a big move. What were the early steps to do that? What's required to take on web search?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. And I mean, in Google's initial vision of making the world's information accessible to everyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So can you speak to the technical details of how Perplexity works? You've mentioned already RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation. What are the different components here? How does the search happen? First of all, what is RAG? What does the LLM do? At a high level, how does the thing work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, let's just lean on that. So in general, RAG is doing the search part with a query to add extra context. Yeah. to generate a better answer, I suppose. You're saying you want to really stick to the truth that is represented by the human written text on the internet. And then cite it to that text.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So where is there room for hallucination to seep in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
I get to see sort of directly because I've seen answers. In fact, for a perplexity page that you posted about, I've seen ones that reference a transcript of this podcast. Mm-hmm. And it's cool how it like gets to the right snippet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like probably some of the words I'm saying now and you're saying now will end up in a perplexing answer. It's crazy. Yeah. It's very meta. Including the Lex being smart and handsome part. That's out of your mouth in a transcript forever now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
not to say it's just a way to mess with the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, the model doesn't know that there's video editing. So the indexing is fascinating. So is there something you could say about some interesting aspects of how the indexing is done?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How does Perplexibot work? Like, so that's a beautiful little creature. So it's crawling the web. Like, what are the decisions it's making as it's crawling the web?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But most, most of the details of how a page works, especially with JavaScript is not provided to the bot, I guess, to figure all that out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Is that a fully machine learning system? Is it embedding into some kind of vector space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So that's the ranking, but you also, I mean, that step of converting a page into something that could be stored in a vector database It just seems really difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So for the unrestricted web data, you can't just... You need a combination of all, a hybrid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you have to put some extra positive weight on the recency, but not so it overwhelms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So how much of search is a science? How much of it is an art?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
We got Cloaked for cyber privacy, ShipStation for shipping stuff, NetSuite for business stuff, Element for hydration, Shopify for e-commerce, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So constantly you come up with an issue with a particular set of documents and a particular kinds of questions that users ask and the system perplexity doesn't work well for that. And you're like, okay, how can we make it work well for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And you want to find cases that are representative of a larger set of mistakes. Correct. All right, so what about the query stage? So I type in a bunch of BS. I type a poorly structured query. What kind of processing can be done to make that usable? Is that an LLM type of problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So one of the things we should say is that the model, this is the pre-trained LLM, is something that you can swap out in perplexity. So it could be GPT-4-0, it could be CLAW-3, it can be LALMA, something based on LALMA-3.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You can go to the AI model, if you subscribe to Pro like I did, and choose between GPT-4-0, GPT-4 Turbo, CLAW-3 Sonnet, CLAW-3 Opus, and Sonar Large 32K. So that's the one that's trained on Lama 370B. Advanced model trained by perplexity. I like how you added advanced model. It sounds way more sophisticated. I like it. Sona large. Cool. And you could try that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And that's, is that going to be, so the trade-off here is between what latency?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So in the future, you hope your model to be like the dominant, the default model?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And that flexibility allows you to- Really focus on the user. But it allows you to be AI complete, which means you keep improving with every- Yeah, we're not taking off-the-shelf models from anybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So it's really responsive. How do you get the latency to be so low and how do you make it even lower?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Is there some interesting complexities that have to do with keeping the latency low and just serving all of this stuff? The TTFT, when you scale up, as more and more users get excited, a couple of people listen to this podcast and they're like, holy shit, I want to try Perplexity. They're going to show up. What does the scaling of compute look like? Almost from a CEO startup perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Largely?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Perplexity, yeah. Does Netflix use AWS? Yes, Netflix uses Amazon Web Services AWS for nearly all its computing and storage needs. Okay, well, the company uses over 100,000 server instances on AWS and has built a virtual studio in the cloud to enable collaboration among artists and partners worldwide. Netflix's decision to use AWS is rooted in the scale and breadth of services AWS offers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Related questions, what specific services does Netflix use from AWS? How does Netflix ensure data security? What are the main benefits Netflix gets from using? Yeah, I mean, if I was by myself, I'd be going down a rabbit hole right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And asking, why doesn't it switch to Google Cloud or those kinds of things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Although famous as Elon has talked about, they seem to have used like a collection, a disparate collection of data centers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So does Perplexi use AWS? Yeah. And so you have to figure out how much more instances to buy, those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
You tweeted a poll asking, who's likely to build the first 1,800,000 GPU equivalent data center? And there's a bunch of options there. So what's your bet on? Who do you think will do it? Like Google, Meta, XAI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
What was the option you provide, OpenAI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
How much about winning in the George Haas way, hashtag winning, is about the compute? Who gets the biggest compute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's a beautiful way to put it. Decoupling reasoning and facts. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So what, from your whole experience, what advice would you give to people looking to start a company about how to do so? What startup advice do you have?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
And it'll give you the strength to persevere until you get there. Correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
the cost of it, the sacrifice, the pain of being a founder, in your experience? It's a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
It's tough, though, because in the early days of a startup, I think there's probably... really smart people like you, you have a lot of options. You can stay in academia, you can work at companies, have higher position in companies, working on super interesting projects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, to this day, it's one of the things I really regret about my life trajectory is I haven't done much building yet. I would like to do more building than talking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, thank you for remembering that. Wow, that's a beautiful moment that you remember that. I, of course, remember it in my own heart. And in that way, you've been an inspiration to me because I still, to this day, would like to do a startup because I have, in the way you've been obsessed about search, I've also been obsessed my whole life about human-robot interaction. It's about robots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. I mean, that combination of a passion towards a particular thing and this new, fresh perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
But there's a sacrifice to it. There's a pain to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, in that way, you, my friend, have been an inspiration. So thank you. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that for young kids like myself and others listening to this. You also mentioned the value of hard work, especially when you're younger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Like in your 20s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So can you speak to that? What's advice you would give to a young person about like work-life balance kind of situation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Well, there's a lot of questions to ask that I would first zoom out once again. So fundamentally... It's about search. So you said first there's a search element, and then there's a storytelling element via LLM, and the citation element. But it's about search first. So you think of perplexity as a search engine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Also, there's a physical mental aspect. Like you said, you can stay up all night. You can pull all-nighters, multiple all-nighters. I can still do that. I'll still pass out sleeping on the floor in the morning under the desk. I still can do that. But yes, it's easier to do when you're younger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Use your time wisely when you're young. Because yeah, that's planting a seed that's going to grow into something big if you plant that seed early on in your life. Yeah, that's really valuable time. Especially like... You know, the education system early on, you get to like explore. Exactly. It's like freedom to really, really explore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Oh yeah, no empathy. Just people who are extremely passionate about whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, I think you have to surround yourself by people. It doesn't matter what walk of life. I have, you know, we're in Texas. I hang out with people that for a living make barbecue. And those guys, the passion they have for it, it's like generational. That's their whole life. They stay up all night. It means all they do is cook barbecue. And it's all they talk about. And it's all they love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah. So that Messi is your favorite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
That's the first thing you said today that I'm just, Deeply disagree with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
The human and the journey that you've.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Yeah, he's not from this planet for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So you like the underdog. I mean, your own story has elements of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So if you just look, put on your visionary hat, look into the future, what do you think the future of search looks like? And maybe even, let's go with the bigger pothead question, what does the future of the internet, the web look like? So what is this evolving towards? And maybe even the future of the web browser, how we interact with the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
So there's this collective intelligence of the human species sort of always reaching out for more knowledge, and you're giving it tools to reach out at a faster rate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The following is a conversation with Edward Gibson, or Ted, as everybody calls him. He is a psycholinguistics professor at MIT. He heads the MIT Language Lab that investigates why human languages look the way they do, the relationship between cultural language and how people represent, process, and learn language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, if that was the primary driver, then everybody was speaking English or speaking one language. There's also attention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You're right. Maybe this is slow, but maybe that's where we're moving. But there is a tension. You're saying language is at the fringes. But if you look at geopolitics and superpowers, it does seem that there's another thing in tension, which is a language is a national identity sometimes. For certain nations. I mean, that's the war in Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Ukrainian language is a symbol of that war in many ways, like a country fighting for its own identity. So it's not merely the convenience. I mean, those two things are a tension, is the convenience of trade and the economics and be able to communicate with neighboring countries and trade more efficiently with neighboring countries, all that kind of stuff, but also identity of the group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because language is the way, for every community, like dialects, that emerge are a kind of identity for people. It's sometimes a way for people to say F-U to the more powerful people. And it's interesting. So in that way, language can be used as that tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you have hope for machine translation that it can break down the barriers of language? So while all these different diverse languages exist, I guess there's many ways of asking this question, but basically how hard is it to translate in an automated way from one language to another?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And there might be entire concepts that are missing. So to you, it's more about the space of concept versus the space of form. Like form, you can probably map.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
There's a music to the form. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
We should say that there is like, I hesitate to say meaning, but there's a music and a rhythm to the form when you look at the broad picture, like the difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, or Hemingway, Bukowski, James Joyce, like I mentioned. There's a beat to it. There's an edge to it that is in the form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I would love to see... That sounds totally fascinating. Translation to Hemingway is probably the lowest... I would love to see different authors, but the average per sentence dependency length for Hemingway is probably the shortest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I met a guy named Aza Raskin who does a lot of cool stuff, really brilliant. Works with Tristan Harris and a bunch of stuff. But he was talking to me about communicating with animals. He co-founded Earth Species Project where you're trying to find the common language between whales, crows, and humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And he was saying that there's a lot of promising work that even though the signals are very different. Right. like the actual, if you have embeddings of the languages, they're actually trying to communicate similar type things. Is there something you can comment on that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Is there promise to that in everything you've seen in different cultures, especially like remote cultures, that this is a possibility or no? That we can talk to whales?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But also if we have a lot of intellectual humility here, there's somebody formerly from MIT, Neri Oxman, who I admire very much, has talked a lot about, has worked on communicating with plants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
so like yes the signal there is even less than but like it's not out of the realm of possibility that all nature has a way of communicating and it's a very different language but they do develop a kind of language through the chemistry uh through some way of communicating with each other and if you have enough humility about that possibility i think you can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think it would be a very interesting, in a few decades, maybe centuries, hopefully not, a humbling possibility of being able to communicate not just between humans effectively, but between all of living things on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think if we're humble, there could be some interesting trees out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Let me ask you a wild out there sci-fi question. If we make contact with an intelligent alien civilization and you get to meet them, how hard do you think, how surprised would you be about their way of communicating? Do you think it would be recognizable? Maybe there's some parallels here to when you go to the remote tribes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Is there something you can say about the process he follows? How do you show up to a tribe and socialize? I mean, I guess colors and counting is one of the most basic things to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's a tough one, where you just show up knowing nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's beautiful that humans are able to connect in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You've had an incredible career exploring this fascinating topic. What advice would you give to young people? about how to have a career like that or a life that they can be proud of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I love it. And I love the fact that your pursuit of fun has landed you here talking to me. This was an incredible conversation, Ted. You're just a fascinating human being. Thank you for taking a journey through human language with me today. This is awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Edward Gibson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Wittgenstein. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So just to clarify, verb initial is subject, verb, object. That's correct, verb. verb final is still subject, object, verb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's so fascinating. I ate an apple or I apple ate. Yes. Okay, and it's fascinating that there's a pretty even division in the world amongst those, 40, 45%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And I think TDM MetaTrade got bought by Charles Schwab or acquired or merged. I don't know. I don't know how these things work. All I know is that Yahoo Finance can integrate that and just show me everything I need to know about my quote-unquote portfolio. I don't have anything interesting going on, but it is still good to kind of monitor it, to stay in touch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
harmonic generalizations about word-to-word. There's so many things I want to ask you. Okay, good. Let me just, sometimes basics. You mentioned dependencies a few times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What do you mean by dependencies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So a tree is also sort of a mathematical construct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, yeah. So it's fascinating that you can break down a sentence into a tree, and then every word is hanging on to another. It's depending on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
There's nobody sitting here listening mad at you. I do not think so. I don't think so. Okay. There's no linguist sitting there mad at this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because to me, just as a layman, it's surprising that you can break down sentences in all languages into a tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, okay, so what's at the root of a tree? How do you construct? How hard is it? What is the process of constructing a tree from a sentence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Now, a lot of people I know have a lot more interesting stuff going on investment-wise, so all of that could be easily integrated into Yahoo Finance, and you can look at all that stuff, the charts, blah, blah, blah. It looks beautiful and sexy and just helps you be informed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What's usually the root? Is it going to be the verb that defines the event?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What if you're messing... Are we talking about language that's like correct language? What if you're doing poetry and messing with stuff? then rules go out the window, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Now, that's about your own portfolio, but then also for the entirety of the finance information for the entirety of the world. That's all there. the big news, the analysis of everything that's going on, everything like that. And I should also mention that I would like to do more and more financial episodes. I've done a couple of conversations with Ray Dalio.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, there's a much more extensive culture of poetry throughout the history of the last hundred years in Russia. And I always wondered why that is. But it seems that there's more flexibility in the way the language is used. You're morphing the language easier by altering the words, altering the order of the words, messing with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And so... I love the terminology of agent and patient and the other ones you used. Those are sort of linguistic terms, correct? Correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, this is fascinating. So how hard is it to form a tree in general? Is there... Is there a procedure to it? Like, if you look at different languages, is it supposed to be a very natural, like, is it automatable, or is there some human genius involved?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It modifies something about the word that adds additional meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
A lot of that is about finance, but some of that is about sort of geopolitics and the bigger context of finance. I just recently did a conversation with Bill Ackman, very much about finance. And I did a series of conversations on cryptocurrency. Lots and lots of brilliant people, Michael Saylor, so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Drink, drank, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And there's a lot of irregulars in English.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The evolution of the irregulars are fascinating, because it's essentially slang that's sticky, because you're breaking the rules, and then everybody uses it and doesn't follow the rules, and they say screw it to the rules. It's fascinating. So you said morphemes, lots of questions. So morphology is what, the study of morphemes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That is fascinating. So in general, there's, what, two morphemes per word? Usually one or two? Or three?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, I'll ask the same question over and over. But... how does the, just sometimes to understand things like morphemes, it's nice to just ask the question, how does these kinds of things evolve? So you have a great book studying sort of the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
how the cognitive processing, how language is used for communication, so the mathematical notion of how effective language is for communication, what role that plays in the evolution of language, but just high level, like how does a language evolve where English is two morphemes or one or two morphemes per word and then Finnish has infinity per word? So how does that happen? Is it just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Charles Hoskinson, Vitalik, I mean just lots of brilliant people in that space thinking about the future of money, future of finance. Anyway, you can keep track of all of that with Yahoo Finance. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com. This episode is also brought to you by Listening, an app that allows you to listen to academic papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, I don't know if it's naive. I think it's simple. Simple. I think naive is an indication that it's incorrect somehow. It's a trivial, too simple. I think it could very well be correct. But it's interesting how sticky. It feels like two people got together. It just feels like once you figure out certain aspects of a language, that just becomes sticky and the tribe forms around that language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Maybe the language, maybe the tribe forms first and then the language evolves. And then you just kind of agree and you stick to whatever that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Also, he should have a book titled Syntax, A Cognitive Approach, published by MIT Press, coming out this fall. So look out for that. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Yahoo Finance for basically everything you've ever needed if you're an investor. Listening for listening to research papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's a thing I've always wished existed, and I always kind of suspected it's very difficult to pull off, but these guys pulled it off. Basically, it's any kind of formatted text brought to life through audio. Now for me, the thing I care about most, and I think that's at the foundation of listening, is academic papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So probably color words is a good example of how language evolves from sort of function. When you need to communicate the use of something, then you kind of invent different variations. And basically, you can imagine that the evolution of a language has to do with what the early tribes were doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What kind of problems are facing them, and they're quickly figuring out how to efficiently communicate the solution to those problems, whether it's aesthetic or functional, all that kind of stuff, running away from a mammoth or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think what you're pointing to is that we don't have data on the evolution of language, because many languages were formed a long time ago, so you don't get the chatter anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, you get an inkling of that from the rapid communication on certain platforms, like on Reddit, there's different communities, and they'll come up with different slang, usually from my perspective, driven by a little bit of humor, or maybe mockery or whatever, just talking shit in different kinds of ways. And you could see the evolution of language there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
because I think a lot of things on the internet, you don't want to be the boring mainstream. So you like want to deviate from the proper way of talking. And so you get a lot of deviation, like rapid deviation. Then when communities collide, you get like, just like you said, humans adapt to it. And you can see it through the lens of humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So I love to read academic papers, and there's several levels of rigor in the actual reading process, but listening to them, especially after I skimmed it, or after I did a deep dive, listening to them is just such a beautiful experience. It solidifies the understanding. It brings to life all kinds of thoughts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, it's very difficult to study, but you can imagine like 100 years from now, well, if there's a new language born, for example, we'll get really high resolution data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
We'll now have good data on it, which is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can you talk to what is syntax and what is grammar? So you wrote a book on syntax.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And I'm doing this while I'm cooking, while I'm running, while I'm going to grab a coffee, all that kind of stuff. It does require an elevated level of focus, especially the kind of papers I listen to, which are computer science papers. But you can load in all kinds of stuff. You can do philosophy papers. You can do psychology papers like this. Very topic of linguistics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So quick questions around all this. So formal language theory is the big field of just studying language formally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And then phrase structure grammar is this idea that you can break down language into this S-N-P-V-P type of thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So to clarify, dependency grammar is the framework under which you see language and you make the case that this is a good way to describe language. And Noam Chomsky is watching this, he's very upset right now, so let's, just kidding, but what's the difference between, where's the place of disagreement? Between phrase structure grammar and dependency grammar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I've listened to a few papers on linguistics. I went back to Chomsky and listened to papers. It's great. Papers, books, PDFs, webpages, articles, all that kind of stuff. Even email newsletters. And the voices they got are pretty sexy. It's great. It's pleasant to listen to. I think that's what's ultimately most important is it shouldn't feel like a chore to listen to it. Like I really enjoy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And these are just lexical copies. They're not necessarily moving from one to another. There's no movement. There's a romantic notion that you have like one main way to use a word and then you could move it around. Right, right. Which is essentially what movement is implying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Normally you'd get a two week free trial, but listeners of this podcast get one month free. So go to listening.com slash Lex. That's listening.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, life, auto, home, disability, all kinds of insurance. There's really nice tools for comparison. I'm a big fan of nice tools for comparison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Just say there's lexical copies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
When we say the learning problem, do you mean humans learning a new language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
If I'm trying to sound sophisticated, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So one of the main divisions here is the movement story versus the lesson, the copy story. That has to do about the auxiliary words and so on. But if you rewind to the phrase structure grammar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Like I have to travel to harsh conditions soon, and I have to figure out how I need to update my equipment to make sure it's weatherproof, waterproof even. It's just resilient to harsh conditions. And it would be nice to have sort of comparisons. I have to resort to like Reddit posts or forum posts kind of debating different audio quarters and cabling and microphones and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, for you, so we should clarify, so dependency grammar is just, well, one word depends on only one other word, and you form these trees, and that makes, it really puts priority on those dependencies, just like as a There's a tree that you can then measure the distance of the dependency from one word to the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
They can then map to the cognitive processing of the sentences, how easy it is to understand and all that kind of stuff. So it just puts the focus on just like the mathematical distance of dependence between words. So it's just a different focus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Just continue on the thread of Chomsky because it's really interesting. Because as you're... discussing disagreement, to the degree there's disagreement, you're also telling the history of the study of language, which is really awesome. So you mentioned context-free versus regular. Does that distinction come into play for dependency grammars?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So within a sentence? Within a sentence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
and waterproof containers, all that kind of stuff. I would love to be able to do a rigorous comparison of them. Of course, going to Amazon, you get the reviews, and those are actually really, really solid. And so I think Amazon's been the giant gift to society in that way, that you kind of can lay out all the different options and get a lot of structured analysis of how good Amazon is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Since we're kind of talking about the history of the study of language, what other interesting disagreements, and you're both at MIT, or were for a long time, what kind of interesting disagreements there, tension of ideas are there between you and Noam Chomsky?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And we should say that Noam was in the linguistics department, and you're, I guess for a time were affiliated there, but primarily brain and cognitive science department. which is another way of studying language, and you've been talking about fMRI. Is there something else interesting to bring to the surface about the disagreement between the two of you, or other people in the discipline?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
this thing is, so Amazon's been great at that. Now, what Policy Genius did is did the Amazon thing, but for insurance, so the tools for comparison is really my favorite thing. It's just really easy to understand. The full marketplace of insurance. With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's the biggest method. But the method is a symptom of a bigger approach, which is sort of a psychology philosophy side on GNOME, and for you, it's more sort of data-driven, sort of almost like a mathematical approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So data-driven psychologists, well, you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But in the actual, like how that manifests itself outside of the methodology is like these differences, these subtle differences about the movement story versus the lexical copy story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, well, let's explore the theories that... You explore in your book. Let's return to this dependency grammar framework of looking at language. What's a good justification why the dependency grammar framework is a good way to explain language? What's your intuition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So the cry is connected to the boy. The cry at the end is connected to the boy in the beginning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Head to policygenius.com slash Lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you can save. That's policygenius.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Just to clarify, the distance of the dependencies is whenever the boy cried, there's a dependence between two words, and then you're counting the number of, what, morphemes between them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Sure. And you're saying the longer the distance is at dependence, the more, no matter the language, except legalese. Even legalese. Even legalese. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, okay, okay. But that... The people will be very upset that speak that language. Not upset, but they'll either not understand it, or they'll be like, their brain will be working in overtime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Is that a chicken or the egg issue here? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I'm not name dropping here, but I recently went on a hike with the CEO of Shopify, Toby, he's brilliant. I've been a fan of his for a long time, long before Shopify was a sponsor. I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors this podcast. Now, just to clarify, it really doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Wait a minute. So central embedding meaning like you take a normal sentence like the boy cried and inject a bunch of crap in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That separates the boy and the cried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay. That's central embedding. And nesting is on top of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
They don't mean anything different. Got it. And then... what you're saying is there's a bunch of different kinds of experiments you can do. I mean, I like the understanding one is like have more embedding, more central embedding. Is it easier or harder to understand? But then you have to measure the level of understanding, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And those are giving you a signal. That's why you can say that. What about the completion of the central event?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, actually, I'm struggling with it in my head. Well, it's easier when you stare at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Okay, so the universal theory of language by Ted Gibson is that you can form dependency... You can form trees from any sentences. That's right. You can measure the distance in some way of those dependencies, and then you can say that most languages have very short dependencies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Nobody in this world can put pressure on me to have a sponsor or not to have a sponsor or for a sponsor to put pressure on me what I can and can't say. I, when I wake up in the morning, feel completely free to say what I want to say and to think what I want to think. I've been very fortunate in that way in many dimensions in my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Policy Genius for insurance. Shopify for selling stuff online. And Eight Sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip friends, please still check out the sponsors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's like 10% of the... And even in those languages, it's still short dependencies. Short dependencies is rules. Yeah. Okay, so what are some possible explanations for that? For why languages have evolved that way? So that's one of the, I suppose, disagreements you might have with Chomsky. So you consider the evolution of language in terms of information theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And I also have always lived a frugal life and a life of discipline, which is where the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought truly comes from. So I don't need anybody. I don't need a boss. I don't need money. I'm free to exist in this world in the way I want. sees right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And for you, the purpose of language is ease of communication and processing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
When you say production, can you... Oh, I just mean ease of language production.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's on both sides of the production.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
My initial intuition is that you optimize language for the audience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But it's both. It's just kind of like messing with my head a little bit to say that some of the optimization might be the primary objective. The optimization might be the ease of production.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Wait, wait, wait, wait. But the purpose of communication is to be understood, is to convince others and so on. So like the selfish thing is to be understood. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Right. I mean like the ease of production. Helps me be understood then. I don't think it's circular. I think the primary objective is about the listener. Because otherwise, if you're optimizing for the ease of production, then you're not going to have any of the interesting complexity of language. You're trying to explain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Now, on top of that, of course, I'm surrounded by incredible people, many of whom I disagree with and have arguments, so I'm influenced by those conversations and those arguments and I'm always learning, always challenging myself, always humbling myself. I have kind of intellectual humility. I kind of suspect I'm kind of an idiot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But that means the message needs to be understood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I think I'm still tying meaning and form together in my head. But you're saying if you keep the meaning of what you're saying constant, the optimization, yeah, it could be the primary objective that optimization is for production. That's interesting. I'm struggling to keep constant meaning. It's just so, I mean, I'm such a, I'm a human, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So for me, the form, without having introspected on this, the form and the meaning are tied together, like, deeply. Because I'm a human. Like, for me, when I'm speaking, because I haven't thought about language, like, in a rigorous way, about the form of language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yes. Just words. To you, specifying the breed of dog and whether they're cute or not is changing the meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Right, so you're just, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
This is so fascinating and just like a really powerful window into human language, but I wonder still throughout this how vast the gap between meaning and form. I just have this like maybe romanticized notion that they're close together, that they evolve hand in hand, that you can't just simply optimize for one without the other being in the room with us. Well, it's kind of like an iceberg.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I start my approach to the world of ideas from that place, assuming I'm an idiot and everybody has a lesson to teach me. Anyway, not sure why I got off that tangent, but the hike was beautiful. Nature, friends, is beautiful. Anyway, I have a Shopify store, lexfriedman.com slash store. It's very minimal, which is how I like, I think, most things. If you want to set up a store, it's super easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Form is the tip of the iceberg and the rest, the meaning is the iceberg, but you can't separate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, I mean, that's a really interesting question. What is the difference between language written, communicated versus thought? What to use the difference between them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can you specify what you mean by language, like communicated language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And that's pretty stable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can I ask a quick question? Sorry, it's a small tangent. At which point as you grow up from baby to adult, does it stabilize?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So clearly when you lead up to a baby's first words, before that there's a lot of fascinating turmoil going on about figuring out what are these people saying? And you're trying to make sense, how does that connect to the world and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that might be just fascinating development that's happening there. That's hard to introspect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But anyway, you- Anyways, we're back to the scanner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It takes a few minutes. Even I figured out how to do it. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep, and it's part of the three cover. The source of my escape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Are we talking about speaking and listening, or are we also talking about reading?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So if you, wait, wait, so if you read random words?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Like gibberish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The network doesn't get activated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So programming...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And so- Is that as mind-blowing as I think? That's pretty cool. That's weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The door, when opened, allows me to travel away from the troubles of the world into this ethereal universe of calmness. A cold bed surface with a warm blanket. a perfect 20 minute nap, and it doesn't matter how dark the place my mind is in, a nap will pull me out, and I see the beauty of the world again. Technologically speaking, a-sleep is just really cool. You can control temperature with a nap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Sorry to go into a place where you maybe... A little bit philosophical, but is it possible that this area of the brain is doing some kind of translation into a deeper set of almost like concepts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, like a translation network. Yeah. But I wonder what is at the core, at the bottom of it. Like, what are thoughts? Are thoughts, to me, like... I don't know. Thoughts and words. Are they neighbors? Or is it one turtle sitting on top of the other? Meaning, like, is there a deep...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, I wonder if there's like some stable, nicely compressed encoding of meanings that's separate from language. You know... I guess the implication here is that we don't think in language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I wonder if the inner voice activates that same network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I do think I vocalize what I'm reading, but I don't think I hear a voice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, I don't think I have an inner voice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I refuse to believe that's the majority of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It could be a self-report flaw. It could be. You know, when I'm reading, inside my head, I'm kind of like saying the words, which is probably the wrong way to read, but I don't hear a voice. There's no percept of a voice. I refuse to believe the majority of people have it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Anyway, it's a fascinating, the human brain is fascinating, but it still blew my mind that language does appear, comprehension does appear to be separate from thinking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's become such an integral part of my life that I've begun to take it for granted. Typical human. So the app controls the temperature. I set it, currently I'm setting it to a negative five. And it's just super nice, cool surface. It's something I really look forward to, especially when I'm traveling. I don't have one of those. It really makes me feel like home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
This is kind of blowing my mind right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I'm trying to load that in because it has implications for large language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, let's take a stroll there. You wrote that the best current theories of human language are arguably large language models. So this has to do with form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You don't know what's going on. You don't know what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What's your definition of a theory? Because it's a gigantic black box with a very large number of parameters controlling it. To me, theory usually requires a simplicity, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You could probably construct a mechanism by which it can generate a simple explanation of a particular language, like a set of rules. Something like a... It could generate... A dependency grammar for a language, right? Yes. You could probably just ask it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You write that the kinds of theories of language that LLMs are closest to are called construction-based theories. Can you explain what construction-based theories are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Check it out and get special savings when you go to asleep.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Edward Gibson. When did you first become fascinated with human language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you think that large language models understand language? Are they mimicking language? I guess the deeper question there is, are they just understanding the surface form? Or do they understand something deeper about the meaning that then generates the form?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But it's also possible the larger language model would be aware of the fact that there's sometimes over-representation of a particular kind of formulation. And it's easy to get tricked by that. And so you could see if they get larger and larger, models be a little bit more skeptical. So you see over-representation. So it just feels like form can...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
training on form can go really far in terms of being able to generate things that look like the thing understands deeply the underlying world model of the kind of mathematical world, physical world, psychological world that would generate these kinds of sentences. It just feels like you're creeping close to the meaning part. Easily fooled, all this kind of stuff. But that's humans too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So it just seems really impressive how often it seems like it understands concepts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And so... Well, no, no, no. I'm not saying that. I think when you just look at anecdotal examples and just showing a large number of them where it doesn't seem to understand and it's easily fooled, that does not seem like a scientific data-driven analysis of how many places is a damn impressive in terms of meaning and understanding and how many places is easily fooled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What's the mechanism by which humans figure out that it's an error?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Less likely to make, I should say. Yeah, less likely. Because like humans are very... Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, you're asking, you know, you're asking humans to... You're asking a system to understand 100%. Like, you're asking some mathematical concepts. And so, like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, the central embedding. The central embedding struggles with-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But it really often doesn't just complete sentences. It very often says stuff that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
and sometimes says stuff that's not true. And almost always the form is great. But it's still very surprising that with really great form it's able to generate a lot of things that are true. Based on what it's trained on and so on. So it's not just form that it's generating, it's mimicking true statements from the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I guess the underlying idea there is that on the internet, truth is overrepresented versus falsehoods. I think that's probably right. But the fundamental thing it's trained on, you're saying, is just form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, that's a sad, to me, that's still a little bit of open question. I probably lean agreeing with you, especially now you've just blown my mind that there's a separate module in the brain for language versus thinking. Maybe there's a fundamental part missing from the large language model approach that lacks the thinking, the reasoning capabilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's fascinating. Still, to me, an open question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What do you have the interesting limits of LLMs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Their form is perfect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So when you look at grammar, you're almost thinking about it like a puzzle, almost like a mathematical puzzle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, it's close to being perfect. Well, you said ability to complete central embeddings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But that's not perfect, right? That's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Oh, wait, wait, wait. So perfect is as close to humans as possible. I got it. But you should be able to, if you're not human, you're superhuman, you should be able to complete central embedded sentences, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The form of human language. And how humans process the language. I think that's plausible. And how they generate language. Process language and generate language, that's fascinating. So in that sense, they're perfect. If we can just linger on the center embedding thing, that's hard for LLMs to produce, and that seems really impressive, because that's hard for humans to produce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And how does that connect... to the thing we've been talking about before, which is the dependency grammar framework in which you view language and the finding that short dependencies seem to be a universal part of language. So why is it hard to complete center embeddings?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can you just linger on what do you mean by cognitive cost?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So you can somehow, in different ways, convert it to a number. I wonder if there's a beautiful equation connecting cognitive cost and length of dependency. E equals mc squared kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
For sure, but there might be some insight in the kind of function that fits the data, meaning like a quadratic, like what...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I enjoyed their stuff, maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a new sponsor. And they got a new website that you should check out. It's a website that provides financial management reports, information, and news for investors. Yahoo itself has been around forever. Yahoo Finance has been around forever. I don't know how long, but it must be over 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Probably somehow connected to working memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
No, that's a beautiful idea. And the underlying idea is beautiful, that there's a cognitive cost that correlates with the length of dependency. Mm-hmm. It just, it feels like it's a deep, I mean, language is so fundamental to the human experience. And this is a nice, clean theory of language where it's like, wow, okay. So like, we like our words close together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It depends on where it's close together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, the simplicity of the theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Have you gone through the process? Is there like, you take a piece of text and then simplify... sort of like there's an average length of dependency and then you like, you know, reduce it and see comprehension on the entire, not just single sentence, but like, you know, you go from James Joyce to Hemingway or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Let's talk about legalese because you mentioned that as an exception. We should take it tangent upon tangent. That's an interesting one. You give it as an exception. It's an exception. That you say that most natural languages, as we've been talking about, have local dependencies with one exception, legalese.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So what is legalese, first of all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, I actually know very little about the kind of language that lawyers use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You just reveal the game that lawyers are playing. They're optimizing a different
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So fundamentally, your journey through life was one of a mathematician and a computer scientist, and then you kind of discovered the puzzle, the problem of language, and approached it from that angle. To try to understand it from that angle, almost like a mathematician or maybe even an engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And the passive voice accounts for some of the low-frequency words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Oh, so passive voice sucks. Low frequency word sucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
How hard is that process, by the way? I'm so sorry, don't question, but how hard is it to detect center embedding? Oh, easy. Easy to detect. You're just looking at long dependencies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So you're not just looking for long dependencies. You're just literally looking for center embedding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So like a center embedding is a big bomb you throw inside of a sentence that just blows up. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
My eyes might glaze over in mid-sentence. No, I understand that. I mean, legalese is hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
On the comprehension, on the reading side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But... I have some theories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Abracadabra type of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, don't you think there's an incentive for lawyers to generate things that are hard to understand
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
No, lawyers also don't understand it. You're creating space. I mean, you ask in a communist Soviet Union, the individual members, their self-report is not going to... correctly reflect what is broken about the gigantic bureaucracy that then leads to Chernobyl or something like this. I think the incentives under which you operate are not always transparent to the members within that system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So like it's just, feels like a strange coincidence that there is benefit if you just zoom out and look at the system as opposed to asking individual lawyers that making something hard to understand is going to make a lot of people money. You're going to need a lawyer to figure that out, I guess, from the perspective of the individual, but then that could be the performative aspect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It could be as opposed to the incentive-driven to be complicated. It could be performative to where we lawyers... speak in this sophisticated way and you regular humans don't understand it, so you need to hire a lawyer. Yeah, I don't know which one it is, but it's suspicious. Suspicious that it's hard to understand and that everybody's eyes glaze over and they don't read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Did you ever come across the philosophy angle of logic? So if you think about the 80s with AI, the expert systems where you try to kind of maybe sidestep the poetry of language and some of the syntax and the grammar and all that kind of stuff and go to the underlying meaning that language is trying to communicate and try to somehow compress that in a computer-representable way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Influential bad apples that everybody looks up to, whatever their central figures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
They didn't want this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And they weren't better than regular people at comprehending it. Or they were, on average, better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The same difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So maybe the next president of the United States can, instead of saying generic things, say, I ban center embeddings and make Ted the language czar of the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But center embeddings are the bad thing to have. That's right. So if you get rid of that. That'll do a lot of it. That'll fix a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah. That is so fascinating. Yeah. And it's just really fascinating on many fronts that humans are just not able to deal with this kind of thing. And that language, because of that, evolved in the way it did. It's fascinating. So one of the mathematical formulations you have when talking about language as communication is this idea of noisy channels. What's a noisy channel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Like literal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you ever come across that in your studies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It would have been interesting to see if you pursued the language side. That's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, that's really cool to sort of model if you don't hear certain parts of a sentence or have some probability of missing that part. Like, how do you construct a language that's resilient to that, that's somewhat robust to that? Yeah, that's the idea. And then you're kind of saying, like, the word order and the syntax of the language, the dependency length are all helpful, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But we're talking about, just to be clear, we're talking about maybe just actually the sounds of communication. Like you and I are sitting in a bar, it's very loud, and you model with a noisy channel the loudness, the noise, and we have the signal that's coming across. And you're saying word order might have something to do with optimizing that, where there's a presence of noise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, to me, it's interesting how much you can load into the noisy channel. Like how much can you bake in? You said like, you know, cognitive load on the receiver end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Sure, but then underneath it, there's a million other subsets. Oh, yeah, that's true. I mean, I just mentioned cognitive load on both sides. Then there's like speech impediments or just everything. Worldview, I mean, the meaning, we start to creep into the meaning realm of like, we have different worldviews.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
You mentioned one of the things is like a way to measure a language is learning problems. So like what's the correlation between everything we've been talking about and how easy it is to learn a language? So is like short dependencies correlated to ability to learn a language? Is there some kind of, or like the dependency grammar, is there some kind of connection there? how easy it is to learn?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So it's interesting. You think there is a big divide. There's a gap. There's a distance between form and meaning. Because that's a question you discuss a lot with LLMs, because they're damn good at form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So they're not optimized for learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Can it be just noise? Can it be just the messiness of the development of a language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Well, no, but what I mean by noise is like cultural, like sticky cultural things, like the way you communicate, just there's a stickiness to it, that it's an imperfect, it's a noisy, it's stochastic. The function over which you're optimizing is very noisy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So, because I don't, it feels weird to say that learning is part of the objective function, because some languages are way harder to learn than others, right? Or is that, that's not true? That's not true. That's interesting. I mean, that's the public sort of perception, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
For a second language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you think there's, oh, wow. I mean, it's an open question, right? How close form and meaning are. We'll discuss it, but to me, studying form, maybe it's a romantic notion, gives you, form is like the shadow. of the bigger meaning thing underlying language. Language is how we communicate ideas. We communicate with each other using language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
To what degree is language, this is returning to Chomsky a little bit, is innate? You said that for Chomsky, he used the idea that some aspects of language are innate to explain away certain things that are observed. How much are we born? with language at the core of our mind, brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So that part of the brain that lights up when you're doing all the comprehension, that could be learned. That could be just, you don't need, you don't need any.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So in understanding the structure of that communication, I think you start to understand the structure of thought and the structure of meaning behind those thoughts and communication to me. But to you, big gap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
These are natural experiments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
The first few hours, days, months of human life are fascinating. It's like, well, inside the womb, actually, like that development. That machinery, whatever that is, seems to create powerful humans that are able to speak, comprehend, think, all that kind of stuff, no matter what happens. Not no matter what, but robust to the different ways that the brain might be damaged and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
That's really interesting. But what would Chomsky say about the fact, the thing you're saying now, that language is... seems to be happening separate from thought. Because as far as I understand, maybe you can correct me, he thought that language underpins... Yeah, he thinks so. I don't know what he'd say. He would be surprised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because for him, the idea is that language is sort of the foundation of thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And it's pretty... mind-blowing to think that it could be completely separate from thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
What do you find most beautiful about human language? Maybe the form of human language, the expression of human language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It's a fascinating effect. Yeah. You mentioned Bolivia. What's the connection between culture and language? You've also mentioned that much of our study of language comes from W-E-I-R-D, weird people, Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. So when you study remote cultures, such as around the Amazon jungle, what can you learn about language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, that's blowing my mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
How are you going to ask, I want two of those?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
It survived so much. It evolved rapidly and quickly, adjusting, evolving, improving, all of that. The thing I use it for now is there's a portfolio that you can add your account to. Ever since I had zero money, I used, boy, I think it's called TD Ameritrade. I still use that same thing, just getting a basic mutual fund account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
This is fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And they're going to be noisy when you interview a bunch of people with the definition of few, and there's going to be a threshold in the context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
And it might actually be at first hard to discover. Yeah. Because for a lot of people, the jump from one to two will be few. Right? So it's a jump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
I mean, that's fascinating. That's fascinating that numbers don't present themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Counting is not required to complete the matching test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Because you have to count.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
There's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing there because if you don't have the words, then maybe they'll limit you in the kind of like a little baby Einstein there won't be able to come up with a counting task. You know what I mean? Like the ability to count enables you to come up with interesting things probably. Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
So, yes, you develop counting because you need it, but then once you have counting, you can probably come up with a bunch of different inventions. Like how to, I don't know. Yeah. what kind of thing, they do matching really well for building purposes, building some kind of hut or something like this. So it's interesting that language is a limiter on what you're able to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Yeah, that's what I mean. That limit is also a limit on the society of what they're able to build.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But if you care about goats, you're going to know them actually individually also. Yeah, you will. I mean, cows and goats, if there's a source of food and milk and all that kind of stuff, you're going to actually really care.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
Do you have a sense why universal languages like Esperanto have not taken off? Like why do we have all these different languages?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#426 – Edward Gibson: Human Language, Psycholinguistics, Syntax, Grammar & LLMs
But because the United States is a gigantic economy, and therefore... Yeah, it's big economies that do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So the current understanding in mainstream archaeology is that after the Young Address is when the civilizations popped up in different places of the globe with a lot of similarities, but they popped up independently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And they don't just pop up. They kind of build up gradually. First, there's some settlements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then there's different dynamics of how they build up and the role of agriculture in that is also non-obvious, but it's just… There's first a kind of settlement, a stabilization of where the people are living, then they start using agriculture, then they start getting urban centers and that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
To me, Notion is hands down the best integration of LLMs into the note-taking process when there's a lot of documents, a lot of different kinds of documents, and a lot of different kinds of people creating the documents. In the same way that in the recent episode I talked about with Cursor can query the code base, Notion generalizes that and can query the document base.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Can you say how it was discovered? I think this is one of the most fascinating things on Earth, period. So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So all the wikis and projects and all the notes that you take, all of that can be queried, you can ask questions about it, you can find stuff, you can summarize, especially when there's multiple people on the team, you can summarize all the progress made in a particular project, all that kind of stuff. You show up at the beginning of the day and you want to know, okay, what happened yesterday?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Where can I help? Those kinds of questions can be answered with Notion. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Riverside. It really is just an incredible platform for recording podcasts online. A lot of people are doing podcasts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And yet the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say, a time capsule, so protected by forming a mound around it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And perhaps we should also state, if you look at the entirety of history of hominids, Humans or hominids have been explorers. I didn't even know this when I was preparing for this. Yeah. Looking at Homo erectus. Yeah. 1.9 million years ago. Absolutely. Almost right away, they spread out through the whole world. Yeah. And we Homo sapiens evolved from them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And we should also mention, since we're talking about sort of controversial debates going on, as I understand, there's still debates about the dynamics of all that was going on there, like we mentioned in Africa, that it's, you know, I think the current understanding, we didn't come from one particular point of Africa, that there's multiple locations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released. And it's focused on the distant past of the Americas, a topic I recently discussed with the archaeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archaeologist, scholar I love talking to on the podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And the natural question that people ask me and people ask on the internet is how to do it easy. I think Riverside is the place to go to achieve easy professional level quality on both the audio and the video. I've used it a bunch over the years to record remote podcasts. In fact, I need to be doing more remote podcasts. The point is the technology is super easy because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So I guess the general puzzlement that you're filled with is given that these creatures explore and spread and try out different environments, why did it take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop complicated society settlements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You have double-ended recording, so you have extremely high-quality recording on both ends. All you do is just log in in the browser. It just works. I'm so glad this exists. It just works. And of course, they have a bunch of nice features that are leveraging AI, for example. You have a text-based editor for both audio and video, which is just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
The sinking of the multiple guests, obviously simple seeming thing, but hard to do seamlessly and flawlessly, and they do just that. I mean, it's just incredible. They pulled it off. It's not easy to pull off. and they make it look easy, which is wonderful. So it's a product that I recommend to a lot of people who are interested in doing a podcast of any kind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So one of the defining ways that you approach the study of human history that I think contrasts with mainstream archaeology is you take this sort of astronomical symbolism and the relationship between humans and the stars very seriously. I do, as I believe the ancients did. I think it's important to sort of... consider what humans would have thought about back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Now we have a lot of distractions. We have social media, we can watch videos on YouTube, whatever. But back then, especially before sort of electricity, the stars is like, The sexiest thing to talk about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
There's no light pollution, so there's... There's the majesty of the heavens. Every single night, you're spending looking up at the stars, and you can imagine there's a lot of sort of status value to be the guy who's very good at studying the stars, and sort of the scientists of the day. And I'm sure there's going to be these geniuses that emerge. They're able to do two things. One...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
tell stories about the gods or whatever based on the stars. And then also, as we'll probably talk about, use the stars practically for navigation, for example. So it makes sense that the stars had a primal importance for the ideas of the times, for the status, for religious explorations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Like I said, I record my remote interviews with Riverside. Give it a try at riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar, delicious electrolyte mix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, but detecting the precession of the equinox is hard, because especially they don't have any writing systems, they don't have any mathematical systems, so everything is told through words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So that's one of the reasons that you take myths seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I drink it throughout the day, I'm drinking it now, and I'm actually pretty low on water and electrolytes at the moment because I did a really hard training session The training session was about an hour and a half and I think I only took one round off. And it was just hard training round after round after round.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So there is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis that provides an explanation of what happened during this period that resulted in such rapid environmental change. So can you explain this hypothesis?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And by the end of it, I was just sort of both in the zone technique-wise, but also kind of psychologically accepting whatever happens in each particular puzzle that is jiu-jitsu. So I trained against some really strong dudes today. It was... Wrestlers, intense. The technique was there too. So it's like, it's a battle for everything. Lots of just attacking for submissions over and over and over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Is there a good understanding of what happened geologically, whether there was an impact or not? Like, what explains this huge dip in temperature and then rise in temperature?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Everything in the transitions, there's no stalling in a particular position. It's just movement and movement and movement and constant attacks. Yeah, it was exhausting. Plus the heat, just all of that sweating. And I usually don't drink during training. So by the time I'm done, I'm just like, no water in me. And that's when the Element really helps out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
How important is the impact hypothesis to your understanding of the Ice Age advanced civilizations? So is it possible to have another explanation for environmental factors that could have... erased most of an advanced civilization during this period?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I go from feeling really shitty to feeling really good. So get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I set up a store on lexfermer.com slash store. And I need to add shirts there, especially shirts that don't have my face on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So from this perspective, when we talk about advanced Ice Age civilization, it could have been a relatively small group of people with the technology of They're scholars of the stars and they're expert seafaring navigators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And perhaps some...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them? Well, first of all, the astronomy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I keep getting all kinds of ideas, but just haven't gotten around to it, even though it's super easy. No, here's an interesting thing. I've been getting more and more into programming languages that I haven't used before because I'm doing interviews with more and more programmers coming up, planning on it, thinking about it, excited for it. Programming makes me happy. Anyway,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I found out that Shopify, you know, the product, the service, the website was originally maybe still built with Rails, Ruby on Rails. So Ruby on Rails is this technology That's super sexy, super popular, or was for a long time, and I never just got around to using it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So one of the things I would like to do is to get better at that so I can get a greater understanding of what it takes to program for the web so that I can talk to people who excel at that, who are experts at that. Anyway, all that said, you can build incredible stuff with Ruby on Rails, which is Shopify, and you can sell stuff Whatever it is you want to sell, you can sell it with Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptians to celebrate further an already holy place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded, and respectful in disagreement. I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries, and I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream in the various disciplines involved. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So what's the case, what's the evidence that the Egyptologists used to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Sign up for a dollar per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I think at the end of the podcast, Graham called death a leap into the next great adventure. Something like that. And I remember that made me smile, a kind of smile that just warms my heart and the warmth stays there for a time. It's a kind of joyful acceptance of the transitory nature of life. Those words and the way he said them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier. And why that's important is, in that case, it would be evidence of some transfer of technology from a much older civilization. The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, Most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged and they desperately scattered across the globe. Seeking refuge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Seeking refuge and telling stories of maybe, one, the importance of the stars. Mm-hmm. Their knowledge about the stars. Yeah. And their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Now, of course, the air bars on this are quite large, but if an advanced Ice Age civilization existed, where do you think it was? Where do you think we might find it one day if it existed? And how big do you think it might have been?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And just as he said, death indeed is one of the great concerns for us humans. Whether we acknowledge it or not, it is the darkness beneath the surface waves of our daily concerns. At least I personally believe that there is a fear there, a great fear. that must be confronted and dealt with and integrated into our conception of what it means to be a human being and how to survive the waves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
How big do you think it might have been? And do you think it was spread across the globe? So if there were expert navigators Do you think they spread across the globe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So that speaks to one of the challenges that archaeologists provide to this idea is that there is a lot of evidence of humans in the Ice Age, and they appear to be all hunter-gatherers. Mm-hmm. But like you said, only a small percent of areas where humans have lived have been studied by archaeologists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I mean, that's why Gobekli Tepe fills my mind with imagination, especially seeing it as a time capsule. you know, it's almost certain that there's places on Earth we haven't discovered that once we do, even if it's after the Ice Age, will change our view of human history. Do you think there's going to be a place, like what will be your dream thing to discover?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
like Gobekli Tepe that says a definitive perturbation to our understanding of Ice Age history?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Anyway, I'm a big believer that talking is one of the tools that should be used to understand your mind and to figure out what strategies can be used to navigate life. And yeah, that's what talk therapy can do. And I recommend the easiest way to do that is BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Quick pause. Bath and break? Sounds good. So to me, the story that we've been talking about, it is... both exciting if the mainstream archeology narrative is correct and the one you're constructing is correct. Both are super interesting because the mainstream archeology perspective means that there is something about the human mind from which the pyramids, these ideas spring naturally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
You place humans anywhere, you place them on Mars, it's gonna come out that way. So that's an interesting story of human psychology that then becomes even more interesting when you evolve Out of Africa with Homo sapiens, how they think about the world. That's super interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And then if there's an ancient civilization, advanced civilization that explains why there's so many similar types of ideas that spread, that means that there's so much undiscovered. Yeah. Still. Yeah. About the sort of the spring of these ideas of civilization that come. So to me, they're both fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So I don't know why there's so much sort of infighting, but I think it's partly territorial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Graham Hancock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, in general, I got a chance to get a glimpse of the archaeology community. And in archaeology, in science in general, I don't have much patience for this kind of arrogance or snark or dismissal of... general human curiosity that I think your work inspires in people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And so that's why people like Ed Barnhart, who I recently had a conversation with, you know, he radiates sort of kindness and curiosity as well. And it's like that kind of approach to ideas, especially about human history, it inspires people, inspires millions of people to ask questions. I mean, that's why you had Keanu Reeves on the new season.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
He's basically coming to the show from that same perspective of curiosity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Let's start with a big foundational idea that you have about human history, that there was an advanced Ice Age civilization that came before and perhaps seeded what people now call the six cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Andes, and Mesoamerica. So let's talk about this idea that you have. Can you, at the highest possible level, describe it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So given that, can you maybe steel man the case that archaeologists make about this period that we've been talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
can you make the case that that is indeed what happened, is it was hunter-gatherers for a long time, and then there was a cataclysm, a very difficult period in human history with the Young Adraeus, and that changed the environment and then led to the springing up of civilizations to different places on Earth. Can you sort of make the case for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If we can just look back at your debate with Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan experience, what are some takeaways from that? What have you learned? Maybe what are some things you like about Flint? You said that he's one of your big critics, but what do you like about his ideas and what were you maybe bothered by?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I should just like linger on this because for me, it was the shipwrecks thing was convincing. And then looking back, first of all, watching your video, but also just realizing the peopling of Australia part. That's mind-boggling to me. 50,000 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Just imagine being the person standing on the shore, looking out into the ocean, standing on the shore of a harsh environment, looking out into the ocean of a harsh environment and deciding that, you know what, I'm going to go towards near certain death
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And there's no archaeological evidence of those boats?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Do you think one day we'll find a ship that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So, okay. So that's back to the 3 million shipwrecks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So what's your takeaway from that debate? Uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Listen, I feel you. I've seen the intensity of the attacks and the whole racism label is the one that can get under your skin. And it's a toolbox that's been prevalent over the past, let's say decade, maybe a little bit more as a method of cancellation when a person has is the opposite of racist very often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It's kind of hilarious to watch, but it can get under your skin, especially when you have certain dynamics that happen on the internet where it seeps into a Wikipedia page and then other people read that Wikipedia page and you get to hear it from like friends. Oh, I didn't know you're at whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And you realize that Wikipedia description of who you are is actually has a lot of power, not by people saying, that know you well, but people that just kind of are learning about you for the first time. Definitely. And they can really start to annoy you and get under your skin when the people are kind of indirectly injecting. They're writing articles about you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They can then be cited by Wikipedia. It can really bother a person who is actually trying to do good science or just trying to inspire people with different ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
to say a positive thing that I enjoyed, I think towards the end in him speaking about agriculture, it was pretty interesting. So the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting, like where you can get some insights through the fog of time about like what people were doing, how they were living.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
appreciate when you look from up above. So the idea that they built stuff that you can only appreciate when viewed from up above means they had a very kind of deep relationship with the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Everything we're talking about is so full of mystery. It's just fascinating, especially the farther back we go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Notion for note-taking, Riverside for making amazing-looking podcasts online, Element for hydration, Shopify for selling stuff online, and BetterHelp. for your mind. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexherman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If we as a human civilization continue, I think that is the one way to create backups of us elsewhere in the universe, given the space, is to do a life gun and shoot it everywhere. And then it just plants. And you kind of hope that whatever is the magic that makes up human consciousness, and if that magic is already there in the initial DNA of the bacteria,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And as you were mentioning, there's just so many interesting mysteries along the way here. For example, I mean, it's like, I think like 3 billion years, it was single cell organisms. So it seems like life was pretty good for single cell organisms, that there was no need for multicellularity, that like for animals, for any of this kind of stuff. Yeah. Why is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It seems like you could adapt much better if you're a more complicated organism. It took a really long time to take that leap. Is it because it's really hard to do? And what was the forcing function to do that kind of leap? And the same, I mean, for us to be selfish and self-obsessed, for us humans, like what was the magic leap to Homo sapiens from the other hominids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And why did Homo sapiens win out against Neanderthals and the other competitors? Why are they not around anymore? So those are all fascinating mysteries and it feels like the more we
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
proposed sort of radical ideas about our past and take it seriously and explore, the more we'll be able to sort of figure out that puzzle that leads all the way back to Homo sapiens and maybe all the way back to the origin of life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Why do you think Homo sapiens evolved? What was the magic thing? There's a bunch of theories about fire leading to meat, to cooking, which can fuel the brain, that's one. The other is like social interaction. We're able to... use their imagination to construct ideas and share those ideas and tell great stories. And that is somehow an evolutionary advantage. Do you have any favorite conceptions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
For our discussion, though, what is interesting is all the hominids seem to be explorers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
They spread. I mean, I didn't know this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That's the leap from non-human to human. One of the things you've discussed is your idea of what was the leap to human civilization. What is the driver, what is the inspiration for humans to form civilizations? And for you, that's shamanism. Can you explain what that means?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Just imagine the number of plants they had to have eaten. Yeah. And consumed and smoked, all kinds of combinations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Both possibilities, as you describe, are interesting. And to me, they're kind of akin to each other. is I wonder what the limit of the brain's capacity is to create imaginary worlds and treat them seriously and make them real. And in those worlds, explore and have real sort of moral, deep brainstorming sessions with those entities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So it's almost like the power of the human mind to imagine taken to its limit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, and would you say that the reason that could give birth to a civilization, is it because such visions can help create myths, and especially like religious myths? That would be a cohesive thing for a large group of people to get around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, they'll be doing it for the right reasons. I mentioned to you, I recently interviewed Donald Trump and actually brought up this same idea that it would be a much better world if most of Congress and most politicians would take some form of psychedelic, at the very least.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And for me also, it's exciting. Some of these substances like psilocybin are being integrated into scientific studies, large scales. It's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, I actually just recently found out that you had a TED Talk, War on Consciousness, that was taken down. Yeah. And that was just part of just the general resistance. Because it was a pretty... It wasn't a radical...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
In general, just along that line of thinking, I'm pretty sure that what we understand about consciousness today will seem silly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And for me, from an engineer perspective, it's interesting if it's possible to engineer consciousness in artificial beings. Yeah. It's another way to approach the question of how special is human consciousness. Yeah. From where does it arise... Is it something that permeates all of life? And in that case, what is the thing that makes life special? Like, what is life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
What is these living organisms that we have here that evolved to create humans? And what is truly special about humans? And it's both scary and exciting to consider the possibility that we can create something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That'd be a fascinating, because then you can construct all kinds of physical forms to manifest the consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
That makes humans really uncomfortable. Because we are at the top of the food chain. We consider ourselves truly special. And to consider that there's other things that could be special.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Yeah, fear is a useful thing, but it can also be destructive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
If you look into the future, maybe the next hundred years, what do you hope are the interesting discoveries in archaeology that we'll find?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So not just the how it was built, but the why. But the why. And to you, it seems obvious that there would be a cosmic motivation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So you think there's something interesting to be discovered about how it was built? You mean beyond the ideas of using ramps and wet sand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
I love the Great Pyramids as a kind of puzzle that was created by the ancient peoples to be solved by later peoples. I mean, this is, I don't know if you're aware of the 10,000 year clock. That was built by Jeff Bezos and Danny Hillis in Sierra Diablo Mountains in Texas. So they're building a clock that ticks once a year for 10,000 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
So it's talking about, and it's supposed to sort of run, you know, if there's a nuclear apocalypse, it just runs. And it's an example of modern humans thinking like, okay, if 10,000 years from now and beyond, if something goes wrong or the future humans that are way different come back and they,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
they analyze what happened here how can we create monuments that they could then analyze yeah and in that way be curious about in in their curiosity discover some deep truths about this current time it's an interesting kind of notion of like what can we build now that would last and the answer is that the majority of what we build now wouldn't last wouldn't uh would be it would be gone uh within a few thousand years
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
Well, you're one such human, and you said you contemplate your own death. Are you afraid of it? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
And Graham, thank you so much for inspiring the world to explore that mystery. Thank you for talking today. Thank you, Lex. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Graham Hancock. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his second time on the podcast. But this time, we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle. I traveled there to hang out with Paul, and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Our time in the jungle was very hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And there's like a faith in that interaction that eventually we'll find clean water because water's plentiful on earth. It's kind of like a delusional faith that eventually we'll find. And it was just like a little celebration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think the cooling aspect of the water, because the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle, and just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is. Yeah, it was a little celebration of life, of life on Earth, of Earth, of the jungle, of everything. It was a nice moment. I think about that. Had a couple of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's one in the puddle and one in the river. One was full of delusion and fear and the other one was full of relief and celebration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, it's something that, I haven't trained, I don't even know how you would train for that kind of thing, but it's extremely dense jungle. So every single step is like completely unpredictable in terms of the terrain your foot interacts with. So the different variety of slippery,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
that is on the jungle floor is fascinating because some things, I mean, the slope matters, but some roots of trees are slippery, some are not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Some trees in the ground already rotted through, so if you step through, you're going to potentially fall through, so it could be a shallow hole or it could be a very deep hole with some leaves and vegetation covering up a hole where if you fall through, you could break a leg and completely lose your footing or fall rolling down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And if you roll downhill, I'm pretty sure there's a 99% probability that you'll hit a thing with spikes on it. So there's so many layers of avoiding dangers of small dangers and big dangers all around you with every single step. So there's like a mental exhaustion that sets in, like just the perception. And you're just observing you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You're extremely good at perceiving, having situational awareness of taking the information in that's really important and filtering out the stuff that's not important. But even for you, that's exhausting. And for me, it was completely exhausting, just paying attention, paying attention to everything around you. So that exhaustion was surprising.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Cause it's like, there's moments when you're like, I don't give a damn anymore. I'm just going to step. I'm just going to like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And then there's just bad luck because there is wasp nests. There's just like a million things. And that is physically, is mentally, psychologically exhausting because there's the uncertainty. When is this going to end? It's up in our particular situation, up and down hills, up and down hills, very steep downward, very steep upward, no water, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's the most difficult thing I've ever done physically. but it's very difficult to describe what are the parameters that make it difficult. Because I run long distances very regularly. I do extremely difficult physical things regularly that on some surface level could seem much more challenging than what we did. But no, this was another beast. This is something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But it was also raw and real and beautiful because it's like... It's what the explorers did. Yeah. It's what Earth is without humans. And also just like the massive scale of the trees around us. was the humbling size difference between human and tree. It's both humbling in that, like, that tree is really old. It's the time difference, lifetime difference, and just the scale. It's like, holy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We live on an earth that can create those things. It makes me feel small in every way. That life is short. That my physical presence on this earth is tiny. How vulnerable I am. All of those feelings are there. And in that, the physical endurance of traversing the jungle, yeah, was the hardest journey that I remember ever taking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Just sitting there with you, Paul, and with JJ in the water. full darkness, the rain coming down, and us all just laughing, having made it through that, having eaten a bit of food before, and the absurdity of the timing of all of it that it somehow worked out, and how we're just three little humans sitting in a river.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What a life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That was a real one. Yeah. I'll never forget that. So it's a real honor to have shared that. Of course, we had very different experiences. When you saw a caiman in that situation, you're like, I have to go meet that guy that's in front of me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And also that like very different life trajectories have taken these three humans into this one place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah. It's like what is this universe that would like, because we're kind of like those moths. You know what I mean? Like we come from some weird place on this earth and we have all kinds of shit happen to us and we're all pursuing some shit and some light and we ended up here together enjoying this moment. That's something else. It just felt absurd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And in that absurdity was this like real human joy. And damn water tasted good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Fuck. I think there's something to be said about like the fact that we didn't think through much of that and we just dived into it. I think there was like, we're like laughing, enjoying ourselves moments before. And once you go in, you're like, oh shit. Oh shit. And you just come face to face with it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Like, what did you see in the snake's eyes? How did you sense that this is not the right, this is gonna be your end if you proceed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think that's what, you know, whatever that is in humans that goes to that, that's what the explorers do. And the best of them do it to the extreme levels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It somehow works out. It does seem to somehow work out. Let me ask you about Jane Goodall, another explorer of a different kind. What do you think about her? About her role in understanding this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. It's a software designed to save you time and money on fulfillment, shipping stuff that you sell on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So I started reading the River of Doubt book you recommended to me on Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. So that guy's badass on many levels, but I didn't realize how much of a naturalist he was, how much of a scholar of the natural world he was. So that book details his journey into the Amazon jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Um, what do you find inspiring about Teddy Roosevelt and that whole journey of just saying, fuck it, of going to the Amazon jungle of taking on that expedition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But going to the jungle on many levels is really difficult for him at that time. There's so many more things even than now that can kill you. All the different infections, everything. And the lack of knowledge, just the sheer lack of knowledge. So that truly is an expedition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So they also mapped. So on the biology side, it's interesting. But they mapped and documented a lot of the unknown geography and biodiversity. What does it take to do that? So when I see a move about the jungle, you're always like, you capture a creature, take a picture, write down, like, so you can...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
find new creatures, find new things about the jungle, document them, sort of a scientific perspective on the jungle. But back then, there was even less known, much less known about the jungle. So what do you think it takes to document, to map that world and new unexplored wilderness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That book of birds you have, like encyclopedia of birds. Yo. What? The human achievement. In these pages. For people listening, Paul's just flipping through a huge number of pages. These are just, is this in the Amazon or is this in Peru?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Documenting all of that. I mean, there's also, which we got to experience, and you're pretty good at also, is actually making, understanding and making the sounds of the different birds. What's your favorite bird sound to make?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Curious almost. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing, projecting onto it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And like you were saying, it's a reminder, oh, that's a friend of mine. Yeah. Surrounded by friends. I have so many friends here. What does it take to survive out here? What are some basic principles of survival in the jungle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So keeping the gear organized and all that, but also being willing to sort of improvise. I've seen you improvise very well because there's so much unknowns. There's so much chaos and dynamic aspects that like planning is not going to prevent you from having to face that in the end of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Also, the texture of the scales is really fascinating. I mean, it's my first snake I've ever touched. It's so interesting. It was just such an incredible system of muscles that are all interacting together to make that kind of movement work and all the texture of its skin, of its scales. What do you love about snakes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I mean, the thing you mentioned, trees falling, that's a thing in the jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Holy shit. First of all, a lot of trees fall. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Who do you think would eat most of you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And we'll slowly look up and just kind of smile at the camera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's why you always have to look good. Any moment a tree can fall on you and a vulture just swoops in and eats your heart. That's right. We talked about it alone, this show, a bit. Yo. Rockhouse. Yeah. What do you think about that guy? Rockhouse, Roland Welker from season seven. He built the Rockhouse. He killed the Muscox with bow and arrow and then finished it with a knife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's really mind-blowing. I mean, so for people who don't know, that shows you're supposed to survive as long as possible. On season seven of the show, they literally said you can only win it if you survive 100 days. And there's a lot of aspects of that show that's difficult, one of which is it's in the cold. The others, they get just a handful of supplies, no food, nothing, none of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So they have to figure all of that out. And this is probably one of the greatest performers on the show, Roland Welker. He built a rock house shelter. So what does survival entail? It's building a shelter. Fire, catching food, staying warm, getting enough energy to sort of keep doing the work. It takes a lot of work. Like building the rock house, I read that it took 500 calories an hour from him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
From my first experience with a snake to all the thousands of experiences you had with snakes, what do you love about these creatures?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So he had to feed himself, right? Quite a lot. You're lifting 200 pound boulders. And still the guy lost, I read, 44 pounds, which is 20% of his body weight. So that's survival. What lessons, what inspiration do you draw from him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, she maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness all through it when the condition got really tough. And she had a very different perspective as, you know, Roland didn't want any of the spirituality. It's very pragmatic. Yeah. And for Callie, it's a very spiritual connection to the land. She said something like she wanted not only to take from the land, but to give back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I mean, there's this kind of poetic, spiritual connection to the land. It's such a dire contrast to Roland. Yeah. But she's still a badass. I mean, to survive, no matter what, no matter the kind of personality you have, you have to be a badass. I think she took a porcupine quill from her shoulder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Plus, if I remember correctly, I think she caught two porcupines. The second one was like rotting or something or infected. It had an infected body, whatever. It had the spots on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
She chose not to eat it. No, and then she chose not to eat it at first, and then she decided to eat it eventually. I forgot that. Yeah, and that was an insane, sort of really thoughtful, focused, collective decision, waiting a day and then saying, fuck it, I need this fat. And that was the other thing, is like fat is important. Oh, yeah. It's like meat is not enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You learn about like what are the different food sources there. Apparently there's like rabbit starvation is a thing because when you have too much lean meat, it doesn't nourish the body. Fat is the thing that nourishes the body, especially in cold conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And she didn't really lose, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So she got evac'd because her toe was going. Frostbite. Frostbite. 100 days. You think you can do 100 days?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know, it's funny. Cause you sometimes feeling yourself in the jungle and you're alone. And there's a, another guy, uh, Jordan, uh, Jonas Hobo Jodo. Uh, he's the season six winner. And he said that the camera made him feel less lonely. Yeah. I've heard of him from multiple channels. One of the things is he spent all of his 20s living in Siberia with the tribes out there. Herzog, happy people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And so he actually talked about that. it's one of the loneliest time of his life because when he went up there, he didn't speak Russian and he needed to learn the language. And even though you have people around you, when you don't speak their language, it feels really, really lonely. And he felt less lonely on the show because he had the camera and he felt like he could talk to the camera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There is an element when you have, in these harsh conditions, if you like record something, you feel like you're talking to another human through it, even if it's just a recording. I sometimes feel that like, Maybe because I imagine a specific person that will watch it, and I feel like I'm talking to that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You have to step up. That's one of the reasons I want a family. I think when you have kids, you have to be like, you have to be the best version of yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
How has your life changed since we last met? Speak about changing everything. So you've been, for people who don't know, pushing jungle keepers forward into uncharted territories, saving more and more and more and more rainforest. There's a lot, I could ask you about that. There's a lot of stories to be told there. It's a fight, it's a battle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a battle to protect this beautiful area of rainforest, of nature. But since we last met, you've continued to make a lot of progress. So what's the story of Jungle Keepers leading up to the moment we met and after and everything you're doing right now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Friend with snake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Me friend snake. You said some of them are sometimes aggressive, some of them are peaceful. Is this a mood thing, a personality thing, a species thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But what's the approach? So trying to, with donations, to buy out more and more of the land and then protect it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So as long as you're producing something from the land, they don't see it as a loss that the nature was destroyed permanently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I ask that people donate to Jungle Keepers. You guys are legit. That money is going to go a long way. Junglekeepers.org. If you somehow were able to raise very large, so the raindrops would make a waterfall, a very large amount of money. I don't know what that number is, maybe $10 million, $20 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
30 million, what are the different milestones along the way that could really help you on the journey of saving the rainforest?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
some guy in a james bond suit was going to come down here with microphones and and that all of a sudden the world would know that he was on this quest to protect this this incredible ecosystem and all those little aliens well that's all the important thing to remember that the the people that are cutting down the forest the loggers are also human beings their families they're they're they're basically trying to survive and they're desperate and they're doing the thing that will bring them money
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So they're just human beings at the core of it. If they have other options, if they have other options, they will probably choose to give their life to saving the community too. First and foremost, providing for their family. And after that, saving the community, helping the community flourish. And I think probably a lot of them love the rainforest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know? It's all about just providing people options. There's some dark stuff on the gold mine stuff you've talked about. You showed me parts of the rainforest where the gold mines are, and they're just kind of erasing the rainforest. Yeah. Sort of at the edges, that's when the mining happens. And it's this ugly...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
this ugly process of they're just destroying the jungle just for the surface layer of the sand or whatever that they process to collect just little bits of gold. And there's also very dark things that happen along the way as the communities around the gold mines are created. So the entirety of the moral system that emerges from that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
has things like prostitution where one third of the of the women that are drawn into that sex traffic and prostitution are minors under you know under 17 years old 13 to 17 year old there's just a lot of really really dark stuff i think that we have
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, I've read an article that said an estimated 1,200 girls between ages of 12 and 17 are forcibly drafted into child prostitution around the communities in the gold mines. At least one-third of the prostitutes in the camp are underage. Wow. The girls had ended up in the camp after receiving a tip that there were restaurants looking for waitresses and willing to pay top dollar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They jumped on a bus together and came down to the rainforest. What they found was not what they were expecting. The mining camp restaurants served food for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, it was the girls themselves who were on the menu. Literally at the end of the road and without the money to return home, the girls would soon become trapped in prostitution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It integrates with Shopify and wherever else you sell stuff and allows businesses, medium, large, to just ship stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Is there a milestone in the near future that you're working towards financially in terms of donations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So tell me about the snake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
He's so tiny. He's so tiny. People listening, there's a snake in Paul's hands right now. It's very... It's long, of course, but very skinny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And as you were saying, it reaches up to the leaves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In a state of vulnerability. Yeah. But bro, there's nothing cuter than a little puppy with a tongue. A baby ball python.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Baby king cobra. What's it take you for? Baby elephant. So what are they? They're like at a puddle and they just take it in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So one of the other fascinating life forms is other humans, but living a very different kind of life. So uncontacted tribes, what do you find most fascinating about them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What do you think they're, because you've spoken about them being dangerous. What do you think their relationship with violence is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We don't know their creation myths. So they have a very primitive existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
First of all, do you think their nature is similar to ours? And how do their values differ from ours?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's a shotgun shell here, by the way. Yeah. From the loggers. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we picked that up yesterday. Was that yesterday? That was, I don't know. I don't know. One of the things that happens here is time loses meaning in some kind of deep way that it does when you're in a big city in the United States, for example, and there's schedules and meetings and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It transforms the meaning, your experience of time, your interaction with time, the role of time, all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It also puts in perspective, like, all the busyness, all the, uh... It kind of takes the ant out of the ant colony and says, hey, you're just an ant. This is just an ant colony and there's a big world out there. Yeah, it's a chance to be grateful, to celebrate this earth of ours and the things that make it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Worth living on, including the simple things that make the individual life worth living, which is water and then food. And the rest is just details. Of course, the friendships and social interaction, that's a really big one, actually. That one I'm taking for granted because I didn't get a chance yet to really spend time alone. Hmm. And when I came here, I've gotten a chance to hang out with you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And there's a kind of camaraderie. There's a friendship there. If that's broken, that's a tough one too. I mean, you spent quite a lot of time alone in the jungle. You ever get alone out here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I'm a huge fan of logistics and supply chains and looking at that incredibly complicated network of how one package gets from point A to point B. Part of that is the theoretical computer scientist in me because when you simplify that problem and formulate it as a graph theory problem, then you can perform all kinds of optimizations on it, which takes me back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You ever just get alone out here? Just like this sense of like existential dread of like what, you know, the jungle has a way of not caring about any individual organism. It just kind of churns. It's like, it makes you realize that life is finite quite intensely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So sometimes the needs are simple. They just don't have the words to communicate them to us humans. Yeah. And is it disinterest or is it fear? Almost like they don't notice us? Or is it where the unknown aspect of it, the uncertainty, is a source of danger?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And you take all those people in their nice dresses, in those fancy restaurants, and you put them in those conditions, they're all going to want the same thing, this water. Yes. It's all the same thing. All the beautiful people. How has your view of your own mortality evolved over your interaction with the jungle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Um, that'd be fun. That'd be a good one. A lot of people say that you carry the spirit of Steve Irwin. in your heart, in the way you carry yourself in this world. I mean, that guy was full of joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, I at least agree with that comparison. Having spent time with you, there's just an eternal flame of joy and adventure too. just pulling you, uh, a dark question, but do you think you might meet the same end giving your life in some way to something you love?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, just for the listener, we're walking through the jungle late at night. So it's darkness except our headlamps on. And then all of a sudden, Paul stops. He looks in the distance. He sees two eyes. I think you thought, is that a jaguar or is it a deer? And it was moving its head like this. Like scared or maybe trying to figure it, trying to localize itself, trying to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, I hope you, like a Clint Eastwood character, just impossible to kill. I like how you squinted your eyes. On cue. Who do you think will play you in a movie?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, all right. Italian? Yeah. It's funny. Do you think of yourself as Italian or human? American?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Let's clarify. We, you mean a large fraction of the world. You know, I mentioned to you one of the biggest things I've noticed when I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States is the... How plentiful bananas and pineapples were, the fruit section, the produce section of the... Didn't have to wait in line at the grocery store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Could just eat as many bananas and pineapples and cherries and watermelon as you want. That's... Not everybody has that. No, that's true. Not everybody has that, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's the thing that I also noticed is I don't think so much about politics when I'm here. We haven't even talked about it. Don't talk about the stupid differences between humans. Nah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So there is a force within nature that's always searching for order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Trying to see around. You're doing the same to it. The two of you like moving your head. Yeah. And like deep into the jungle. Like, I don't know. It's pretty far away through the trees. You can still see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
When you have lived here and taken in the ways of the Amazon jungle, how have your views of God, you mentioned, how have your views of God changed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's the thing to actually mention. I mean, with the headlamp, you see the reflection in their eyes. It's kind of incredible to see a creature, to try to identify a creature by just the reflection from its eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, thank you for being one of the humans trying to do good in this world. And thank you for bringing me along for some adventure. And I believe more adventure awaits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosalie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Joseph Campbell. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Your definition of lucky is a complicated one. Yeah. It's a fascinating process when you see those two eyes trying to figure out what it is. And it is trying to figure out what you are in that process. Let's talk about caiman. We've seen a lot of different kinds of sizes. We've seen a baby one, a bigger one. Tell me about these 16-foot-plus apex predators of the Amazon rainforest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
to some of my favorite courses on the theory and the practice. So numerical optimization, when you're talking about nonlinear programming, and then the more theoretical stuff with convex programming. A particular kind of formulation of an optimization problem can be easy to solve or hard to solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, like intelligence and agility versus like raw power and dominance. I mean, I got to handle some smaller caiman and just the power they had, you know, you scale that up to imagine what a 16 foot, even a 10 foot, any kind of black caiman, the kind of power they deliver. Maybe can you talk to that? Yeah. The power they can generate with their tail, with their neck, with their jaw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's difficult to describe in words. There's a lot of power. And we're talking about the power of the neck. I mean, there's a lot. It can generate power all up and down the body. So probably the tail is a monster. But just the neck and, you know, not to mention the power of the bite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And the speed too, because the thing I saw and got to experience is how still and calm, at least from my amateur perspective, it seems calm, still, and then from that sort of zero to 60, you could just go wild. Just thrash it. And then there's also a decision it makes in that split second, whether as it thrashes, is it going to kind of bite you on the way or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
When I look at this world of logistics and shipping stuff from point A to point B, where there's like a million point As and a million point Bs, combinatorial madness of that, it's really exciting that there is systems that enable that all to work. Anyway, I'm glad ShipStation exists and I'm glad they're solving this tricky but extremely important problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So anything longer than you, you don't control the tail. You don't have, you have barely control. than anything really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, Mastiffs. I mean, you mentioned dinosaurs. What do you admire about black caiman? They've been... here for a very, very long time. There's something prehistoric about their appearance, about their way of being, about their presence in this jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They have this, they carry this wisdom and their power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In the simplicity of their power, they carry the wisdom. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's going to be the remaining humans versus the crocs and the cockroaches. And the cockroaches are just background noise. Yeah, they'll always be there. Sons of bitches. You know, we're talking about individual black caiman and caiman and different species of caiman, but whenever they're together and you see multiple eyes, which I've gotten to experience, it's quite a feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Go to ShipStation.com slash Lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a site that provides financial management reports, information, and news for investors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's just multiple eyes looking back at you. Of course, for you, that's immediate excitement. You immediately go towards that. You want to see it. You want to explore it. Maybe catch them, analyze what the species is, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Can you just describe that feeling when they're together and they're looking at you? So head above water, eyes reflecting the light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It included everything from getting lost in dense, unexplored wilderness with no contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more. Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest. For this mission, he founded Jungle Keepers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's humbling these giant creatures. And especially at night, like you were talking about. And for me, it's both scary and just beautiful when the head goes under. Because like underwater, it's their domain. So anything can happen. So what is it doing that its head is going under? It could be bored. It could be hungry, looking for some fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I use it for the cool little feature of it letting you add your portfolio and thereby letting you monitor it and get news about real agent things. So they have a TD Ameritrade account and mutual fund there, which I guess got switched over to Charles Schwab. So there's a really nice interface that lets you monitor that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It could be maybe wanting to come closer to you to investigate. Maybe you have some food around you. Maybe it's an old friend of yours and just wants to say hi. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That said, you know, you protect your friends and you analyze and study your friends. But sometimes friends can have a bit of a misunderstanding. And if you have a bit of a misunderstanding with a black caiman, I feel like just a bit of a misunderstanding could lead to a bone crushing situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, I think it's something about you where you become like this portal through which it's possible to see nature is not threatening, but beautiful. And so in that you kind of naturally by hanging out with you, I get to see the beauty of it. There is danger out there, but the danger is part of it. Just like there's a lot of danger in the city. There's danger in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's a lot of ways to get hurt emotionally, physically. There's a lot of ways to die in the stupidest of ways. We went on an expedition to the forest, just twisting your ankle, breaking your foot. getting a bite from a thing that gets infected. There's a lot of ways to die and get hurt in the stupidest of ways in a non-dramatic came and eating you alive kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But of course, as part of that interface, you can also see news of the crazy stuff that's going on in the markets. It gives you an insight in what the people who really have money invested in the success of companies are thinking about, where they're excited about, where they're cynical about, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They eat baby rabbits and mice. Well, in the case of apex predators, I think when people say dangerous animals... They really are talking about just the power of the animal. And the Black Camel have a lot of power. A lot of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We talked about the scales of the snake with like, they came in just the way it felt was incredible. Just the armor, the texture was so cool. I don't know, like the bottom one came in and had a certain kind of texture. And it just all feels like power, but also all feels like designed really well. It's like exploring through touch, like a World War II tank or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's the engineering that went into this thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That like... The mechanism of evolution that created a thing that could survive for such a long time. It's just incredible. This is a work of art. The defense mechanisms, the power of it, the damage it can do, how effective it is as a hunter, all of that. You can feel that just by touching it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In the water, I mean, we talked also about hippos. Those are interesting creatures from all the way across the world. Just monsters. Yeah. Hippos and rhinos. Hippos are bigger, usually, or rhinos are bigger. Rhinos. Rhinos, after elephants, is the largest white rhinos. They can be terrifying too, again, when you step into the defense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a nice lens that we should see the world, one that contrasts with a more kind of political and geopolitical lens, which I often look at, and also contrasts with the historical lens. You know, I read a lot of history books, and there, time is slowed down. The ephemeral ups and downs of every day are not as important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So for young people out there, you think you're having trouble, think about that turtle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Oh, shit. What a world we live in. So it's interesting, you mentioned black caiman and anacondas are both apex predators. So it seems like the reason they can exist in similar environments is because they feed on slightly different things. How is it possible for them to coexist? I read that anacondas can eat caiman, but not black caiman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But of course, when you're living in the moment, in the day, this week, the ups and downs of the world are extremely important. And especially if you have money invested in certain small slices of that world. So I use Yahoo Finance for monitoring that perspective on the world. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Can you actually explain how the anaconda would take down a caiman? Like, would it first use constriction and then eat it, or what's the methodology?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And you'd be like the coach on the sideline screaming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
and someone said but it's able to digest oh it's some kind of mucus oh like the mucus there's a lot oh interesting there's levels of protection from the anaconda itself but it seems like the anaconda is such a simple system as an organism like that simplicity taking a scale it could just do the can swallow a caiman digested slowly i know but my question was how how on earth is it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It works for individuals, it works for couples. I remember seeing numbers, crazy numbers, like 350 million messages, chat, phone, video sessions. Over 35,000 licensed therapists. over 4.4 million people that got help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So what does it feel like being crushed, choked by an anaconda?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Do something. But yeah, but there's the specialization of a lifetime of doing damage to the world and using those muscles. It just makes you that much more powerful than most humans because humans, I guess, have more brain, so they get lazy. They start puzzle solving versus using the biceps directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, I mean like you and I were like half dead running up a mountain. Meanwhile, there's a grandma just like walking and she's been walking that road and she's just built different. With her alpaca on her shoulders. With a baby. They're just built different when you apply your body in a physical way your whole life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's exactly what I feel like when you give him a hug. This is definitely a chimp of some sort. How does that, just the constriction of the anaconda, just the feeling of that, are they doing that based on instinct or is there some brain stuff going on? Like, is this just like a basic procedure that they're doing and they just really don't give a damn? They're not like thinking, oh, Paul,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Talking about a network. So I was just talking about the logistics of shipping stuff from A to B. Here's the logistics of the human psyche. The collective intelligence and the collective psyche of the human species seeking to explore the shadow of the individual minds. But in so doing, exploring the collective shadow of our species. It'd be cool to visualize all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This is this kind of species. It would taste good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Now here's the question. If the mosquito is stupid and you can't catch it, what does that make you? Fuck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You actually mentioned to me, just on the topic of anacondas, that you've been participating in a lot of scientific work on the topic. So really, in everything you've been doing here, you are celebrating the animals, you're respecting the animals, you're protecting the animals, but you're also excited about studying the animals and their environment. So you're actually a co-author on a paper
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
on a couple of papers, but one of them is on anacondas and studying green anaconda hunting patterns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So in the shallow stream, it moves not just in the water, but in the sand. Yeah. So it also likes to borrow a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Anyway, we're just individuals. We don't have a way to take the perspective of the species. We only have our own mind, our own conscious mind and the subjective view that it provides of the world. So for that subjective view, It's good to clean the lens, so to speak, every once in a while, and that's what I think talk therapy does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So by doing these kinds of studies, you figure out how they move about the world, what motivates them in terms of when they hunt, where they hide in the world, as the size of the anaconda change. So all of that, those are scientific studies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
By the way, the rocket ships are shaped that way for efficiency purposes, not because they wanted to make it look like a penis. Speaking of which, I've ran across a lot of penis trees while exploring. Have you? And make me very... I know it's not just a figment of my imagination. I'm pretty sure they're real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And BetterHelp is super easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere, so you should definitely try it at betterhelp.com slash lex, and if you go there, you'll save it in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
In fact, you explained it to me and they make me very uncomfortable because there's just a lot of penises hanging off of a tree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I don't know what the purpose is. I don't know who they're supposed to attract, but it certainly makes...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I haven't even seen them. There was a time where I almost fell and to catch my balance, I had to grab one of the penises of the penis tree and unforgettable. Anaconda, the biggest, baddest anaconda in the Amazon versus the biggest, baddest black caiman. Because you mentioned they're like, there's a race. If there's a fight, this is UFC and Cage who wins underwater.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This is the biggest and the baddest. The biggest and the baddest. that you can imagine given all the studies you've done of the two animals, species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
How fast is the construction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So the black caiman would bite somewhere close to the head and just try to hold on and thrash?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So like a giant anaconda and a giant black caiman, they could probably even coexist in the same environment, just knowing, using the wisdom to avoid the fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
As I was deep in nature, disconnected completely from the world, and the sounds of the urban world, no machinery, no people, nothing, just nature. You can hear water, you can hear the wind, you can hear the animals, the insects, the little and the big, and just that, no people. So, as I was in that, I got a chance to really think about the productive world, let's say, the world of companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They're up here. I haven't seen it. And Jimmy has been living there his whole life. His whole life. There's pumas in the mountains?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think you're saying pumas have a curiosity, have a way about them where they, like, explore, like, follow people. Like, just to kind of figure out, like, just that curiosity, as opposed to causing harm or hunting and that kind of stuff. Like, what is this about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They're gathering information. I wonder how complex and sophisticated their world model is. Like how they're integrating all the information about the environment, like where all the different trees are, where all the different nests of the different insects are, what the different creatures are by size, all that kind of stuff. I'm sure they don't have enough,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
you know, storage up there to like keep all that, but they probably keep the important stuff. You know, so sort of integrate the experiences they have into like what is dangerous, what is tasty, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
By the way, we're walking just exactly the same area, also exact same time. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
One of the things you do when you turn off the headlamp, complete darkness all around you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And it is indeed, out of the many things that make me happy, it is one of the things that makes me really happy, and that is to build, to create stuff in this world that helps people, whether that is as an individual programmer or on a larger scale by starting a company. All of that makes me truly happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Except for the times over the last few days when we walked on through jungle without a trail. And that's just a different experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Every step is really hard work. Every step is a puzzle. Every step is a full possibility of hurting yourself in a multitude of ways. You're just a wasp nest under a leaf, a hole under a leaf on the ground where if you step in it, you're going to break a knee, ankle, leg, and going to not be able to move for a long time. There's all kinds of ants that can hurt you a little or can hurt you a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Bullet ants. There's snakes and spiders. Oh, yeah. My favorite that I've gotten to know intimately is different plants with different defensive mechanisms, one of which is just spikes. So sharp. I don't know if you brought it, but there's... I didn't bring it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Where's my club? There's an epic club with the spikes, but there's so many trees that have spikes on them. Sometimes they're obvious spikes, sometimes less than obvious spikes. And, you know, it could be just an innocent, as you take a step through a dense jungle, it could be an innocent placing of a hand on that tree that could just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
completely transform your experience, your life, by penetrating your hand with like 20, 30, 40, 50 spikes. And just changing everything. That's just a completely different experience than going on a trail where you're an observer of the jungle versus the participant of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And somehow in the jungle, full of gratitude to be able to exist on this beautiful earth, I also was full of gratitude for all the cool things that humans have built. But running a company is tricky, and that's what NetSuite helps with. In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. You can take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, the mammal paper is looking at the diversity of life in this one region of the Amazon. Can you talk more about that paper? Mammal diversity along the Les Piedras River.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
My general sort of amateur experience of the species I've encountered here is like, this should not exist. Whatever this is, this is not real. This is CGI. Like what? Just the colors, the weirdness. I mean, there's, I think I called it the Paris Hilton caterpillar because it's like furry. It looks like one of those little- Sounds like Paris Hilton's dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's like really furry and it's transparent and sort of, it's transparent. All you see is this white, beautiful fur and it's just like this caterpillar. It doesn't look real. Do you think there are species- Like how many species have we not discovered? And is there a species that are like extremely badass that we haven't discovered yet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And some of them could be extremely effective predators in a niche environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep, and its new and amazing Pod 4 Ultra. One of the things when I was in the jungle, I mean, there's a few creature comforts that are taken away when you're out in nature, especially when you're deep out in nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And that's where a lot of the monkeys are. That's where there's just a lot of dynamic life up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Sex and violence, or implied violence, or the threat of violence. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So just speaking of screaming, macaws are like these beautiful creatures. They're lifelong partners. They stick together. Monogamous. They're monogamous, so you see two of them together. But when they communicate, their love language seems to be very loud screaming. Yeah. What do you learn about relationships from a cause? That it can be loud and rough and still be loving. And still be loving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But is that interesting to you that there's like monogamy in some species that they're lifelong partners and then there's like total lack of monogamy in other species?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
If every jungle creature was the same size, Oh boy. who would be the new apex predator, the new alpha at the top of the food chain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And of course, one of the things you remember is the ability to have a bed to go to that's not full of insects and all that kind of stuff, but a bed that can be cool. Man, it would be amazing to get the A-sleep bed out. into the middle of the jungle, because it's hot out there. And to be able to cool down, which I do, with Eight Sleep would be a really cool experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah. Well, let's go bullet ant versus black caiman. Same size.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, insects have just a tremendous amount of, like, strength. I don't know how they generate what the geometry of that is. The natural world can't create that same kind of power in the bigger thing, it seems like. It seems like. It seems like ants and... like just these tiny creatures are the ones that are able to have that much strength. I don't know how that works, what the physics of that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org. This trip for me was life-changing. It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I'm fortunate to exist in with all of you. So I'm glad I went and I'm glad I made it out alive. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It doesn't make any sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, there might be a lot of the like... biophysics limits, you know. Fascinating stuff. Just like the interplay between biology, chemistry, and physics of like a life form. Because like this thing, there's a lot involved in creating a single living organism that could survive in this world. And bigger... Being big is not always good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Being a big creature, for many reasons, like you were saying, the big creature seems to be going extinct for many reasons. But in the human world, it's because they seem to be of higher value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And we humans are social beings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Anyway, they've upgraded from Pod 3 to Pod 4. So Pod 4 does 2x the cooling power. And they also added a super cool thing called Pod 4 Ultra, which has an extra base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. that can control the positioning of the bed so it can elevate you, say, to like a reading position.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, it's a family thing. You mentioned piranhas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What do you think, you know, they're a source of a lot of fear from people. What do you find beautiful and fascinating about these creatures? They're also kind of social, or at least they hunt and operate in groups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, so fish is a food source for so many creatures in the jungle. So they're primarily a food source. But piranhas are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Bite off a little bit and then makes you vulnerable. And then that vulnerability is exploited by some other species. And then that's it. That's the end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So if you kill an animal, you want to use it to its fullest by using it as a food source, by cooking it, by eating every part of it, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's a really, really cool idea on many fronts, including like you have this integrated system that does the sensing of the sleep time and the sleep phase and the HRV and heart rate and all that kind of stuff. It does the cooling of both sides of the bed separately, and now we can control the positioning of the bed. It's crazy. I really love it when products keep rapidly evolving, improving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, humans using them for sustenance, there's a collaboration there. That's something also that I've seen in the jungle, that there's creatures using each other, and it's like a dance of either mutually using each other, or it's parasitic, or symbiotic, It's interesting. There's a medicinal plant you grabbed that was full of ants that were trying to murder you by biting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They were defending the plant that they were using for whatever purpose. There's a clear dance there of the ants using the plant and the plant existing there for... other applications and other use for humans. And there's that kind of circle of life happening, but the ants were a defense. So the, the plant didn't have its own defense mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The ants, the army of ants was there to protect the plant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, surprisingly painful. Because they're small. There's nothing like... Luckily, I've not been bitten by a bullet ant yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's really exciting to me. Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I used it in just a few minutes to create an online store, lexfreeman.com slash store, to sell a few shirts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
a source of a lot of existential confusion for me is ants and the intelligence of different creatures in the forest. There's these giant colonies, there's just giant systems, but even just looking at a single colony of ants, them collaborating, leafcutter ants, is an incredible system. So individually, the ants seem kind of dumb and simplistic, but taken together, there is a vast intelligence
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's able to be robust and resilient in any kind of conditions. It's able to figure out a new environment. It's able to be resilient to any kinds of attacks and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's their part. Oh, that everybody plays a part in the entirety of the nature mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We should mention that there's this one source of light and we're shrouded in darkness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It can be a small store, it can be a gigantic store, and it all is super easy, and they have a lot of third-party apps that are integrated seamlessly in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, the diversity of organisms here. is the biggest celebration of life. That is at the core of what makes Earth a really special thing. That said, you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up here. All right, you brought a machete to this fight. Luckily, the table is long enough. I can't reach. You can't reach me. See, to you, Earth is truly special. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
For example, including on-demand printing, so I can just add a shirt there, and then you have a bunch of companies that do on-demand printing that print the shirt and ship the shirt and take care of the fulfillment and all that kind of stuff, and all of it is seamlessly integrated, super easy to monitor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You don't think there's other Earths out there, millions of other Earths in our galaxy. When you look up, you know, we're sitting in the Amazon River. Okay. At dark, the storm rolled over. Yeah. And you started counting the stars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
One, two. And that was, once you can count the stars, that was a sign that the storm will actually pass. Eventually it will pass. And that's what you were doing. Three, four, five. And it's going to pass. You're not going to have to sit in that river for like all night. So just a couple hours to keep yourself warm. Okay. Each of those stars, there's Earth-like planets around them. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Why do you think there's not alien civilizations there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Once again, there's a kind of theme in this discussion of networks, of networks of human buying and selling, shipping, communicating, all of that. And I'm just so glad that people have created...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We are the most intelligent animal. So one, I agree with you. There's some degree to which when you imagine aliens, you forget for a moment how special and important life is here on Earth. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
through curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence, what is consciousness, what is exactly the thing that makes life on Earth special. Another way of doing that, and I see the jungle in that same way, is basically treating the animals all around us, the life forms all around us, as kinds of aliens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
systems, products, services, many of which are available online to connect humans together and let humans do their human things and help them flourish and enjoy life in all the ways that life can be enjoyed in the 21st century. Thank you to Shopify and thank you for all the sponsors of this podcast that are helping create systems of that nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That's a humbling way, that's an intellectual humility with which to approach the study of like, what the hell is going on here? This is truly incredible. Are the animals we've met over the last few days conscious? What is the nature of their intelligence? What is the nature of their consciousness? What motivates them? Are they individual creatures or are they actually part of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
large system and how large is the system? Is Earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips of that system? Or are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the emerging complexity of the system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So I think thinking about aliens is a necessary, I like my Tom with a little drop of poison from Tom Waits, is a necessary perturbation of the system of our thinking To sort of say, hey, we don't know what the fuck's going on around here. Sure. And aliens is a nice way to say, okay, the mystery all around us is immense. Because to me, likely, aliens are living among us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Not in a trivial sense, little green men, but the force that created life. I think permeates the entirety of the universe, that there is a force that's creative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You believe that? Not like 100%, but there's a good percentage. I don't understand how it's possible for there not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout just our galaxy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think there's no Bigfoot, there's no trivial manifestations of aliens. I think if they're here, they're here in ways that are not comprehensible by humans because they're far more advanced than humans are. They're far more advanced than any life forms on Earth. So even if it's just their probes, we cannot just even comprehend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas, for example. That ideas could be aliens. Feelings could be aliens. Consciousness itself could be aliens. So we can't restrict our understanding of what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
operates via natural selection on this particular planet it could be much much much more sophisticated it could be in the space of computation for example as we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence it could be operating on some other level that we can't even imagine
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand. We barely understand quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a way we use to make very accurate predictions, but to understand why It's operating that way. We don't. And there's so many gigantic, powerful, cosmic entities out there that we detect. Sometimes can't detect dark matter, dark energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But it's out there. We know it exists. but we can't explain why and what the fuck it is. We give it names, black holes and dark energy and dark matter, but those are all names for things that mathematical equations predict, but we don't understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosalie. Where are we right now, Paul? Lex, we are in the middle of nowhere. It's the Amazon jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
All of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now, and maybe for a long time, going to be impossible for humans to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species are trying to communicate with us humans or with other life forms and are trying to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand. Like, let's create a thing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, so it is true that we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is like one of the most beautiful things Earth has ever created. And in that little organism is encapsulated the entire history of Earth. And it's beautiful. So both things are true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create. And we should become... multi-planetary species as a backup for that purpose. But also remember that this place is really, really special and probably, if not difficult, probably impossible to recreate elsewhere. And by the way, there's something incredibly powerful about a skull.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know, not a direct ancestry, but there's a, it's like a, you know, like you're looking at a puddle at a reflection. A little blurry, but it's still there. It's still there. And like the roots of who we are is still there. And it's all kind of incredible. Do you ever think of the tree of life? Just kind of like where we came from? Yeah. The jungle is ephemeral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a system that just keeps forgetting because it's just churning and churning and churning and churning. It has, in some ways, no history. But to create the jungle, to create life on Earth, there's a deep history of lots of death, sex and death. A festival of sex and death. Life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
The male competition continues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's vegetation, there's insects, there's all kinds of creatures. A million heartbeats, a million eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So at the sphere, the postcard from Earth, I mean, it's a celebration of Earth. Yeah. In all forms. And one of the critical big creatures in that film is an elephant. And it steps over the audience and the whole sphere reverberates that power. I mean, some of it is size. Yeah. Some of it is like, how did Earth create this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It is a weird looking creature, but we take it for granted because we've accepted that this Earth can't create this kind of thing, but it is weird, beautifully weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah. And it's cool to hear that, you know, with the crushing and the pride of the young elephant, that there's a complexity of behavior. It's just like with humans. I mean, you know. Yeah, it's not always pretty. That's the thing, man. Humans are capable of good and evil. And sometimes we attach these words. I love that there's just... It's an orchestra of different sounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
All right. Good luck to you, buddy. Good hunting. You know, humans are capable... Evil things and beautiful things and I wonder if animals are the same You think there's just different personalities and different life trajectories for animals like as they develop in their understanding of social interaction of Survival of maybe even primitive concepts of right and wrong within the social system
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Do you think there is a lot of diversity in personalities and behavior? Just like different people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What are all the creatures right now, if they wanted to, could cause us harm?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So that regulation mechanisms from that emerges a kind of moral system under which they operate. What's right and wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, the value of child life is different from species to species. Some of them hold the sacred, some of them not at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Just to zoom out into the ridiculous questions, as we were talking about aliens, there's a lot of people trying to understand, trying to study the origin of life. Oh, I love this. First of all, what do you think is life versus non-life? Like when you look at like ants or even like the simplest of organisms, we saw a frog in a stream yesterday. That was like a leaf frog.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It was like as flat as a sheet of paper. And it does a lot of weird things. And it found a way to exist in this world. But that's a single living organisms with a bunch of components to it. But there's a life form that exists in this world. What is the difference between that and a rock? What is the essence of that life? This might be an unanswerable question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There's probably a chemistry, physics, biology way of answering that. What to you is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I see this so many in very simple mathematical models, like something called Game of Life, their cellular automata. You could see from simple rules and simple objects, when they're interacting together, as you grow that system, complex objects arise. Like that emergence of complexity is not understood by science, by mathematics at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And it seems like from primordial soups, you can get a lot of cool shit. And the force of getting from soup to like two humans on microphones. Yeah. not understood and it seems to be a thing that happens on Earth. I tend to think that it's a thing that happens everywhere in the universe and there's some deep force that's pushing this along in some way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
That there's something we, I don't want to sort of simplify it, but there is something that creates complexity out of simplicity that we don't quite understand. And that's the thing that created the first organism, living organism on earth. That like leap from no life to life on earth, that's a weird one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And the bacteria stuck around for a long time. A billion, two billion years. It's just very, very long. Just bacteria. Just bacteria. But a lot of them. A lot of them. There's probably a lot of innovation, a lot of murder, a lot of interaction. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, there's, there's a bit, a few big leaps along the history of life on earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You know, the predator prey dynamic, that was a really cool innovation. It's almost like innovations like featured on iPhone. It's like, it's nice. Like a predator prey, uh, eukaryotes. So complex multicellular organisms, uh, emerging from the water to land. That was weird. That was an interesting innovation. Whatever led to humans, there's a lot of interesting stuff there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Not to give any spoilers, but Postcard from Earth, Darren Aronofsky's film, the idea there is there's probes that are sent out from Earth to all these other planets. And each probe contains two humans, a man and a woman. And those two humans are in love. So think of a couple in love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They're sent there with all the information, basically a leaf that holds the information of what it takes to create life on other planets, to recreate on Earth and other planets. And the two humans hold all the information together. for the things that make life on earth special, especially in human civilization is love, consciousness, the, the, the social connection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So all that information is sent in the probe and the postcard from earth is, uh, those humans waking up, remembering all the information that is earth, that more like a celebration of, all the things that make Earth magical throughout its history, all the diversity of organisms, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You're loading all that in to create life on that new planet, which is something I think alien civilizations are doing. They're sending probes all throughout the galaxy, and they just haven't arrived yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Among many things, you're also an artist who's trying to convert the thing that is nature into a thing that we humans can understand. The complexity, the beauty of it. That's what Darren Aronofsky tried to do with those couple of films. That's something that I hope you do. Actually, in the medium of film, too. That would be very interesting. And you do that in the medium of books, currently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
How much do you think we understand about the history of life on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
We got ShipStation for fulfillment, Yahoo Finance for investors, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, 8sleeve for naps, and Shopify for selling stuff on the internet. Choose wise, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, I tend to believe that we mostly don't understand anything, but there is an optimism in continuously figuring out the puzzle. Sure. We offline talked about the Graham Hancock, Flynn Dibble debate on Rogan. I like debates personally. So Flynn Dibble represents mainstream archaeology. And I actually like the whole...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
science, the whole field of archaeology, you're trying to figure out history with so little information. You're trying to put together this puzzle when you have so little. And you're desperately clinging on to little clues. And from those clues, using the simple possible explanation to understand. And now with modern technology, as Flint was trying to express,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
that you can use large amounts of data that's like imperfect, but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations. There are different practices from the little details of what kind of things they eat, how they interact with each other, what kind of art they create to when they existed, what are the timeframes, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding. But still, the error bars are large in terms of what really happened. And that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about like lost civilizations, which I like also because it gives you have a kind of humility about maybe there's giant things we don't know about or we got completely wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And that's always good to like remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I mean, there's methods of trying to figure that out, but really, again, the error bars are so large that it's almost like we're trying to create a narrative that makes sense for us. You know, that I'm 10% Neanderthal, therefore I can bench press this much, and therefore my aggressive tendencies have an explanation, when in reality there's so much diversity of personalities that they far overshadow
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
But there is, each of those animals, like you described, have a kind of radius of defense. So if you accidentally step into its home, into that radius, it can cause harm. Or make them feel threatened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Don't hit me again. Don't choke me out again. Yeah, man. One of the things you and I talk a lot about is different explorers. Yeah. Who do you think is... I'm just throwing ridiculous questions one after the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Well, let me actually push back. You have that explore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
There is definitely a thing in you, just me having observed you behave in the jungle and in the world, you're pulled towards exploration, towards adventure, towards the possibility of discovering something beautiful, including like a small little creature or like a whole new part of the rainforest, a part of the world that is like, holy shit, this is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I think that's the same kind of imperative. So maybe not going out to the stars, but like- Like, I could see you doing exactly the same thing. So he disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find an ancient lost city, which he and other people believed existed in the Amazon rainforest. So there's that pull. Like, I'm going to go into there with shitty equipment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
with the possibility of finding something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Can you explain what the purpose of the machete in this situation is? What is a machete? How does it work? How does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You cut a fish head off with a machete by like, it was swimming. And then you basically, you know, macheted the water. And the other fascinating thing about that fish without its head, it kept moving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It was just using, I guess, its nervous system to swim beautifully. I mean, there's so many questions there about how nature works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And he was delicious. Yeah. And I'm grateful for his existence and for his role and for my existence on this planet, this brief existence, that I was able to enjoy that delicious, delicious fish. So the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle. This is vines, by the way. This is rope-like things that are extremely strong. And they go all kinds of directions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
They go horizontal and all of this. I don't even... We have a tree right above us. That makes no sense. There's like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it. It just makes no sense. It feels like sometimes trees come from the... uh, from the sky. Sometimes they come from the ground.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
I don't, I don't really quite understand the, how that works because there's new trees that grow on old trees and the old trees rot away and the new trees come up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So, you know, back to Percy Fawcett and exploration. What do you think it was like for him back then, 100 years ago? Goddamn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So that moment of stasis that is life is going to end abruptly when you interact with one of those. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
If you're able to tune into the, that frequency, I feel like you're, you and JJ are able to tune to the, to the frequency of the jungle that is a provider, not a destroyer of human life, right? Yeah. Like, I think to be collaborated with, not fought against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
This seemingly... Can I just pause at how incredibly beautiful it is that you could just reach to your right and grab a piece of the jungle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
No, like different world. Different value system. Different value system. Different relationship with violence and life and death, I think. We value life more. We value... We resist violence more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And they celebrated it too. They celebrated it. And direct violence too, like taking that machete and murdering me. Or if I got to the machete first, me murdering you. Not a chance, bitch. And then I would put it on Instagram and show off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Meanwhile, I emerge from the jungle of blood around me with a machete and I take over your Instagram account. He's very humble. He doesn't want to hear about the love. All right. So what do you think makes a great explorer? Whether it's Percy Fawcett, Richard Evan Schultes. By the way, say who Richard Evan Schultes is. He's a biologist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So that's another lens through which to be an explorer is to study the... the biology, the immense diversity of biological life all around us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Like we're going through the dense jungle yesterday. Yeah. And you slide down the hill, your foot slips, you slide down, and then you find yourself staring a couple feet away from a Bushmaster snake. What are you doing? You're, for people who somehow don't know, are somebody who loves, admires snakes, who has met thousands of snakes, has worked with them, respects them, celebrates them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Yeah, he wrote The Plants of the Gods, Their Sacred Healing and the Hallucinogenic Powers. That is interesting. You mentioned how to discover that. How do you find those incredible plants, those incredible things? things that can warp your mind in all kinds of ways. Of course, physically heal, but also take you on a mental journey. That's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So you don't think trial and error is possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What do you think exists in the spirit world that could be found by taking that journey?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
It's a really good way of looking at it. It's a big house, and you get to open doors that you've never had before and discover what rumors are there inside you. You ever think about that, like that there's parts of yourself you haven't discovered yet, or maybe you've been suppressing? How much are you exploring the shadow? Oh, boy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
So say you, me, Carl Jung, and Jordan Peterson are in a deserted island together. Fuck, I didn't even make my bed today. There's no bed in an island.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
What would you do with a Bushmaster snake?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You're grounded. Things are simpler. You're back inside the video game. What are the chances you think we're actually living in a video game?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
No, there's a main player. Usually that's not going to be God. God is the thing that creates the video game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
And there's somebody that's our NPCs. Like, I'm an NPC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
Jesus Christ. Yeah, you created me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God
You forget what fundamentally matters in life. What is the source of meaning in a human life? Uh, If you talk about such subjects, nevertheless, you could for a time stroll in the big philosophical questions. And if you do it for short enough a time, you won't forget about the things that matter. That there is human suffering, that there is real human joy. That is real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The following is a conversation with Craig Jones, martial artist, world traveler, and one of the funniest people in the sport of submission grappling. While he does make fun of himself a lot, he is legitimately one of the greatest submission grapplers in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I train with many of them regularly and consider many of them friends, including Craig, Gordon, and of course, John Donaher, who I will talk to many, many more times on this podcast. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The Patriot defense system is incredible. It's an incredible piece of technology. That's from the United States. It's expensive, but it's incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, it's human nature as well. It's not just Kyiv. It's Kharkiv. It's even Donbass, Kherson. People get accustomed to war quickly because it's impossible to suffer for long periods of time. So you adjust and you appreciate the things you still have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
We got Asleep for naps, Element for hydration, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business stuff, Shopify for selling stuff online, and ExpressVPN for privacy on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me. If you want to give feedback, go to lexfriedman.com slash survey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And it is now a minefield like a lot of parts of Ukraine. That's one of the dark, terrifying aspects of wars. How many mines are left? Even when the war ends for decades after there's mines everywhere because demining is extremely difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Why do you think you were able to get to Chernobyl? Why don't you think the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian soldiers don't see you as a threat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So your connection was actually Putin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
If you want to submit questions or videos or call-ins for me to answer on the podcast, go to lexfriedman.com slash AMA. And there's a bunch of other ways at lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And underneath the veil of nonstop sexualized Aussie humor and incessant online trolling, he is truly a kind-hearted human being who's trying to do good in the world. Sometimes, he does so through a bit of controversy and chaos, like with the new CGI tournament that has over $2 million in prize money, and it's coming up this Friday and Saturday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Artillery is terrifying because they're just shelling. And the destructive power of artillery is insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod four ultra. It is a pretty interesting mystery of what's going on in the brain while we sleep, because it's not like the thing shuts off. It's actually a pretty active and dynamic process. It's also humbling. that we need sleep. It is a little death. It is a thing like food that our body requires, and that to me is humbling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, they have to, right? They have to be in good spirit. You have to be joking and laughing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
They're probably still telling stories of that crazy Australian-American that rolled in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, it's a very creative marketing campaign. Very dangerous one. I don't think Coke or Pepsi are going to do that one. So it's very innovative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's another reminder that we're mortal, another reminder that we're merely human, that we're merely a biological organism. In fact, it's a reminder that not just our organism, our body, but the entirety of human civilization is fragile. I've been studying a lot about both ancient civilizations and the modern civilizations that were driven by ideologies, especially the communist ideologies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So I went to a lot of the same places as well, including Hursan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
How did that experience change you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
the soldiers are using their own funds to buy equipment, whether it's bullets, whether it's guns, whether it's armor. Is that still what you saw?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, there's Telegram groups on both sides, and it's basically, some of it is propaganda, some of it is psychological warfare, some of it is just the human nature of being like, of increasing your own morale and the morale of the people around you by showing off successfully killing other human beings, which are made other in war. And the nature of this war has evolved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I'll probably do a few videos on those, certainly a few podcasts, just thinking deeply about the ideas that drive humanity. Anyway, all of these things I dream and think about when I'm laying on the extremely comfortable Eight Sleep bed that controls the temperature and boy, is it needed on these hot Texas summer nights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So drones have become more and more prevalent. They're consumer-level cheap drones. Can you speak to that? Have you seen the use of FBV drones?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So it's a terrifying tool of war and tool of psychological war and used by both sides increasingly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Currently, they're all, as far as I know, all human controlled, so FPV. But to me, increasingly terrifying notion is of them becoming autonomous. It's the best way to defend against a drone that's FPV controlled is for AI to be controlling that drone. Just have swarms of drones that are $500 controlled by AI systems. And that's a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Terrifying possibility that the future of warfare is essentially swarms of drones on both sides, and then maybe swarms of drones say, between U.S. and China over Taiwan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Those are pre-programmed. So the low-level control, flight control of those is done autonomously, but there's an interface for doing the choreography that's hard-coded in. Yeah. Adding increasing levels of intelligence to a drone where you can detect another drone, follow it, and defend yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
In terms of the military on both sides of the Ukraine war, that's a technology that's like the most wanted technology is drone defense. Like how are you defending those drones on both sides? And anybody that comes up with an autonomous drone technology. is going to help whichever side uses that technology to gain a military advantage. And so there's a huge incentive to build that technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Go to eightsleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. It is one of the most delicious things I consume in a day on days like this. So yesterday I had a really hard training session in jujitsu. I did, I don't know, 10, 11 rounds maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But then, of course, once both sides start using that technology, then there's swarms of autonomous drones who don't give a shit about humans just killing everything in sight on both sides. And that's terrifying. There's civilian deaths that are possible that are terrifying, especially when you look 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And they can wait for a very, very long time. And as far as I know, even politicians, like you're in danger everywhere in Ukraine. So if you want to do a public speaking thing and doing it outside, you're in danger. Because it's very difficult to detect those drones. It could be anywhere. So it's a terrifying...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did they, when you talked to the soldiers there, did they have a hope or a vision how the war will end?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
When I was there, there's a kind of optimism that they would be victorious, like definitively. And so is there still that optimism? And also, are they ready for a prolonged war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And it's just all the water from my body is gone because I usually don't drink water when I'm training. Not for any particular reason, but just because I don't want to take a break. I really want to go to a place where I'm exhausted. And so, once I'm done with training, The level of deliciousness that a cold water with a watermelon salt powder from Element is difficult to describe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did they comment on U.S. politics, whether they hoped for Trump or for, in that situation, Biden, now Harris, to win the presidential election?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did you lie to people and say you were close to the president so they can be nice to you? Like so they can convince you to continue the funding?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, martial arts, there's like a code and there's a respect, a mutual respect. Even if you don't know anything about the other person, if you both have done martial arts. I mean, there's similar things with judo, with jiu-jitsu, with grappling, all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
That's gangster. That's great. One of the things I love about Nogi Jiu-Jitsu is you don't see rank. So on a small scale, there's no hierarchy that emerges when you have the different color belts. Everybody's kind of the same. It's nice. You get to see the skill. The skill speaks, but there's just a mutual respect and whatever. You can quickly find out who...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I actually wonder if I would be able to figure out the rank of a person. Can you usually figure out how long a person's been doing jiu-jitsu?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Oh, it's like in the jungle whenever there's like an insect that's red that is like really flamboyant looking, that means they're dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Okay. So, yeah, you mentioned the project. Can you talk about that? I saw there's a preview that you showed. Craig Jones gone walkabout. Gone walkabout, yeah. And so you showed a preview in Indonesia where you're both kind of celebrating and maybe poking a bit of fun at Hicks and Gracie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's really, really refreshing. And I found that if I don't consume electrolytes after training like that, I start getting a headache, I just start feeling off. And so replenishing the electrolyze after is really important. And of course, I also make sure I drink element beforehand as well. But yeah, all that is important to support the body when you're doing those difficult training sessions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, you should keep it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's good to know that you see yourself as the John Travolta of jiu-jitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, there's a lot of similarities between the two of you. So you mentioned Anthony Bourdain. What do you like about the guy? What do you find inspiring and instructive about the way he was able to, as you said, scratch beneath the surface of a place?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, that's actually a skill that you're incredibly good at. You make fun of a lot of people, but there's something. Maybe there's an underlying respect. Maybe it's the accent. I don't know what it is. There's a love underneath your trolling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Speaking of which, let's talk about CJI. You're putting on the CGI tournament. It's in about a week. Same weekend as ADCC. $3 million budget, two divisions, two super fights. Winner of each division gets $1 million. Everyone gets $10,000. How do you even say that? Plus one. 10,000 plus one, yeah. Plus one. Just to compete. So it's August 16th and 17th. Everybody should get tickets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And it is one of the things that allows me to escape whatever the turmoil that's going on in my mind. And the community, the art of it, I love it all. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Same weekend as ADCC, which is August 17th. Okay, so what's the mission of what you're doing there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, it's good to know that the anonymous funder appreciates you for who you are, Craig Jones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I think in this episode, Craig brings up doing couples therapy with Gordon. You know, I'm a big fan of those guys, training with them and just the way they approach this really complicated art and their ability to achieve sort of world-class outcomes and consistently innovate, I'll innovate everybody else. It's so fascinating to watch. So part of me hates that there's shit talking going on online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you're saying, allegedly, there were some under-the-table payments by ADCC. Do you have secret documents proving this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I understand it's part of the sport, but I do hope that there is, at least amongst the fans, more celebration of the athletes involved. And I'm now still working through the footage of the Olympics for judo and wrestling. It's just, I love all the sort of one-on-one combat sports and all of the Olympics in general and all sports, man. I love football and basketball.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Can you speak to that? How are you preparing for this moment of violence on a Saturday night with Gabby Garcia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Has it added some complexity to the picture that there's some sexual tension in the room whenever the two of you are together?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Maybe I'm being romantic, but it seems like you've slowly started to fall in love with each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's inspiring for many young men that follow you and look up to you. Just the romantic journey that you've been on is truly inspiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Steve Curry's performance at this Olympics is just like legendary. You can't look away. That guy was just on fire. I love it when an athlete steps up and it's their day. And it's just perfection. Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Those are awesome. You're calling it the alley. That's really, really interesting. So it's like in a pit, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yes, the same weekend as the prestigious ADCC tournament. The goal of CGI tournament is to grow the sport, so you'll be able to watch it for free online, live on YouTube, and other places. All ticket profits go to charity, mainly to cancer research. So I encourage you to support the mission of this tournament by buying tickets and going to see the event in person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It is the machine within the machine of a business that provides a common language where the different modules of the business can communicate. all the messy stuff. It really was fascinating to watch the rate of progress that XAI is doing and Tesla is doing on building up their compute center.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What about the jiu-jitsu on a slant? You've triangled somebody on a slant. Is there some interesting aspects about the actual detailed techniques of how to be effective using a slant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The wrong way. I actually have no idea why people take advice from you, but they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, I think a million dollars is a lot of money, but the opportunity here, because it's open and freely accessible by everyone, is to put on a show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's fascinating to see the process of a business solving the puzzles and doing so rapidly and figuring out how to construct a collection of humans that is able to develop processes, simplify them, optimize them, and all of that together efficiently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. And that's not for charity. That's for your personal bank account. The OnlyFans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, Tap Cancer Isle is great and all the charities that the athletes have been selecting are great. What's been the hardest? You are wearing a suit, so you figured out how to do that. The tie was difficult, for sure. The tie was difficult, but you figured it out, and congratulations on that. But you've never run a tournament. No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Not in a competitive environment for OnlyFans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
without any kind of bottlenecks, or if there's bottlenecks, you remove the bottlenecks and doing so at a rapid rate and iterate, iterate, iterate, all of that. That's the difference between successful businesses and not, or not just successful, but revolutionary businesses. It truly is beautiful to watch. The art of cutting through the bullshit of bureaucracy really is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What's been, Reddit question, what's been the most surprising people who turned down your invite?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And yeah, you should have the right tools for the job, and NetSuite is good. And NetSuite is trusted by 37,000 companies that have upgraded to it. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Was there ever any chance that Gordon Ryan would enter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You reversed him from side control?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Okay. So that could be like an instructional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But the right place, right time though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Shopify is an exemplary sort of manifestation of capitalism, the good side of capitalism. I've been working on a video on communism, the history of communism. because a lot of people have been throwing around the word communism and fascism and all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you think you've gotten it in his head? Yes. How do you think you would do if you were to face him for the said 500,000? For the 500? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You still think you got it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
All right, so you're going to make a statement with Gabby that it'll be a match she remembers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So unlike with Miragali, if you win, you're not going to ride off to the sunset with Gabby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you think you can actually beat Nicholas Miragali?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You're a man of Reddit because they suggested that you should consider ketamine therapy sessions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
With all due respect, Greg, I can't imagine a therapist sitting down with you. That would be a terrifying question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Is this the medical Bali, or what did you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's the old Sean Connery thing. It's not a therapist. It's just something that's spelled the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Can you just speak to your trolling experience? Is there, like, underneath it all, is there just a respect, the human beings you go after?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And I've been taking seriously the understanding of the history of these movements and ideologies and taking seriously the words and the meaning behind the words and the historical meaning behind the words, the economic system, the political system, implications of those systems, all of that, just understanding the history, understanding the ideas,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Who do you think is the biggest troll or shit talker in martial arts? Hanada Laranja. Yeah, well, you can't even put him in the, he's another class of human being. He's overqualified. Chael Sonnen comes to mind. Chael's good. You versus Chael. Who's a better shit talker? If you look at the entirety of the career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So on Reddit, somebody said you are a Coral Belt level troll and just happen to be good at jiu-jitsu. So what did it take for you to rise to the ranks of trolling from White Belt to Black Belt to Coral Belt? What's your journey with talking shit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So when you come to America and everybody takes themselves a little too seriously, those are just a bunch of victims you can take advantage of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Do you ever look in the mirror and like regret how hard you went in the paint? That's somebody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I don't know. As a fan of yours, as a fan of Gordon's also, but as a fan of yours, I see the love behind it. I don't know. It seems always just fun. The shit talking seems fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What's your relationship like with Mo, the organizer of ADCC?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And that started around the time you were thinking about CJI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
and explaining them and internalizing them seriously and walking through the fire calmly. But anyway, Shopify is a platform where a very large number of people can sell stuff and a very large number of people can buy stuff. And they're free to do so. And the system is very low friction for everybody involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So you're saying that there could potentially be poor business decisions, poor allocation of money that could be reallocated better to support the athletes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
If you talk to them, would you be good faith? Like, would you, uh, turn off the, or turn the troll down from 11 to like a three?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, transparency in all of its forms. That's what bothers me about the IOC with the Olympics is that there's this organization that puts on an incredible event, but it's completely opaque. It's not transparent. And the athletes don't get paid almost at all, so it's usually from sponsorships. And they... they sell distribution, broadcast distribution, and so it's mostly paywalled after the fact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's very, unless you're a super famous athlete or a famous event, it's hard to watch, I don't know, the early rounds of the weightlifting or the judo or all of the competitions, where most of those athletes, get paid almost nothing and they've dedicated their whole life. Like they've sacrificed everything to be there and we don't get to watch them openly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So there is a small manifestation of the vibrant market of individuals, humans interacting and flourishing together. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period. at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You can't, in many cases, you can't even pay for it with ILC. I've got to experience this because I'll have like podcast conversations with like Judoka, for example. And I put like a little clip in a podcast and the Olympics channel takes it down immediately. So they have all the videos uploaded private. They're private. Oh, to flag the copyright. They just flag the copyright automatically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
From the private videos they could release. that could release somewhere, even if it's paywalled, which I'm against, but paywall it, but make it super easily accessible so the flow grappling model is still okay. I'm against it, but if you do a really good job of it, okay, I can kind of understand a membership fee, but it should be super easy to use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But in the case of the Olympics, first of all, in the case of the Olympics, the whole point of the Olympics is for it to be accessible to everybody. So paywalling... goes against the spirit of the Olympic Games. And I will say the same is probably true for many sports, like grappling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Especially for major events like ADCC, that I feel like they should be openly accessible to everybody, like on every platform. But what was the decision like for you to make it accessible on YouTube and X?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Is there a possible future where the 2026 ADCC is run by Craig Jones?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, having just chatted with Elon Musk, who fundamentally believes that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, that to me, if the universe has a sense of humor, you would certainly, Craig Jones would certainly be running ADCC, which would be, I mean, it would just be like beautifully hilarious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So I saw B-team videos of the CJI camp, people training super hard. So you aside, who don't seem to do things in a standard way, what does it take to sort of put yourself in a peak shape, peak performance for a huge event like the CJI or the ADCC?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Now, of course, on the topic of communism that I've been researching, and not just communism, but totalitarian regimes, often these utilize mass surveillance. and not just totalitarian regimes, but all societies, there's a temptation by those in centralized control to maintain power, to maintain leverage on the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I saw a video of Nicky Ryan with a trash can throwing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And the top comment is like, that's him doing the warmup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. But yeah, so you're supposed to train hard enough to where you have this confidence that you're prepared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So is it possible to out-cardio Craig Jones? Is your game fundamentally a technique-based game?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Right. But isn't that the secret to your success, being lazy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So to you, being psychologically relaxed is extremely important. Just not giving a damn. I wonder what that is. Not too much pressure. I don't want pressure. I don't like the pressure. But you like the pressure when it comes to internet communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. How important is it to just go crazy hard rounds leading up to competitions like that? You said sort of Nicky Rod, but like on average for like athletes at world-class level, do you have to put in the hard rounds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
There's a temptation to utilize mass surveillance, and of course, the job of the people is to fight back, fight for their privacy, fight for their freedom of speech, freedom of thought, all of that. All of that that fights off the descent into the dystopian worlds of the 1984 ilk. Anyway, a good VPN is step one of protecting yourself. And I've always been using ExpressVPN. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. It's terrifying, man, because the thing is, like with Anthony Bourdain –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
sort of analogy here like you're exploring all parts of the world you just want to be there in the culture teach good techniques and just socialize you don't want to like there's just a bunch of killers that are trying to like murder you yeah that to them they're like i get to test myself against a world-class athlete today and to you you're like oh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, last time, see, you're another level, you and Ryan Hall are just world class, but like, For me, I'm trying to navigate through this, because I'd like to be able to roll 10 rounds for fun, for cultural.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And unfortunately, ripping submissions or knee on belly, some kind of dominant position, people don't hear the message at all. Or if I let them submit me a bunch of times, they don't calm down either. So I've been trying to figure out how to solve that puzzle, because I like to keep rolling with people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
It's fast, works on any device and operating system, including Linux, my favorite operating system. Go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, I invite you all to come to the pool with Craig Jones and me. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I don't know. I'm trying to develop a radar when I look at a person. I'm trying to figure out, are they?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Craig gave me a special link that gives you a 50% discount on the tickets. Go to lexfriedman.com slash CJI and it should forward you to the right place. They're trying to sell the last few tickets now. It's a good cause. Go buy some. And also, let me say, as a fan of the sport, I highly encourage you to watch both CJI and ADCC and to celebrate athletes competing in both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I've never had a flow roll with a Polish person. Somebody on Reddit asked, how many legs did you break in Eastern Europe? Three or four.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So speaking of which, just for the hobbyist, for a person just starting out, what wisdom can you provide? Like say you were tasked with coaching a beginner, a hobbyist beginner, how would you help them become good in a year? What would be the training regimen? What would be their approach, mental, physical, in terms of practice to jiu-jitsu?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So that's part of it is you, the way you move, but I guess you also don't allow anybody to put you in a really bad position in terms of hurting you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So the thing you want as a beginner is to focus on minimizing injury by relaxing, by not going, by not freaking out. Yes, keeping it at a pace so you can understand what just happened. The thing is, how do you know if you're freaking out or not as a beginner? It feels like a... If you're panicking. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
That's a good... If you're... I mean, I see a lot of beginners kind of breathing, starting to breathe hard. They tense up. That's probably... Underneath that is panic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But also you have one of the more innovative games in jujitsu history. How'd you develop that? How do you continue throughout your career? How are you innovating? What was your approach to learning and figuring positions out, figuring submissions out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So that's just something that brings you joy, uh, Is by doing the unexpected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
So your, your game is even a bit trolly. Interesting. So like, but what's the actual process of like, like with the Z guard, all the innovative stuff you've done there, how do you come up with ideas there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Did you say artistic or autistic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Okay. Just checking. Yeah. What's like the most innovative thing you've come up with? What's like some of the cooler ideas you've come up with on the mat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, but put some humor on top of it. Like Power Bottom, their instructional names are pretty good. But you changed that one, I saw, the name of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
When you brought the $1 million in cash on Rogan's podcast, did you have security with you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You got a phone call from the man and said, change this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Right, right. What do you think about Zuck in general? Like the fact that he trains Jiu-Jitsu. Have you got a chance to train with him? Because you've trained with Volk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Competed in jiu-jitsu, intends to compete in MMA. Has a beginner's mind, is humble about it. It's interesting. Was he ever in consideration for CJI? Oh, I mean, we would love to have him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. What's your relationship has been like with Volkanovski? What have you learned about martial arts, about grappling and different domains, just training with him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
And you can't say the reasons why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
You think you could have set that up if you had more time? Part of the challenge here is for some of these gigantic matchups, I feel like it takes time to court them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But there's a lot of other interesting matchups you could have possibly gotten through if there's more time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What do you think makes the Dagestani wrestlers and fighters so good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But you think in the grappling context, that will not always translate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I wonder if it's like, you know, at his prime could be versus you, for example. Who do you think wins there? Buggy choke for sure. Buggy choke? No way. I know you're joking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Really? So you can get the buggy choke at the highest level? Can you educate me on that? Like if that legitimately can work at the highest level? Buggy choke for sure, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
That's what everyone says. That's what Pablo Escobar probably says also. What's your relationship with risk? Especially with the risk of death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Have you ever, like, gone hard with a Dagestani person? Like, grappling, wrestling? Any of the fighters, any of the MMA guys?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What do you think, you as the wise sage of jiu-jitsu, if you look 10, 20 years out, how do you think the game is going to evolve? The art of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What do you think is going to be the most popular submissions on CGI and ADCC this year? Is it going to be Foot Locks or Rear Naked?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
We are going to see that, aren't we?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, when I show the sport of jiu-jitsu, the most exciting stuff is whenever both people want to be Wrestling, scrambling wrestling. They both want to get on top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
But then the whole crowd will then mock you ceaselessly, as they should, for conceding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Who took the most risks? I mean, in a way, that's what's going to happen because this is quite open. So the benefit of being exciting is you're going to be glorified on social media. And if you're going to be boring and stall, you're going to be endlessly sort of willified.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Well, in a certain sense, on a basic human level, yeah. I mean, not all that matters, but if you're going to stall, you're going to become a meme, I feel like, especially with CGI. And so are the refs going to try to stop stalling? Yeah, we're going to penalize them hard, hit them hard, get that boring shit out of here. So what percentage of athletes would you say are on steroids? Is it 100%?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah, the looks of it. But you could also go the other way. Certain people are just genetically built and they look like they are and then there's probably others like yourself. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. Yeah, that's the part of accusations of people being on steroids that I hate. It's like without data, people are just like, it's a way they can say that somebody's cheating without, because I like celebrating people. And sometimes people aren't on steroids and they aren't cheating and they're just fucking good. What about Gabby Garcia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
I think she's beautiful, strong, and you're a lucky man to share the mat with her. You should be honored. Yeah. I'm betting a huge amount of money on her. Me too. Either way, you're going to get paid. She's paying 11 to 1. I bet on love as well. So we are aligned in that way. Love will prevail. Okay. You put Alex Jones to sleep. Just to reflect back on that. What was... He was too woke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
He needed it. So that's you fighting the woke mind virus or whatever?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What was that like? I didn't see the full video. I just saw a little clip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
The craziest shit possible. What's it like going to sleep?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Yeah. And then you loaded it in. That must be a cool feeling, to load it all back in, like, realize, where am I? I feel like that sometimes in a hotel when I'm, like, traveling. It's like, where the fuck am I again? When you wake up. Maybe that's what it's like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
What?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Oh, good. Thank you. Thank you. Now I know. So given all the places you've gone, all the people you've seen recently, what gives you hope about this whole thing we've got going on about humanity? about this world. We start war sometimes, we do horrible things to each other sometimes. I missed all that, what gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Like you're not attracted to risk. You're attracted to adventure. And the risk is the thing you don't give a damn about if it comes along with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Had poor delivery. Well, thank you for being at the forefront of making fun of everything and anything. And thank you for talking today, brother. Thank you, bro. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Craig Jones. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Anthony Bourdain. Travel changes you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly. You leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life and travel leaves marks on you. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Speaking of which, you went to Ukraine, like you said, twice recently. Twice. Really pushed the limit there. Including to the front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
Tell me the full story of that from the beginning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#439 – Craig Jones: Jiu Jitsu, $2 Million Prize, CJI, ADCC, Ukraine & Trolling
From CJI with Nicky Ryan, Nicky Rod, Rotolo Brothers, Fionn Davis, Mackenzie Dern, and more, to ADCC with Gordon Ryan, Nicholas Margali, Giancarlo Budoni, Rafael Lovato Jr., Mika Galvao, and more. I have a lot of respect for everyone involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
The following is a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, currently serving his sixth term in office. He's one of the most influential, powerful, and controversial men in the world, leading a right-wing coalition government at the center of one of the most intense and long-lasting conflicts and crises in human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
This life, this world of ours, is too beautiful not to keep trying, trying to do some good in whatever way each of us know how. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And that's how it will remain. We spoke about tech companies offline. There's a lot of tech companies nervous about this judicial reform. Can you speak to why large and small companies have a future in Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
We got Numeri for the world's hardest data science tournament, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, and Shopify for e-commerce. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team we're always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So you had a conversation about AI with Sam Altman of OpenAI and with Elon Musk. What was the content of that conversation? What's your vision for sort of this very highest of tech, which is artificial intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Numeri, a hedge fund that uses machine learning to make investment decisions. It's basically a really difficult data set, a really difficult competitions with real world testing, with a test set. with the highest of stakes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
As I talk about in this conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, he's a big believer in the power and the efficiency of the market. That's the cleanest signal you can get. in the interaction of a very large number of people competing purely with good information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And I'm not sure where it's going to go. and that's something we have to respond to at the nation level and just as a human civilization, both the threat of AI to just us as a human species and then the effect on the jobs and, like you said, cybersecurity. What do you think? You think we're going to lose control? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
First of all, I do believe, maybe naively, that it will create more jobs than it takes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm really concerned about cybersecurity and the nature of how that changes with the power of AI. And in terms of existential threats, I think there will be so much threats that aren't existential along the way that that's the thing I'm mostly concerned about. versus AI taking complete control and becoming sort of superseding the human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Although that is something you should consider seriously because of the exponential growth of its capabilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So taking a small tangent, as we talked about offline, you have a... a background in Taekwondo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
We mentioned Elon Musk. I've trained with both. Just as a quick question, who are you betting on in a fight?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And to step into that world as a machine learning algorithm to see what you can do with past data and how to make predictions such that you can outperform other humans or other algorithms, that's super interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
As we spoke, and as I speak now, large-scale protests are breaking out all over Israel over this government's proposed judicial reform that seeks to weaken the Supreme Court in a bold accumulation of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Yeah, I mean, martial arts is this kind of... It's bigger than just combat. It's this kind of journey of humility, and it has... It's an art form. It truly is an art. But it's fascinating that these two figures in tech are facing each other. And I won't ask a question of who you would face and how you would do, but... Well, I'm facing...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm just a big fan of real-world datasets and large-scale real-world machine learning benchmarks, both as a way to learn of what works and what doesn't, and just the fun, the fun of competing. The fun of competition is a good catalyst for learning and taking steps on the long journey towards mastery. Head over to numeri.ai.com to sign up for a tournament and hone your machine learning skills.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
The solution of a monopoly is growing arbitrarily, unstoppably in power. Economic power and therefore in political power. Some of that is regulation. Some of that is competition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
It's not that simple. Well, I believe in the power of competition that there will always be somebody that challenges the big guys, especially in the space of AI. The more open source movements are taking hold, the more the little guy can become the big guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Yeah, I wouldn't count out the little guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Well, I hope you're right. Well, let me ask you about this market of politics. So you have served six terms as prime minister over 15 years in power. Let me ask you again, human nature. Do you worry about the corrupting nature of power on you as a leader, on you as a man?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
That's numeri.ai.com for a chance to play against me and win a share of the tournament surprise pool. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. In my early teenage years, when I first started reading the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, I dreamed of becoming a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, because I thought that is a way to explore the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Well, you have been involved in several corruption cases. How much corruption is there in Israel? And how do you fight it in your own party and in Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
in some funny kind of way. The journey I took through computer science and the development of robots and machine learning systems, artificial intelligence systems, all of that took me to a podcast called Artificial Intelligence that was then renamed to just my name. And now I am finally doing... psychotherapy on microphones with other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
what is the top obstacle to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians? Let's talk about the big question of peace in this part of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
But if you want to do the same kind of process and you don't want to start your own podcast, then maybe you want to sign up for BetterHelp because it's super easy to get started, it's affordable, it's accessible. Discreet, all of that. Available worldwide, super easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So the expansion of settlements in the West Bank has been a top priority for this new government. People may harshly criticize this as contributing to escalating Israel-Palestine tensions. Can you understand that perspective, that this expansion of settlements is not good for this two-state solution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm a big believer in talk therapy and so you should try out BetterHelp because it's the easiest way to try out and integrate talk therapy into your life. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system that manages all kinds of stuff, financials, human resources, inventory, e-commerce, all that kind of messy stuff that nobody really thinks about when they launch a company. I certainly don't think about when I'm thinking about launching a company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Given the current intense political battles in Israel, our previous intention to speak for three hours was adjusted to one hour for the time being, but we agreed to speak again for much longer in the future. I will also interview people who harshly disagree with the words spoken in this conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
with Saudi Arabia. What does it take to do that with Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I'm thinking about big design decisions, big engineering decisions. I'm thinking about how to hire a team of amazing people a team that is diverse in their background, in the way they see the world, in their approaches to problem solving, all of that. That's what excites me. All the messy stuff that's as essential, if not more, for running a business. I don't think about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So expanding the circle of peace, just to linger on that, requires what, secretly talking man to man, human to human, to leaders of other nations, Theoretically, you're right. Theoretically, okay. Well, let me ask you another theoretical question. On the circle of peace, as a student of history, looking at the ideas of war and peace, what do you think can achieve peace in the war in Ukraine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Looking at another part of the world, if you consider the fight for peace in this part of the world, how can you apply that to that other part of the world between Russia and Ukraine now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
That's why you should use the best tools to the job to at least help you out on that part. You can start now with no payment or interest for six months. Go to netsuite.com slash lex to access their one-of-a-kind financing program. netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
They might be required later on. Do you believe in the power of conversation, since you have contacts with Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, just leaders sitting in a room and discussing how the end of war can be brought about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
What part of this is just basic human conversation? ego, stubbornness, all of this between leaders, which is why I bring up the power of conversation, of sitting in a room realizing we're human beings and that there's a history that connects Ukraine and Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
The great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day to day operations. I've been wanting to put out some merch out there because I'm working with an amazing artist to help me out, create some awesome stuff. And I've been so lazy about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
As you write about in your book, what have you learned about life from your father?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
And when I say lazy, I just mean my plate is so full and I've been doing some extremely difficult travel, but also taking on these difficult projects and trying to figure out my life. But through all of that, a source of excitement, a source of opportunity for me is just how fun and easy it is to use Shopify, to create your own store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Never stop. And if I may suggest... As part of that education, I would add in a little literature, maybe Dostoevsky, in the plentiful of time you have as a prime minister to read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So if that's the thing that's exciting to you, you should definitely do it. Go sell some cool stuff. It has thousands of integrations and third-party apps. It's basically anything you want to do, you can get done. From on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, all that kind of stuff. Again, highly, highly, highly recommend you try out Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Last question. You've talked about a survival of a nation. You yourself are a mortal being. Do you contemplate your mortality? Do you contemplate your death? Are you afraid of death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Well, you had one heck of a life there. starting from MIT to six terms as prime minister. Thank you for this stroll through human history and for this conversation. It was an honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
All right, now off mic, I'm going to force you to finally tell me who's going to win, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, but that's a good time to end. We ran out of time here. I'll tell you outside. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Benjamin Netanyahu. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
you're loved by many people here in israel in the world but you're also hated by many in fact i think you may be one of the the most hated men in the world so if there's a young man or a young woman listening to this right now who have such hate in their heart what can you say to them to one day turn that hate into love?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I will speak with other world leaders, with religious leaders, with historians and activists, and with people who have lived and have suffered through the pain of war, destruction, and loss that stoke the fires of anger and hate in their heart. For this, I will travel anywhere, no matter how dangerous, if there's any chance it may help add to understanding and love in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
There's a lot of love, yes. A lot of leaders are collaborating. Respect, I said, not love. Okay, all right. Well, it's a spectrum. But there is people who don't have good things to say about Israel, who do have hate in their heart for Israel. And what can you say to those people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So you're a student of history. If I can just linger on that philosophical notion of hate, that part of human nature. If you look at World War II, what do you learn from human nature, from the rise of the Third Reich and the rise of somebody like Hitler and the hate that permeates that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
I believe in the power of conversation, to do just this, to remind us of our common humanity. I know I'm underqualified and underskilled for these conversations, so I will often fall short, and I will certainly get attacked, derided, and slandered. but I will always turn the other cheek and use these attacks to learn, to improve, and no matter what, never give in to cynicism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
So in those threats underlying that hatred, how much of it is anti-Zionism and how much of it is anti-Semitism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
If we jump from human history to the current particular moment, there's protests in Israel now about the proposed judicial reform that gives power to your government to override the Supreme Court. So the critics say that this gives too much power to you, virtually making you a dictator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
Can you steel man the case that this may give too much power to the coalition government to... the prime minister, not just to you, but to those who follow?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The following is a conversation with Kevin Spacey, a two-time Oscar-winning actor who has starred in Seven, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, and House of Cards. He is one of the greatest actors ever, creating haunting performances of characters who often embody the dark side of human nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The latter is what the mass hysteria of internet mobs too often does, often rushing to a final judgment before the facts are in. I will try to do better than that, to respect due process in service of the truth. And I hope to have the courage to always think independently and to speak honestly from the heart. even when the eyes of the outrage mob are on me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
When you say, say the words and mean them, what does mean them mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, I guess what you're saying is it's extremely difficult to get to the bottom of a little less. Because the power, if we just stick even on seven, of your performance is in the tiniest of subtleties. Like when you say, oh, you didn't know. And you turn your head a little bit. And a little bit like the... the little bit, maybe a glimmer of a smile appears in your face. That's subtlety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Again, my goal is to understand human beings at their best and at their worst. And the hope is such understanding leads to more compassion and wisdom in the world. I will make mistakes. And when I do, I will work hard to improve. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That's less. That's hard to get to, I suppose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So what's it like being in that scene? So it's you, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Brad Pitt is going over the top, just having a mental breakdown. and is weighing these extremely difficult moral choices, as you're saying. But he's like screaming in pain and tormented while you're very subtly smiling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You mentioned Fincher likes to do a lot of takes. That's the famous thing about David Fincher. So what are the pros and cons of that? I think I read that he does Some crazy amount. He averages 25 to 65 takes, and most directors do less than 10.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Why the speed? Why say it fast is the important thing for him, you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I guess actors like the dramatic pauses and the indulge in the dramatic pauses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
We've got ExpressVPN for privacy, 8sleep for naps, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for e-commerce, and AG1 for daily deliciousness. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
David Fincher said about you, he was talking in general, I think, but also specifically in the moment of House of Cards, said that you have exceptional skill both as an actor and as a performer, which he says are different things. So he defines the former's dramatization of a text and the latter as the seduction of an audience. Do you see wisdom in that distinction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And what does it take to do both, the dramatization of a text and the seduction of an audience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, one of the challenges for me in this conversation is remembering that your name is Kevin, not Frank or John or any of these characters. Because they live deeply in the psyche.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use it to protect my privacy on the internet. I used them for many, many years. There's something to be said for loyalty, even with software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And those characters become like lifelong companions. Like for me, they travel with you. And even if it's the darkest aspects of human nature, they're always there. I feel like I almost met them and gotten to know them and gotten to become like friends with them almost. Hannibal Lecter or Forrest Gump. I mean, I've... I feel like I'm best friends with Forrest Gump. I know the guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I guess he's played by some guy named Tom, but Forrest Gump is the guy I'm friends with. Yeah. And I think everybody feels like that when they're in the audience with great characters. They just kind of become part of you in some way, the good, the bad, and the ugly of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Seven years ago, he was cut from House of Cards and canceled by Hollywood and the World when Anthony Rapp made an allegation that Kevin Spacey sexually abused him in 1986. Anthony Rapp then filed a civil lawsuit seeking $40 million. In this trial, and all civil and criminal trials that followed, Kevin was acquitted. He has never been found guilty nor liable in a court of law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Now, part of that, of course, I say tongue-in-cheek because I don't have loyalty to software. But I do have an appreciation of really great design and software. And there's a kind of loyalty that builds up. I think people that use Apple products have that. When you have felt the love that was designed into the product. Like a lot of Apple products have. The early iPhones. All iPhones, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What is that, like a catalyst for thinking deeply about what is magical about this play, this story, this narrative? That's what that is, like thinking backwards, that's what that does?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
to ask the interesting question. I like the poetry and the humility of I'm just a series of colors in someone else's painting. That was a good line. That said, you've talked about improvisation. You said that it's all about the ability to do it again and again and again and yet never make it the same. And you also just said that you're trying to stay true to the text.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So where's the room for the... that it's never the same?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But also in theater, there's no safety net. If you fuck it up, everybody gets to see you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, there is something... of a seduction of an audience in theater even more intense than there is when you're talking about film. I got a chance to watch the documentary Now in the Wings on a world stage, which is behind the scenes of, you mentioned, you teaming up with Sam Mendes in 2011 to stage Richard III, a play by William Shakespeare. I was also surprised to learn
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But when Steve Jobs was running the company, there really was an obsessive integration of beauty into every aspect of the product. I mean... Some of the most beautiful products ever designed were designed by Apple. Anyway, much like I'm friends with characters and books, I'm also friends with pieces of software and enjoy the time we get to spend together across the years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You haven't really done much Shakespeare, or at least you said that in the movie. But there's a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes stuff there. First of all, the camaraderie of everybody, how the bond theater creates, especially when you're traveling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But another interesting thing you mentioned with the chairs of Sam and his trying different stuff, it seemed like everybody was really open to trying stuff, embarrassing themselves, taking risks, all of that. I suppose that's part... of acting in general, but theater especially. Just take risks. It's okay to embarrass the shit out of yourself, including the director.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
There's also a sad moment where at the end, everybody is really sad to say goodbye because you do form a family and then it's over. I guess somebody said that that's just part of theater. I mean, there's a kind of assumed goodbye and that this is it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Oh, God, I just finally figured it out. So maybe you can speak a little bit more to that. What's the difference between film acting and live theater acting?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It just feels like also in theater, you have to become the character more intensely because you can't take a break. You can't take a bathroom break. You're like on stage. This is you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And ExpressVPN has for a long time been a piece of software I walk alongside with. Go to expressvpn.com slash likes pod for an extra three months free. This episode is brought to you by Asleep and it's pod for ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So even when you're doing like a dramatic monologue still, they're still fucking with you. There's stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Okay, that's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That's good to know. You also said, interesting line, that improvisation helps you learn about the character. Can you explain that? So like through maybe playing with the different ways of saying the words or the different ways to bring the words to life, you get to learn about yourself, about the character you're playing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I had a weird experience last night where in my dream, I dreamt of eight sleep, of the bed going up and down, the Pod 4 Ultra, where you can control the positioning of the bed and going up and down. So it's kind of surreal to be on the eight sleep bed, dreaming about the eight sleep bed. It's very meta. It's interesting for me to think about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. And yeah, that's the take. That was an intense interaction. I mean, what was it like, if we can just linger on that, just that intense scene with Al Pacino?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, that's like one of the greatest ensemble casts ever. We got Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, you, Jonathan Pryce. It's just incredible. And I have to say, I mean, maybe you can comment. You've talked about how much of a mentor and a friend Jack Lemmon has been. That's one of his greatest performances ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You have a scene at the end of the movie with him that was really powerful. like firing on all cylinders, you're playing disdain to perfection, and he's playing desperation to perfection. What a scene. What was that like? Just like at the top of your game, the two of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
the landscape of dreams that people are exploring every night. You're talking about eight billion people on Earth. All of them sleep every night. They are exploring some magical land. I just would love to see all the different worlds they're being explored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The darkness and the light from the Jungian shadow emerges, and we get to play with it like a puzzle, try to figure it out like a puzzle in narrative form, as we humans do. It's a cool world. I'd love to be able to visualize it. In general, this whole collective intelligence of the human species is a Interesting organism in itself. I would love to visualize that. The power of the collective mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So it turns out he was right. Yeah. This world works in mysterious ways. It also speaks to the fact of the power of somebody you look up to giving words of encouragement because those can just reverberate through your whole life and just like make the path clear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Beautifully said. Jack Lemmon is one of the greatest actors ever. What do you think makes him so damn good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Anyway, go to asleep.com and use code LEX to get $350 off the pod for Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under... 48 hours. More and more recently, I realized that my time with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung was spent probably more than 20 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. The apartment was, I mean, it's widely considered... one of the greatest movies ever. People sometimes refer to it as a comedy, which is an interesting kind of classification. I suppose that's a lesson about comedy, that the best comedy is the one that's basically a tragedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, yeah. What's that line between comedy and tragedy for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You know? I think Sam Mendes actually said in the Now documentary, something like, with great theater, with great stories, you find humor on the journey to the heart of darkness. Something like this. Very poetic. I'm sorry, I can't be that poetic. I'm very sorry. But it's true. I mean, the people I've interacted in this world have been to a war zone and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
the ones who have lost the most and have suffered the most are usually the ones who are able to make jokes the quickest. And the jokes are often dark and absurd and cross every single line. No political correctness, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I walked alongside them in trying to understand the history of psychoanalysis and the history of exploring the human mind. That's when I wanted to be a psychiatrist. That's when I wanted through that lens, through that approach to understand the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Oh, man. So you mentioned American beauty. And the idea of... not changing, but evolving. That's really interesting because that movie is about finding yourself. It's a philosophically profound movie. It's about various characters in their own ways finding their own identity in a world where... maybe a materialistic system that wants you to be like everyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And so, I mean, Lester just really transforms himself throughout the movie. And you're saying the challenge there is to still be the same human being fundamentally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think a lot of people live lives of quiet desperation in a job they don't like, in a marriage they're unhappy in, and to see somebody living that life and then saying, fuck it. in every way possible, and not just in a cynical way, but in a way that opens them, opens Lester up to see the beauty in the world. That's, you know, the beauty in American beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It's... Well, and you know, you may have to blackmail your boss to get there, but you know. And in that, there's a bunch of humor also. In the anger, in the absurdity of sort of taking a stand against the conformity of life, There's this humor. And I read somewhere that the scene, the dinner scene, which is kind of play-like, where Lester slams the plate against the wall was improvised by you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In some sense, of course, the reason I love doing this podcast is I get to do maybe in spirit the kind of thing that psychoanalysis tried to do, is to delve into the depth of the human mind, shine a light onto the Jungian shadow. But anyway, I bring all that up because I think I need to go back to that work for the philosophy and the wisdom. Not the technical details, just the wisdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The slamming of the plate against the wall. No. No. Absolutely. The internet lies once again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The plate, okay. Well, that was a genius interaction there. There's something about the dinner table. and losing your shit at the dinner table. Having a fight and losing your shit at the dinner table. Where else? Like Yellowstone was another situation where it's a family at the dinner table and then one of them says, fuck it, I'm not eating this anymore and I'm going to create a scene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It's a beautiful kind of environment for dramatic scenes. Or Nicholson and the Shining. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The contrast between you and Annette Bening in that scene creates the genius of that scene. So how much of acting is the dance between two actors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What kind of interesting direction did you get from Sam Mendes in how you approached playing Lester and how did it take on the different scenes? There's a lot of just brilliant scenes in that movie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I guess that's what a great director must do is have the guts in that moment to reshoot everything. I mean, that's a pretty gutsy move.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But there's power in therapy. And if you want to check it out, easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere, check out betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I have a store at lexfriedman.com slash store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And once again, a great performance lies in doing less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The innocence and the purity of lust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What do you think about the notion of beauty that permeates American beauty? What do you think that theme is with the roses, with the rose petals, the characters that are living this mundane existence slowly opening their eyes up to what is beautiful in life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
The little things, the simple things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I don't know what I'm going to do with that store. There's a few shirts on there. Maybe I'll add more shirts. I just always liked wearing shirts of people, of bands, of movies, of books that I like. It's a celebration of the stuff I love. And it's a chance to connect with other human beings over the things I love. If they know the thing, I get to talk to them and share in their love of the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Mortality also permeates the film. It starts with acknowledging that death is on the way, that Lester's time is finite. You ever think about your own death? Yeah. Scared of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What does that fear look like? What's the nature of the fear? What are you afraid of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
See, the interesting thing about Lester is facing the same fear. He seemed to be somehow liberated and accepted everything and then saw the beauty of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So Lester got there. It sounds like Dick Van Dyke got there. You're trying to get there. Sure. You said you feared death at your lowest point. What was the lowest point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So let's talk about it. Let's talk about this dark time. Let's talk about the sexual allegations against you that led to you being cancelled by the entire world for the last seven years. I would like to personally understand the sins, the bad things you did, and the bad things you didn't do. So I also should say that the thing I hope to do here is to Give respect to due process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Innocent until proven guilty that the mass hysteria machine of the internet and clickbait journalism doesn't do. So here's what I understand. There were criminal and civil trials brought against you, including the one that started it all when Anthony Rapp sued you for $40 million. In these trials, you were acquitted found not guilty and not liable. Is that right? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If they don't know about the thing, then I get to talk about the thing I love and share in that way. It's kind of cool that those are two of the modes of connection. So one is you explaining a thing that another person doesn't know about. And in that explanation, the teacher-student sort of dynamic, you get to celebrate a thing. And then when you're both fans, you get to both celebrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think that's really important, again, in terms of due process. And I read a lot, and I watched a lot in preparation for this on this point, including, of course, the recently detailed interviews you did with Dan Wooten and then Alison Pearson of The Telegraph. And those are all focused on this topic, and they go in detail where you respond in detail to many of the allegations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If people are interested in the details, they can listen to those. So based on that and everything I looked at, as I understand, you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to, sort of in a sexual context, for example, by blocking the door. Is that right? That's correct, yeah. You always respected the explicit no from people, again, in the sexual context, is that right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That is correct. You've never done anything sexual with an underage person, right? Never. And also, as is sometimes done in Hollywood, let me ask this, you've never explicitly offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement, correct?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In terms of bad behavior, what did you do? What was the worst of it? And how often did you do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
How often did you cross the line, and what does that mean to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Just to clarify, I think you're often too pushy with the flirting. And that manifests itself in multiple ways. But just to make clear, you never prevented anyone from leaving if they wanted to. You always took the explicit no from people as an answer. No, stop. You took that for the answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
you've never done anything sexual with an underage person, and you've never explicitly offered to exchange sexual favors for career advancement. These are some of the sort of accusations that have been made, and in the court of law, multiple times have been shown not to be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Both as teacher and student. Anyway, if you want to sell shirts, sell whatever you want. Use Shopify and sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
From everything I've seen in public interactions with you, people love you. Colleagues love you, coworkers love you. There's a flirtatiousness. Another word for that is chemistry. There's a chemistry between the people you work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In this conversation, Kevin makes clear what he did and what he didn't do. I also encourage you to listen to Kevin's Dan Wooten and Alison Pearson interviews for additional details and responses to the allegations. As an aside, let me say that one of the principles I operate under for this podcast and in life is that I will talk with everyone, with empathy and with backbone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Another complexity to this, as I've seen, is that there's just a huge number of actors that look up to you. a huge number of people in the industry that look up to you. So just, and love you. I've seen just from this documentary, just a lot of people just love being around you, learning from you what it means to create great theater, great film, great stories. And so that adds to the complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I wouldn't say it's a power dynamic, like a boss employee relationship. It's a admiration dynamic that is easy to miss and easy to take advantage of. Is that something you understand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think that also speaks to a dark side of fame. The sense I got is that there are some people, potentially a lot of people, trying to make friends with you in order to get roles, in order to advance their career. So not you using them, but they trying to use you. What's that like? How do you know if somebody likes you for you, for Kevin, or likes you for, like you said, you're romantic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I often drink it twice a day. Make the drink, put it in the fridge, sometimes put it in the freezer, and like 30 minutes later, it's got that beautifully chilled consistency. Almost like a slushy, but not quite a slushy. And it just brings me happiness, especially when I just did a super long run in the Texas heat. And boys, that heat coming. That summer is coming. The 100 degrees, the 105.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You see a person and you're like, I like this person. And they seem to like you. How do you know if they like you for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In the industry, have you been betrayed? In life? And how do you not let that make you cynical?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
That's a beautiful way to put it. For the times you crossed the line, do you take responsibility for the wrongs you've done? Yes. Are you sorry to the people you may have hurt emotionally?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If you got a chance to talk to the Kevin Spacey of 30 to 40 years ago, what would you tell him to change about his ways How would you do it? What would be your approach? Would you be nice about it? Would you smack them around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
For most of your life, you were not open with the public about being gay. What was the hardest thing about keeping who you love a secret?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
to be able to share that. That must be a thing that weighs on you to not be able to fully, yeah, celebrate your love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And it's intense. Those 10, 12, 15 mile runs in the heat. There's a part of me that hates it. There's a part of me that loves it. And every part of me is better for having done it. Anyway, I love AG1, especially after a long run. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, you made a statement when the initial accusation happened. It could be up there as one of the worst social media posts of all time. It's like two for one. Don't hold back. No, come on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In the first part, you kind of implicitly admitted to doing something bad, which was later shown and proved completely to never have happened. It was a lie. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
From the public perception, the first part of that, so first of all, the second part is a horrible way to come out. Yes, we all agree. And then the first part, from the public viewpoint, they see guilt in that, which also is tragic because at least that part
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Okay. There's an almost convincing explanation for the worst social media post of all time. I almost accept it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
It's beautifully bad, just how bad that social media post is. As you mentioned, Liam Neeson and Sharon Stone came out in support of you recently, speaking to your character. A lot of people who know you, and some of whom I know, who have worked with you privately, show support for you, but are afraid to speak up publicly. What do you make of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I mean, to me personally, this just makes me sad because perhaps that's the nature of the industry, that It's difficult to do that, but I just wish there would be a little bit more courage in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So as you said, your darkest moment in 2017, when all of this went down, one of the things that happened is you were no longer in the House of Cards for the last season. Let's go to the beginning of that show. One of the greatest TV series of all time. A dark, fascinating character in Frank Underwood. A ruthless, cunning, borderline evil politician.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Kevin Spacey. You played a serial killer in the movie Seven. Your performance was one of, if not the greatest portrayal of a murderer on screen ever. What was your process of becoming him, John Doe, the serial killer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What are some interesting aspects to the process you went through becoming Frank Underwood? Maybe Richard III, there's a lot of elements there in your performance that maybe inspired that character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Because you're sharing the secret of the darkness of how this game is played with that best friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
cut it and make it slightly broader, but. That's interesting, because you're doing a bunch of, with both Richard III and Frank Underwood, a bunch of dark, borderline evil things, and then I guess the idea is you're going to be losing the audience and then you win them back over with the addresses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And I saw even with the documentary, the glimmers of that with Richard III. I mean, you were seducing the audience. Like there was such a chemistry between you and the audience on stage. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
the comedic aspect of Richard III and Frank Underwood, is that a component that helps bring out the full complexity of the darkness that is Frank Underwood?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah, there's often like a wry smile. The line that jumps to me when you're talking about Claire in the early, maybe first episode even, I love that woman more than Sharks love blood. I mean, I guess there's a lot of ways to read that line, but the way you read it had both humor, had legitimate affection, had all the ambition and narcissism, all of that mixed up together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
How much of that character in terms of the musicality of the way he speaks is Bill Clinton?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Well, in that way, him and Frank Uno would share like a charisma. There's certain presidents that just have, politicians that just have this charisma, you can't stop listening to them. Some of it is the accent, but some of it is some other magical thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Politicians. So you worked with David Fincher there. He was the executive producer, but he also directed the first two episodes. High level, what was it like working with him again? In which ways do you think he helped guide you and the show to become the great show that it was? I give him...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What are those battles like? I heard that there was a battle with the execs, like you mentioned early on about your name not being on the billing for Seven. I heard that there was battles about the ending of Seven, which was really, well, it was pretty dark. So what's that battle like? How often does that happen, and how do you win that battle? Because it feels like there's a line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
where the networks or the execs are really afraid of crossing that line into this strange, uncomfortable place. And then the director, great directors and great actors kind of flirt with that line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
You think that Godfather's when Pacino was like the Pacino we know was born? Or is that more like, there's the characters that are really over the top, incentive woman. There's like stages, I suppose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Would you say, ridiculous question, Godfather, greatest film of all time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And for that day you fall in love with that movie, and you might even say... to a friend that that is the greatest movie of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I was going to mention when we were talking about Seven that just if you're looking at the greatest performances, portrayals of murderers, so obviously, like I mentioned, Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, that's up there. Seven, to me, is like competing for first place with Silence of the Lambs. But then there's a different one with Kubrick and Jack Nicholson, right, with The Shining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And there's, as opposed to a murderer, who's always been a murderer, Here's a person like in American Beauty who becomes that, who descends into madness. I read also that Jack Nicholson improvised Here's Johnny in that scene. I believe that. That's a very different performance than yours in Seven. What do you make of that performance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Man, I love that guy. Unapologetically himself. Oh, yeah. Your impression of him at the AFI was just great. Well, that was for Mike Nichols. Oh, yeah. He had a big impact on your career. Huge impact on my career. Can you talk about him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
What was Christopher Walken like? So he's a theater guy too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Well, I can see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Oh man, it was a really good sketch. And that guy, there's certain people that are truly unique. and unapologetic, continue being that throughout their whole career. The way they talk, the musicality of how they talk, how they are, their way of being, he's that. And it somehow works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
His watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. I mean, it works in so many different contexts. He plays like a mobster in True Romance. Mm-hmm. And it's like genius, that's genius. But he could be anything. He could be soft, he could be a badass, all of it. And he's always Christopher Walken, but somehow works for all these different characters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So I guess we were talking about House of Cards like two hours ago before we took a tangent upon a tangent. But there's a moment in episode one where President Walker broke his promise to Frank Underwood that he would make him a Secretary of State. was this when the monster in Frank was born, or was the monster always there? The sort of, for you looking at that character,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Was there an idealistic notion to him that there's loyalty and that broke him? Or did he always know that this whole world is about manipulation and do anything to get power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Yeah. What do you think motivated him at that moment and throughout the show? Was it all about power and also legacy? Or was there some small part underneath it all where he wanted to actually do good in the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Do roles like that, like Seven, like Frank Underwood, like... Lesser from American Beauty, do they change you psychologically as a person? So walking around in the skin of these characters, these complex characters with very different moral systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So people should know that you are the serial, you play the serial killer in the movie and the serial killer shows up like more than halfway through the movie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Without judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
In Gulag Archipelago... Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously writes about the line between good and evil and that it runs through the heart of every man. So the full paragraph there, when he talks about the line... During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing place. Sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil, and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change. And to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. What do you think about this note that we're all capable of good and evil?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And when you say billing, it's like the posters, the VHS cover, everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And throughout life, that line moves and shifts throughout the day, throughout every hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
For each guest, I hope to explore their life's work, life's story, and what and how they think, and do so honestly and fully. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The brilliance and the flaws. I won't whitewash their sins, but I won't reduce them to a worse possible caricature of their sins either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And the thing you wanted from them and for them is less hate and more love. Did your dad say he loves you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Is there some elements of politics and maybe the private sector that are captured by a house of cards? How true to life do you think that is? from everything you've seen about politics, from everything you've seen about the politicians of this particular elections?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I have to interview some world leaders, some big politicians. In your understanding of trying to become Frank Underwood, what advice would you give in interviewing Frank Underwood? How do you get him to say anything that's at all honest?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
He'll tell you what you want to hear. Unfortunately, we don't get that look into the mind of a person the way we do with Frank Underwood in real life, sadly. Well, but you could say to somebody, you like the series House of Cards.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I'll try that with Zelensky and with Putin. What do you hope your legacy as an actor is and as a human being? People ask me now, what's your favorite performance you've ever given?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
If it does, do you think you have another Oscar-worthy performance in you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
Well, you have to mention him again. You know, Ernest Hemingway once said that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for, and I agree with him on both counts. Kevin, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kevin Spacey. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
And now let me leave you with some words from Meryl Streep. Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different and then finding myself in there. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
I think the last scene, the ending scene and the car ride leading up to it where it's mostly on you, in conversation with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, it's one of the greatest scenes in film history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
So if people somehow didn't see the movie, there's these five murders that happen that are inspired by five of the seven deadly sins, and the ending scene is inspired, represents the last two deadly sins. And there's this calm subtlety about you in your performance is just terrifying. Maybe in contrast with Brad Pitt's performance, that's also really strong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#432 – Kevin Spacey: Power, Controversy, Betrayal, Truth & Love in Film and Life
But in the contrast is the terrifying sense that you get in the audience that builds up to the twist at the end, or the surprise at the end. with the famous what's in the box from Brad Pitt. That is Brad Pitt's character's wife, her head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
The following is a conversation with Tucker Carlson, a highly influential and often controversial political commentator. When he was at Fox, Time Magazine called him the most powerful conservative in America. After Fox, he has continued to host big, impactful interviews and shows on X, on the Tucker Carlson podcast, and on TuckerCarlson.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I just feel like you hold back too much and don't tell us what you really think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think you just speak your mind more often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Strong words from Tucker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Not to try to get a preview or anything, but do you have interest of interviewing Xi Jinping? And if you do, how will you approach that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I should also say, it's been refreshing you interviewing world leaders. I think when I've started seeing you do that, it made me realize how much that's lacking. Well, yeah, it's just interesting. I mean, from even a historical perspective, it's interesting, but it's also important from a geopolitics perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I was just hanging out with Rogan yesterday, Joe Rogan, and I mentioned to him that it's me being a fan of his show, that I would love for him to talk with you. And he said he's up for it. And you guys haven't done it already? I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You know what I mean? He was doing the thing that he loves doing and it somehow keeps accidentally being exceptionally successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, curiosity, open-mindedness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
The thing I admire about him most, honestly, is that he's a good father. He's a good husband. He's a good family man for many years. And that's his place where he escapes from the world, too. And it's just beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What was the goal? Just linger on that. What was the goal for the interview? How were you thinking about it? What would success be like in your head leading into it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, you were. Just looking in the mirror. Very nice. So what's the secret to a successful relationship, successful marriage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So I think what you're indirectly communicating is it's like humility, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
In the religious context, you have these two categories that I really like of the two kinds of people, people who believe they're God and people who know they're not, which is a really interesting division that speaks to humility and a kind of realist worldview of where we are in the world. Can atheists be in the latter category? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What? Great leaders are so rare that when you see one, you know it right away. It blows your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
That's it. What advice would you give to young people? You got four. You somehow made them into great human beings. What advice would you give to people in high school?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You founded TCN, Tucker Carlson Network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But this feels like one of the first times you're really working for yourself. There's an extra level of freedom here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What hope, positive hope, do you have for the future of human civilization in, say, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
When done well, this gives us a chance to really hear out the guests and to begin to understand what and how they think. And I trust the intelligence of you, the listener, to make up your own mind, to see through the bullshit, to the degree there's bullshit, and to see to the heart of the person. Sometimes I fail at this, but I'll continue working my ass off to improve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, you're right, the secret sauce, the human mind is really special. Like, we should not mess with it. It should be very careful. And whatever special thing it does, it seems like it's a good thing. Like, human beings are fundamentally good. And like, these sources of creativity, a creative force in the universe we don't want to mess with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, fundamentally, you want people in power to be pro-humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, thank you for asking those questions, first of all. And thank you for this conversation. Thank you for welcoming me to the cabin in the woods.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And for a time, they can seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Think of it. Always. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There is a more nuanced discussion about what winning might look like. You're right. A nuanced discussion is not being had, but it is possible for Ukraine to quote unquote win with the help of the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Peace, a ceasefire, who owns which land. Yes. Coming to the table with, as you call the parent, the United States. Yes. Putting leverage on the negotiation to make sure there's a fairness. Amen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
All that said, I find that this no tough questions criticism often happens when the guest is a person the listener simply hates and wants to see them grilled into embarrassment, called a liar, a greedy egomaniac, a killer, maybe even an evil human being, and so on. If you are such a listener, what you want is drama, not wisdom. In this case, this show is not for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Just for the record, you demanded a million dollars from me to talk to me today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Vladimir Putin, after the interview, said that he wasn't fully satisfied because you weren't aggressive enough. You didn't ask sharp enough questions. First of all, what do you think about him saying that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
In the moment, what was your gut? Did you want to ask some tough questions as follow-ups on certain topics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There are many shows you can go to for that, with hosts that are way more charismatic and entertaining than I'll ever be. If you do stick around, please know I will work hard to do this well and to keep improving. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for your support. I love you all. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you mentioned Navalny. After you left, Navalny died in prison. What are your thoughts on, just at a high level first, about his death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There's a lot of interesting ideas about if he was killed, who killed him. Because it could be Putin. It could be somebody in Russia who is not Putin. It could be Ukrainians because it would benefit the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We've got ZipRecruiter for hiring, Listening for, well, listening to academic papers, Hidden Layer for securing your AI models, Element for delicious electrolytes that I'm drinking right now, and AG1 for other kinds of delicious nutrition. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Does it bother you that basically the most famous opposition figure in Russia is sitting in prison?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I recommend subscribing, even if you disagree with his views. It is always good to explore a diversity of perspectives. Most recently, he interviewed the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. We discussed this, the topic of Russia, Putin, Navalny, and the war in Ukraine at length in this conversation. Please allow me to say a few words about the very fact that I did this interview.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or in general, just get in touch with me, please go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, this question about the freedom of the press is underlying the very fact of the interview you're having with him. So you might not need to ask the Navalny question, but did you feel like, are there things I shouldn't say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you were okay being arrested in Moscow and arrested in- I didn't think for a second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Speaking of hiring, this episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter, a site that connects employers and job seekers. So if you're looking to hire, if you're looking to get hired, that's the place to go. I think one of the most important things in life is optimizing, controlling, deciding, figuring out the people you surround yourself with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So the NSA was tracking you? Do you think CIA was? Are people still tracking you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And for those of you, like me, that spend most of their life working and love what they do, but actually, whether you love it or not, if you spend most of your time working, it's really important to choose the place you work correctly. And if you're hiring, it's really important to build the kind of team where everybody really enjoys hanging out with each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you keep switching phones, getting new phones for the battery life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, you say it lightly, but it's really troublesome that you as a journalist would be tracked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you had no fear. Your lawyer said, be careful which questions you asked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You said leaders kill, leaders lie. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
That's quite a realist perspective, but there is a spectrum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think that's not just for productivity's sake. That's also for the happiness of everybody involved. You know, most of my life I spent working with engineers and scientists, and that's a different kind of breed of people, and I've gotten to know that world, but these days I get to work with creative people, and they're different. They're quite different. I would say it's more complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And our task is to figure out where on the spectrum they lie. And the leader's task is to confuse us and convince us they're one of the good guys. Of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I had to learn a lot of difficult lessons the hard way, I would say. But I got to meet a lot of incredible people, a lot of different kinds of incredible. I've gotten to figure out that people can be incredible in all kinds of different ways. That full diversity of incredibleness. It just brings me joy. And you should use the best tools for the job to build that team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So I think cleanliness and architectural design is not the entirety of the metrics that matter when you measure a city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It is true, there doesn't have to be a trade-off between cleanliness and freedom of speech. But it is also true that in dictatorships, cleanliness and architectural design is easier to achieve and perfect and often is done so, so you can show off, look how great our cities are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex to try it for free. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex. The smartest way to hire. Thank you. Also for academic papers, that's the way I use it. It skips all the stuff you don't want to read. And that's not a trivial thing to figure out how to do, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Your point is well taken. You can have both. But do you regret... We had both. That's the point. We had both. I saw it. Do you regret to a degree using the Moscow subway and the grocery store as a mechanism by which to make that point? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
you're a student of history, central planning is good at building subways in a way that's really nice. The thing that accounts for New York subways, by the way, there's a lot of really positive things about New York subways, not cleanliness, but the efficiency, the accessibility, how wide it spreads. The New York network is incredible. But Moscow, under different metrics,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
results of a capitalist system? And you actually said that you don't think US is quite a capitalist system, which is an interesting question in itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So they have figured it out. And so you can listen to academic papers. And it pronounces stuff like it's pleasant to listen to. You do have to like really focus your mind, I would say. So I don't like to do it during running, but I like to do it in a bunch of other contexts. Like there's something just more compelling to listening in certain kinds of contexts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm just- We will get you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So much to say on that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I hope she's attractive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It'd probably be an upgrade. So, well, the central planning point is really interesting, but I just don't... I don't know where you're coming from. There's a capitalist system... I mean, the United States is one of the most successful capitalist system in the history of Earth. So just say- What's the most successful?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Direct data is good, but it's challenging. For example, if you talk to a lot of people in Moscow or in Russia and you ask them, is there censorship? They will usually say, yes, there is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Sometimes I like printing it out and reading. Sometimes I like listening. Both are really, really good. Anyway, you can also do note-taking. You click the add or whatever it's called, plus note button, and then it automatically grabs the last two or three sentences and then saves them. And you don't need to type anything. It's just really simple. One click.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There's no substitute for that. Well, on that point, direct experience in Ukraine. So I visited Ukraine and witnessed a lot of the same things you witnessed in Moscow. So first of all, beautiful architecture. Yes. And this is a country that's really in war. So it's not- Oh, for real? Like for real, where most of the men are either volunteering or fighting in the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And there's actual tanks in the streets that are going into your major city of Kiev. And still the supply chains- are working just a handful of months after the start of the war. Everything is working. The restaurants are amazing. Most of the people are able to do some kind of job, like the life goes on. Cleanliness, like you mentioned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Security, like, it's incredible. Like, the crime went to zero. They gave all guns to everybody, the Texas strategy. It does work. Yeah, when you witness it, you realize, okay, there's something to these people. There's something to this country that they're not as corrupt as you might hear. Right. You hear that Russia's corrupt, Ukraine is corrupt. You assume it's just all going to go to shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And the uploading of the paper or whatever you want to listen to is super simple too. So it's just the whole pipeline is done well. It's easy. I recommend you at least try it. Normally, you would get a two-week free trial, but listeners of this very podcast, you get one month free. So go to listening.com slash Lex. That's listening.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So I think after you did the interview with Putin, you put a clip, I think on TCN, where like your sort of analysis afterwards. Yeah, it wasn't much of an analysis. No, but what stood out to me is you were kind of talking shit about Putin a little bit. Like you were criticizing him. Why wouldn't I? It spoke to the thing that you mentioned, which is you weren't afraid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Now, the question I want to ask is, it would be pretty badass if you went to the supermarket and made the point you were making, but also criticized Putin, right? Criticized that there is a lack of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In the supermarket? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So there is a fundamental way which you wanted Americans to expect more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
We should make clear that, you know, by many measures, you look at the World Press Freedom Index, you're right, U.S. is not at the top. Norway is. U.S. scores 71, same as Gambia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
This episode is also brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your artificial intelligence and machine learning models. I'm actually going to have a bunch of conversations in the upcoming weeks and months on artificial intelligence. I think with Gemini, the language model that Google released updated one, 1.5.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
really west africa so let me just ask hold on a second hold on a second hold on a second now you're making me laugh ukraine is 61 and russia is 35 the lower it is the worse close to china at 23 in north korea at the very bottom 22 didn't ukraine put gonzalo lira in jail till he died for criticizing the government how can they have a high press
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, but deviating maybe is frowned upon, but do you have the freedom to say it if you do deviate? That's the question. Can you keep your job? That's one measurement of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I have received a lot of criticism, publicly and privately, when I announced that I will be talking with Tucker. For people who think I shouldn't do the conversation with Tucker, or generally think that there are certain people I should never talk to, I'm sorry, but I disagree. I will talk to everyone, as long as they're willing to talk genuinely in long form for two, three, four more hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You mentioned Jon Stewart. The two of you have a bit of a history. I don't know if you've seen it, but he kind of grilled your supermarket and subway videos. Have you gotten a chance to see it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, that was essentially it. So in 2004, that's 20 years ago, John Stewart appeared on Crossfire, a show he hosted. And I was kind of... memorable moment. Can you tell the saga of that as you remember it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
There's been a lot of questions raised about how to do this. Well, how to not allow ideology to seep into the systems you create. There's a lot of really interesting questions. What's the role of open source? What's the role of transparency? All of that. And I'll be sure to talk to Meta, to Google, to XAI, to OpenAI folks, all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay, you said a lot of words that will make it sound like you're a bit bitter, even if you're not. So you said unhappy person, partisan person. Well, he's definitely partisan, for sure. So can you elaborate why you think he's partisan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
All of those people are incredible in facing this really difficult problem together. in the open, and sometimes they mess it up and they get criticized for it. And it's a beautiful thing. Anyway, AI, as we develop and try to figure out how to do it in a good way, in a way that benefits humanity, is a really, really, really important problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
He would probably say that he's not a partisan, that he's a comedian who's looking for the humor and the absurdity of the system. That's a dodge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'll just be honest that I watched it just recently, that video. From 20 years ago? From 20 years ago. I watched it initially, and I remember very differently. I remembered that Jon Stewart completely destroyed you in that conversation, and I watched it, And you asked a very good question of him, which was... There was no destruction, first of all. And you asked a very good question of him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Why, when you got a chance to interview John Kerry, did you ask a bunch of softball questions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I thought that was... a really fair question. And then his defense was, well, I'm just a comedian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And one of the things you need to do in terms of solving AI safety is how to do it in a way that can't get hacked. And you can get real creative Just like malware for the old school kinds of software, you can get creative on how to hack machine learning models. And that's what Hidden Layer specializes in. Trying to help you, if you're a company, to figure out how to not get your models hacked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Unfortunately, it's a bit darker. I think the reason he's seen as the winner and the reason at the time I saw as the quote unquote winner is because he was basically shitting on you like personal attacks versus engaging ideas. And it was, it was funny in a dark way and like making fun of the bow tie and all this kind of stuff. And it was fair to call me a dick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And that's not my best quality, trust me. But also to be kind of... I thought Jon Stewart came off as a giant dick at that time, and I'm a big fan of his, and I think he has improved a lot. That may be true. We should also say that people grow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I think he probably feels free enough to do it, but you're saying he doesn't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You can visit hiddenlayer.com slash lex to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your artificial intelligence adoption in a secure way. By the way, I just like saying AI fully pronounced. It's just fun to say. There you have it. This episode is also brought to you by Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Do you think Zelensky's a hero for staying in Kiev? Because I do. To me, you can criticize a lot of things. You should call out things that are obviously positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
The thing I'm drinking right now, and I have been drinking for a long time, multiple times a day, because it makes me feel good when I'm fasting. For a long time now. For a long time. I don't remember how long, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's not about whether he's in Ukraine most of the time or not. Well, I thought that was the whole premise of the- No, no, no, no. At the beginning of the war. When Kiev, when a lot of people thought that the second biggest military in the world is pointing its guns at Kiev, it's going to be taken. And a man, a leader who stays in that city says, fuck it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
When everybody around him says flee, says everybody around him believes the city will be taken or at least destroyed, leveled, artillery, bombs, all of this, he chooses to stay. You know a lot of leaders. How many leaders would choose to stay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
i've been eating only once a day i think i sometimes make exceptions for that in the social setting so do snacks of all kinds it really doesn't matter so it's not super super strict but it just makes me happy so eating once a day mostly meat very low carb if you want to do that right the fasting or the low carb stuff you really want to make sure you get your electrolytes right sodium potassium magnesium all that kind of stuff so
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, there's military answers to that, which is urban warfare is extremely difficult. Do you think that Putin wants to take Kiev? No, I do think he expects Zelensky to flee and somebody else to come into power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, that's why it's interesting that he didn't really bring up NATO extensively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yes, that was a failure. But it doesn't mean you can't have a success over and over and over, keep having negotiations between leaders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Element really helps with that, especially because it's delicious. Also, it helps you drink a lot of water. So I take one of those Powerade bottles. That has how many? Let me see. 28 fluid ounces. Fill it up with water, put it in the fridge so it's cold, and then put one packet of watermelon salt in there and shake it up, and it's ready to go. It's delicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, and I actually, having had a bunch of conversations with people who are living in Russia, they also believe it. Now, there's technicalities here, which the word Nazi, World War II is deeply in the blood of a lot of Russians and Ukrainians. So you're using it as almost a political term. The way it's used in the United States also, like racism and all this kind of stuff,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Because you know you can really touch people if you use the Nazi. I think that's totally right. But it's also, to me, a really disgusting thing to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Because, and also to clarify, there is neo-Nazi movements in Ukraine. They're just very small. You're saying that there's this distinction between Nazi and neo-Nazi, sure, but it's a small percentage of the population, a tiny percentage that have no power in government. As far, I have seen no data to show they have any influence on Zelensky and Zelensky government at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So really, when Putin says denazification, I think he means nationalist movements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
What troubled me about that is because he said that that's the primary objective currently for the war. And that, because it's not grounded in reality, it makes it difficult to then negotiate peace. Because like, what... what does it mean to get rid of the Nazis in Ukraine? So he'll come to the table and say, well, okay, I will agree to do ceasefire once the Nazis are gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay, so can you list the Nazis?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You can get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, our old, old friend AG1. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I suppose it's becoming a meme how much I and other friends of mine are loving AG1. Andrew Huberman, who I love, also loves AG1. I don't know. It's delicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It was very strange, but maybe it was perhaps had to do with speaking to his own population and also probably trying to avoid the use of the word NATO. as the justification for the war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, and you said some of this also in your post-Kremlin discussion while you're in Moscow still, which was very impressive to me that you can just openly criticize. This is great. Well, I don't care. I understand this. I just wish you did some more of that also with the supermarket video and perhaps some more of that with Putin in front of you. Putin in front of me. I'm such a good person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I know you see it as virtue signaling. Yeah, it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yes, I understand. So I think you're just so annoyed about how bad journalists are that you just didn't want to be them. Yeah, that's probably right, actually. Some great conversations will involve some challenging, like you were confused about denazification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you mentioned there's a bunch of conspiracy theories about Putin's health. How was he in person? Like, what did he feel like? Did he look healthy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You mean like visual purposes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
He's like almost 20 years older than me. He looked younger than me. What was that like, the conversation off camera? Like you walking around with him? What was the content of the conversation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It makes me feel like there's at least something in my life I'm not messing up. So it's a safe place I return to for grounding. So whatever crazy diet stuff I do, whatever crazy mental, physical stuff I do, I know I can at least get my nutrition right. The vitamins and all that kind of stuff, get that right. It's basically a fancy multivitamin. But it's a super awesome multivitamin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Who do you think is behind it? If you were to analyze, like zoom out, looking at the entirety of human history, the military industrial complex, you said Kamala Harris. Is it individuals? Is it like this collective flock that people are just pro-war as a collective?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And it's a delicious one. I don't know what else to say. You should be consuming a multivitamin, and this is the best by far that you can do. But for me, I don't know, in terms of physical and mental health, it really just makes me happy. Maybe it'll make you happy as well. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So you actually have mentioned this, it's not just the Cold War, it's World War II that populates most of their thinking in Washington. You mentioned Churchill, Chamberlain, and Hitler, and they kind of, seeing the World War II as kind of the good war and the successful role the United States played in that war, they're kind of seeing that dynamic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
that geopolitical dynamic and applying it everywhere else still?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I will talk to Putin and to Zelensky, to Trump and to Biden, to Tucker and to Jon Stewart, AOC, Obama, and many more people with very different views on the world. I want to understand people and ideas. That's what long-form conversations are supposed to be all about. Now, for people who criticize me for not asking tough questions, I hear you, but again, I disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tucker Carlson. What was your first impression when you met Vladimir Putin for the interview?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Since we're on the time period, let me ask you a kind of almost cliche question, but it applies to you, which you've interviewed a lot of world leaders. If you had the chance to interview Hitler in 39, 40, 41, first of all, would you do it and how would you do it? I assume you would do it given who you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I mean, your energy with Putin, for example, was such that it felt like he could trust you. I felt like he could tell you a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think it was extremely, like, we have to acknowledge how important that interview was for the record and for opening the door for conversation. Right. Like opening the door to conversation literally is the path to like more conversations and peace, peace talks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So Putin's folks have shown interest for quite a while to speaking with me. So you've spoken with him. What advice would you give? Oh, do it immediately. How's your Russian, by the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, fluent. So it would most likely be in Russian. So that's the other thing is, I do have a question about language barriers. Did you feel it was annoying?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's not whining. Can you actually describe the technical details of that? Are you hearing concurrently, like at the same time? Yes, but there's a massive lag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Plus conversation. So the chemistry of conversation, the humor, the wit, the play with words, all this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And we should say that you've met a lot of world leaders. Both Zelensky and Putin are intelligent, witty, even funny. Yes. So like there's a depth to the person that can be explored through a conversation just on that element, the linguistic element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But Zelensky is, I think. No, he is, well, he's better than Putin at English, but he's still the humor, like the intelligence, all of that is not quite there in English. He says simple points, but the guy's a comedian, and he's a comedian primarily in Russian, the Russian language. So the Ukrainian language is now used mostly primarily as a kind of symbol of independence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And he is, you know, really his native language is Russian language. Of course. A lot of people in Ukraine. But you can also understand his position that he might not want to be speaking Russian publicly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But for interview itself, is there advice you have about how to carry an interview? It is fundamentally different when you do it in the native language, but... Yes, I mean, I think...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
In your case, I think the very fact of the interview was the most important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to open with a crazy guy. No, I know. With humor. I know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It doesn't. Oh, yeah. And there'll be a small delay where you have to wait for the joke to see if it lands or not. This is not America. At Fox, you were, for a time, the most popular host. After Fox, you've garnered a huge amount of attention as well. Same, probably more. Do you worry that popularity and just that attention gets to your head? Is it kind of drug that clouds your thinking?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But he was also probably prepared to give you a full lesson in history, as he did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I hope those two things aren't coupled, technological advancement and the erosion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, conclusive is a tough thing. Pretty conclusively. That we can brag about? I think, well, you've criticized Google Search recently, but I think making the world knowledge accessible to anyone anywhere across the world through Google Search
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
No, I don't know. I think they are more informed. It's just revealing the ignorance. The internet has revealed the ignorance that people have, but I think the ignorance has been decreasing gradually. If you look, even you can criticize places like Wikipedia a lot. And very many aspects of Wikipedia are very biased.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But when you, most of it are actually topics that don't have any bias in them because they're not political or so on. There's no battle over those topics. And most of Wikipedia is like the fastest way to learn about a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And, I mean, your fundamental worry is the same kind of thing might be happening or will happen in the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I've seen a lot of increased distrust in science, which is deserved in many places. It just worries me because some of the greatest inventions of humanity come from science and technological innovation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
At best, perhaps. But technology is the very tool which will allow us to have that kind of discourse to figure out, to do science better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Indisputably, you have a presumption, we have a good definition of what beauty is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
there's other sources of prettiness and beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But also there could be... I grew up in the pre-internet age. Good. Good. But if you grew up in the internet age, I think your eyes would be more open to beauty that's digital, that is in the digital world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I could also argue that, you know, I'm a big sucker for bridges and modern bridges can give older bridges that run for their money, but I like bridges too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
And so what is that? And the other question is also consider that whatever is creating this technology is unstoppable. Well, there's that. And the question is like, how do you steer it then? You have to look in a realist way at the world and say that if you don't, somebody else will. And you want to do it in a safe way. I mean, this is the Manhattan Project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
No. For me, it's an easy call in retrospect. In retrospect, yes. Because it seems like it stopped world wars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You saying 79 makes it sound like you're counting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
if I knew my skills with a gun, because he already has a gun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I just like this picture. Am I wearing a cowboy hat? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Okay, great. I like this picture. I think about this a lot now. uh yeah i understand your point but also the i think that metaphor falls apart if uh there's um if there's other nations at play here so if the same as with the nuclear bomb if u.s doesn't build it will other nations build it the soviet union build it china or nazi germany
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's not so obvious to me. What I'm terrified about is probably a similar thing that you're terrified about, is using that technology to manipulate people's minds. that's much more reasonable to me as an expectation. A real threat that's possible in the next few years. But what matters more than that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, I think that could lead to destruction of human civilization through other humans, for example, starting nuclear wars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I think we will forever fight against the dying of the light as the entirety of the civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, I, in the same way, hope to be a dad one day. You should have a ton of kids. Are you going to have a ton of pups? Five, oh, pup? You mean like kids? Yes, fives. But also I've been thinking of getting a dog. But unrelated, I would love to have like five or six kids, yeah, for sure. Have you found a victim yet? A victim? You make it sound so romantic, Tucker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, 100%. But also, in terms of being humble, I do jiu-jitsu. It's a martial art where you get your ass kicked all the time. I love that. It's nice to get your ass kicked. Physical humbling is... Unlike anything else, I think, because we're kind of monkeys at heart and just getting your ass kicked is really helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Let me ask you, you've been pretty close with Donald Trump. Your private texts about him around the 2020 election were made public. In one of them, you said you passionately hate Trump. When that came out, you said that you actually know you love him. So how do you explain the difference?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Who were you texting to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
You said nice things about me earlier. I'm starting to question. I have questions. I have a lot of questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm going to have to see your texts after this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Nice. You said to some degree the election was rigged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Well, you said he was nervous. Were you nervous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's just true. I think half the country... doesn't think he's senile, just thinks he's speaking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Yeah, I think he just has difficulty speaking. It's like gradual degradation, just getting old. So cognitive ability is degrading. What's the difference between degraded cognitive ability and senility? Well, senility has a threshold. It's beyond the threshold to where he could be a functioning leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm with you. I'm a sucker for great speeches and for speaking abilities of leaders and Biden with two wars going on and potentially more, the importance of a leader to speak eloquently both privately in a room with other leaders and publicly is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
Those are the choices we have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So why you have on the Democratic side, you have Dean Phillips, you have R.K. Jr. until recently, I guess he's independent. And then you have Vivek who are all younger people. Yeah. Why did they not connect to a degree to where- It's such an interesting, I mean, I-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So now a vote for Trump is a kind of fuck you to the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
It's good that you took a stand on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
So speaking of the Justice Department, CIA and intelligence agencies of that nature, which you've been traveling quite a bit, probably tracked by everybody, which is the most powerful intelligence agency, do you think? CIA? Mossad? MI6? SVR, keep going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I do often ask tough questions, but I try to do it in a way that doesn't shut down the other person, putting them into a defensive state where they give only shallow talking points. Instead, I'm looking always for the expression of genuinely held ideas, and the deep roots of those ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
I'm doing an Israel-Palestine debate next week. But I have to ask you just your thoughts, maybe even from a U.S. perspective, what do you think about Hamas attacks on Israel? What would be the right thing for Israel to do? And what's the right thing for U.S. to do in this? Looking at the geopolitics of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#414 – Tucker Carlson: Putin, Navalny, Trump, CIA, NSA, War, Politics & Freedom
But it also is a place, like you said, where things are boiling over and it could spread across multiple nations into a major military conflict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The following is a debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny, each arguably representing the right and the left of American politics, respectively. They are two of the most influential and skilled political debaters in the world. This debate has been a long time coming, for many years. It's about 2.5 hours, and we could have easily gone for many more, and I'm sure we will. It is only round one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I think like a lot of things, it's just easier to do a thing every day than like five times a week. Because if it's every single day, it's just there. You can't escape the day without doing it, and it somehow makes it easier to do it. Anyway, I do AG1 twice a day, once after the workout. You should try it out. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This episode is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. When I'm thinking about life insurance, I'm thinking about three things. First, the stoics and meditating on your mortality. Second, Matthew Cox, that episode I just did where he tried selling insurance. That was the first thing he tried to make his dad proud. And then that didn't really work out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As we descend from the heavens of philosophical discussion of conservatism and liberalism, let's go to the pragmatic muck of politics. Trump versus Biden, between the two of them, who was in their first term the better president? And thus, who should win if the two of them are, in fact, our choices should win a second term in 2024? Ben?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So he went to mortgage fraud. So you should definitely listen to that episode. It's a fascinating one. And then the third thing I think about is Better Call Saul, which is a show that I finally, finally started watching. And it's incredible. Dare I say, it might actually be better than Breaking Bad, the original show, from which it's a spinoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That might be the only spinoff show in the history of television that is better than the original. I know, strong words, but it's damn good. Anyway, that guy makes me think of sales and selling insurance and so on. Anyway, back to the first point, which is meditating on your mortality. And you should meditate on your mortality for philosophical and psychological purposes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
But for pragmatic purposes, you should also actualize that into getting some insurance. And you could do that easily, efficiently, in a modern way with Policy Genius. You can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million in coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Can you comment on the foreign policy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
That's a lot from both. Do you want to pick at something where you disagree with here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Head to policygenius.com slash Lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've used them for many years to protect myself on the internet. Everybody should be using a VPN and ExpressVPN is the one I stand behind. There's a big sexy button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
It used to be red. I think it's a different color now. Let me see. It's like the power symbol is red and glowing from different colors into maroon, magenta. It's like modernized. I get it. You got to update with the times. It's still sexy, though. Not crude, bold, simple red. It's more like fluorescent-like. It's funny when companies change the look of things to make it seem and feel updated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG1 for health, Policy Genius for insurance, ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the interwebs, and Insight Tracker for biological data that leads to health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
For example, Google. It works. I get it. But I still a little bit miss the old Google logo. Just like that ghetto HTML look from the early, early days. It still works. I don't know. The simplicity of that. There's a kind of authenticity there. to how crappy that Google logo looked. Anyway, and there is the old times with ExpressVPN. I've been with them forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I mean, long, long, long before they were a sponsor. I've used them. I've loved them. They brought joy to my heart. Anyway, you too can share in the joy by going to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
This episode is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to collect information from my body via blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, to then make lifestyle and dietary recommendations on how I can be a better version of myself. Just imagine the raw sensory waterfall of data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
coming from the human body and using that data through the very kinds of neural nets that are being used in large language models. to make predictions, recommendations, summarization, sort of integrating, simplifying all of that data that's not human interpreted at all and making it human interpretable. That's the future. Anyway, Insight Tracker's taking steps towards that future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the proof is in the pudding. Before we go to Ukraine, can I ask about Israel? So you're both mostly in agreement, but what is Israel- I don't know if I'd say that. Okay, but as I'm learning, what is Israel doing right? What is Israel doing wrong in this very specific current war in Gaza?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
The very basic thing is you should be making decisions about your life in part using data that comes from your own, very own body. That's what Insight Tracker can help you with. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsightTracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Is there a difference between Palestinian citizens and the leadership when you say that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro and destiny. Ben, you're a conservative. Destiny, you're a liberal. Can you each describe what key values underpin your philosophy on politics and maybe life in the context of this left-right political spectrum? You want to go first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Do you have a disagreement with what Destiny said?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And do you think Trump would have helped push that piece?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. Or if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
So Ben said a lot there. Do you disagree with any aspect on the Ukraine side that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben, what do you think it means to be a conservative? What's the philosophy that underlies your political view?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Quick pause, bathroom break. One of the big issues in this presidential election is gonna be January 6th. It's in the news now and I think it's gonna get, become bigger and bigger and bigger. So question for Destiny first. Did Donald Trump incite an insurrection on January 6th, 2021?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You think he should be on the ballot? You think there's a case to be made to remove him from the ballot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I like that you both said 100% chance that Trump will try to go for third term and 0% chance, which statistically- Third term, he's done, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, recently in the news, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT failed to fully denounce calls for genocide. And that rose questions about the influence of DEI programs at universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And so maybe either looking at this or zooming out more broadly at identity politics at universities or identity politics, wokeism in our culture, how big of a threat is it to our culture, to Western civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I have to be honest, I ran out of it two days ago. It was one of those moments when you realize how big of a part of your life a thing is. you really do realize that when a thing is gone, most intensely, most viscerally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Maybe it would be good to get your comments, your old stomping ground Harvard. Do you think the president of Harvard should have been fired?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
You guys probably agree on a lot of this, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I got my education in the Soviet Union, so we just did math.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Destiny the uniter. Wow. Like Biden.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
As we approach the end, let us descend into the meme further and further. Ben, you're in a monogamous marriage. Destiny, you've been mostly in an open marriage until recently. How foundational is marriage, monogamous marriage, to the United States of America? Can open marriages work? Are they harmful to society?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Destiny, what do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Rapid fire questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, we could talk about religion, but that's not rapid fire at all. Let me ask, this is from the internet, does body count matter? Jesus Christ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Okay. Should porn be banned? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
I can't believe I'm asking this question. Is OnlyFans empowering or destructive for women?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Is rap music?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Have you evolved on this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
All right, you're both world-class debaters, even public intellectuals, if I can say that. Yeah, I know. I'm going real hard here. I know. You both care about the truth. What is your process of arriving at the truth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And the Daily Wire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And if you're feeling frisky, then watch Destiny as well. You've talked about having a conversation debating Ben for a long time. What is your favorite thing about Ben Shapiro?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Ben, you've gotten a chance to talk to Destiny now. What do you like about the guy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Well, gentlemen, this was incredible. It's an honor. Thank you for doing this today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
Thanks for listening to this debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Aristotle. The basis of a democratic state is liberty. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#410 – Ben Shapiro vs Destiny Debate: Politics, Jan 6, Israel, Ukraine & Wokeism
And it's actually the little things that form the foundation of a peaceful existence, those little rituals, those little habits, those little comforts, they make life so at once mundane, And at the same time, just perfect. Just right. Anyway, I've recently been doing daily exercise of some sort. So it's either grappling, running, or weightlifting. One of those. And at least one hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
The following is a conversation with Bill Ackman, a legendary activist investor who has been part of some of the biggest and at times controversial trades in history. Also, he is fearlessly vocal on X, FKA, Twitter, and uses the platform to fight for ideas he believes in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
like UMG, able to adjust to such transformations? One, I could ask you about the future, which is artificial intelligence, being able to generate music, for example. There have been a lot of amazing advancements. So do you have to also think about that? When you close your eyes, all the things you think about, are you imagining the possible ways that the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I still have hope. I think universities are really important institutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Nary Oxman, somebody you mentioned several times throughout this podcast, somebody I had a wonderful conversation with, a friendship with, I've known, looked up to her, admired her, has been a fan, I've been a fan of hers for a long time, of her work, and of her as a human being. Looks like you're a fan of hers as well. What do you love about Nary?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What do you admire about her as a scientist, artist, human being?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So she's been a help to you through some of the rough moments you described? For sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there some degree of yin and yang with the two personalities you have? You have described yourself as emotional and so on, but it does seem the two of you have slightly different styles about how you approach the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, you are constantly in multiple battles at the same time, and there's often the media, social media, it's just fire everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
When you go to a particular restaurant, or you go into an ice cream shop, or you go to the grocery store aisle with the delicious snacks, and you know exactly which snack you're getting. I have that. There's these chips that have very low carbs in them. And there's a lot of different kinds. But there's a particular kind I really like and a particular flavor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I don't know, there's a lot of things I want to say, but you made it pretty clear, but just as a member of the community There's also like a common sense test. I think you're more precisely like legal and looking at, but there's just like a bullshit test and like nothing that Nary did is plagiarism in the bad meaning of the word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Plagiarism right now is becoming another ism like racism or so on using as an attack word. I don't care what the meaning of it is, but there's the bad academic fraud, like theft. Theft of an idea. And maybe you can say a lot of definitions and this kind of stuff, but then there's just a basic bullshit test where everyone knows this is a thief and this is definitely not a thief.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And there's nothing about anything that Neri did, anything in her thesis or in her life, everyone that knows her, she's a rock star, right? I just want to make it clear, it really hurt me that the internet, whatever is happening, could go after, could go after a great scientist, because I love science, and I love celebrating great scientists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And it's just really messed up that whatever the machine, and we could talk about business insight or whatever, social media, mass hysteria, whatever is happening, we need the great scientists of the world, because that's like the future depends on them. And so we need to celebrate them and protect them and let them flourish and let them do their thing and keep them out
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
of this whatever shitstorm that we're doing to get clicks and advertisements and drama and all this, we need to protect them. So I just wanna say there's nobody I know and a million friends that are scientists, world-class scientists, Nobel Prize winners, they all love Neri, they all respect Neri. She did zero wrong, I just wanna.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And then the rest of the conversation we're going to have about how broken journalism is and so on. But, like, I just want to say that there's nothing that Nary did wrong. It's not a gray area or so on. I also personally don't love that Claudine Gay –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
is a discussion about plagiarism because it distracts from the fundamentals that is broken um this becomes like some weird technical discussion but in case of nary did nothing wrong great scientist great engineer at mit and beyond she's doing the cool thing now so anyway could not have said it better myself obviously i'm focused on the technical part
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And I actually think AI is not going to be the primary creator of music. I think we're going to actually face the reality that it's not that music has been around for thousands of years, but musicians and music has been around. We actually care to know who's the musician that created it. Just like we wanna know who's the artist, human artist that created a piece of art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you're, at least for now, moving forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I don't know much in this world, but journalists aren't supposed to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It is true, and you're doing your job as a good partner, seeing the silver lining of all of this. How is, just from observing her, how did she stay strong through all of this psychologically? Because at least I know she's pushing ahead with the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, my worry primarily when I saw what Business Insider was doing is that they might dim the light of a truly special scientist and creator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But I also worry about others...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I'll just say that you in this regard are inspiring to me for facing basically an institution that's whole purpose is to write articles. So you're like going into the fire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you think X... formerly known as Twitter as a kind of neutralizing force to that, to the power of centralized journalistic institutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I have to talk to you about politics. Sure. Amongst all the other battles, you've also been a part of that one. Maybe you can correct me on this, but you've been a big supporter of various Democratic candidates over the years. But you did say a lot of nice things about Donald Trump in 2016, I believe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yes. So what was the case back then? And to which degree did that turn out to be true? And to which degree did it not? To which degree was he a good president? To which degree was he not a good president?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Unless that computer has... human-like sentience, which I believe is a real possibility, but then it's really, from a business perspective, no different than a human. If it has an identity, that's basically fame and an influence, and there'd be a robot Taylor Swift, and it doesn't really matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Right, yeah. Not sure that's the world I'm excited about. That's a different discussion. The world is not going to ask your permission to become what it's becoming. But you can still make money on it. Presumably there'd be a capital system and there'd be some laws under which I believe AI systems will have rights that are akin to human rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Or you might be torn because both candidates are not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you want to, I love a future where I'm torn because the choices are so amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And we're going to have to contend with what that means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You've been a supporter of Dean Phillips for the 2024 US presidential race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What do you like about Dean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So he has to increase name recognition, all that kind of stuff. Also, as you mentioned, he's young. Yeah, he's 55, but he's a young 55.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I mean, I guess 55, no matter what, is a pretty young age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So that's a standard. You're at the top of your tennis game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I got a chance to chat with Dean. I really like him. I really like him. And I think the next president of the United States is going to have to meet and speak regularly with Zelensky, Putin, and Yahoo, with world leaders, and have... some of the most historic conversations, agreements, negotiations, and I just don't see Biden doing that. And not for any reason, but sadly, age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Let me look to the future. First, in terms of the financial world, what are you looking forward to in the next couple of years? Do you have a new fund? What are you thinking about in terms of investment, your own and the entire economy, and maybe even the economy of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the hamburger and fries are forever. I was eating at Chipotle last night as I was preparing these notes. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, it is one of my favorite places to eat. You said it is a place that you eat. You obviously also invest in it. What do you get at Chipotle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But I'm not ready to reveal what the brand or the flavor is to maintain a sense of mystery about my life. But more honestly, because I don't actually remember. I just remember the color. Anyway, that's me with watermelon salt and element. It's delicious. I have found the thing I need in my life, especially when I'm fasting or doing low-carb stuff. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you have hope for the entirety of it, even for Harvard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, I share your hope, and you're a fascinating mind, a brilliant mind, persistent, as you like to say, and fearless. The fearless part is truly inspiring, and this was an incredible conversation. Thank you. Thank you for talking today, Bill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bill Ackman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Jonathan Swift. A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And I'm more of a steak guy, just putting that on the record. What's the actual process you go through? Like, literally, like- the process of figuring out what the value of a company is. Like, how do you do the research? Is it reading documents? Is it talking to people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So in the case of Chipotle, for example, by the way, I could talk about Chipotle all day. I just love it. I love it. I wish there was a sponsor. I'll mention it to the CEO. Don't make promises you can't keep, Bill. I'm not making promises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
All right. All I want is free Chipotle. Come on now. What was I saying? Oh, and so you look at a company like Chipotle, and then you see there's a difficult moment in its history, like you said, that there was a food safety issue, and then you say, okay, well, I see a path where we can fix this, and therefore, even though the price is low, we can get it to where the price goes up to its value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for all kinds of insurance, life insurance, auto insurance, home insurance, disability insurance. They have really nice tools for comparison. This is the thing I need in my life for everything. This is where the good aspect of capitalism can come in, where you have freely competing entities
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You said that barriers to entry. You said a lot of really interesting qualities of companies very quickly in a sequence of statements that took less than 10 seconds to say. But some of them were fascinating. All of them were fascinating. So you said barriers to entry. How do you know if there's a type of moat protecting the competitors from stepping up to the plate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So if the restaurant has scaled to a certain number, that means they've figured out some kind of system that works. It's very difficult to develop that kind of system. So that's a moat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Burger King, okay, wow. It's been a meme for a while, but I've... Burger King is great too, Wendy's, whatever. But usually I go McDonald's. I'll just eat burger patties. I don't know if you knew you could do this, but a burger patty at Burger King can do this. McDonald's, it's actually way cheaper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
The patty. And it's cheap. It's like $1.50 or $2 per patty. And it's about 250 calories and it's just meat. And despite the criticism and memes out there, that's... Pretty healthy stuff. It's healthy stuff. And so when I go, the healthiest I feel is when I do carnivore. It doesn't sound healthy, but if I eat only meat, I feel really good. I lose weight. I have all this energy. It's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Honestly competing. Transparent with full information available to the consumer where they get to choose. And choose honestly based on well-defined, clear, full set of parameters. All right? I love it. I need that for... other things I'm doing in my life. I need that for everything. In fact, going back to the other thing I mentioned, I need that for ice cream.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And when I'm traveling, the easiest way to get meat is that. So you go to McDonald's, you order six patties? Exactly. So there's this sad meme of me just sitting alone in a car when I'm traveling, just eating beef patties at McDonald's. But I love it. And you got to do what you love, what makes you happy. And that's what makes me happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
For example, he was a central figure in the resignation of the president of Harvard University, Claude Dean Gay, the saga of which we discuss in this episode. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Wait, is this like fast food trash? I didn't know. I don't know the details of how they're made. I don't have allegiance to McDonald's. I think we got a chance to switch you to Burger King. Great. We'll see. Yeah. I'm making so many deals today. It's wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You were talking about most, and this kind of reminded me of Alphabet, the parent company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So it's interesting that you think that maybe Alphabet fits some of these characteristics. Yeah. It's tricky to know with everything that's happening in AI. And I'm interviewing Sundar Pichai soon. It's interesting that you think that there's a moat. And it's also interesting to analyze it because the consumer is just a fan of technology. Why is Google still around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It's not just the search engine. It's doing it all online. the basics of the business of search really well, but they're doing all these other stuff. So what's your analysis of Alphabet? Why are you still positive about it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I need a full, detailed comparison of the different flavors. I also need data on who enjoyed which flavor throughout human history. I'm not talking about just that ice cream shop. Across all ice cream shops, I want the data. And I don't just want the mean or the median, because that's going to end up on vanilla or chocolate, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there something fundamentally different about AI that makes all of this more complicated, which is the sort of the exponential possibilities of the kinds of products and impact that AI could create when you're looking at Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Google, all of these companies, XAI. or maybe startups? Is there some more risk introduced by the possibilities of AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I want the clusters, and I want to know which cluster I belong to. I want the data. Anyway, so the tools that allow you to explore the parameters are very important, and that's what Policy Genius provides. With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, Google was pretty fat and happy until Chagipati came out. How would you rate their ability to wake up, lose weight, and be less happy and aggressively rediscover their... search for happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And Demis Hassab has thrown them into the picture and all of DeepMind teams and the unification of teams and all the shakeups. It was interesting to watch the chaos. I love it. I love it when everybody freaks out. Like you said, partly embarrassment and partly that competitive drive that drives engineers is great. I can't wait to see what, there's been just a lot of improvement in the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Let's see where it goes. You mentioned management. How do you analyze the governance structure and the individual humans that are the managers of a company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Head to PolicyGenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink that I drink to support better health and peak performance. The degree to which I love AG1 and my very good close friend Andrew Huberman loves AG1 has become a meme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Are we talking about CEO, COO? What does management mean? How deep does it go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You mentioned Warren Buffett. You said you admire him as an investor. What do you find most interesting and powerful about his approach? What aspects of his approach to investing do you also practice?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You've been a part of some big battles, some big losses, some big wins. So it's been a roller coaster. So in terms of temperament, psychologically, how do you not let that break you? How do you maintain a calm demeanor and avoid running with the lemmings?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So psychologically, just as a human being. speaking of lions and gazelles and all this kind of stuff, is there some, is it as simple as just being financially secure? Is there some just human qualities that you have to be born with slash develop?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And, you know, every meme is grounded in reality and truth. And my truth is that it just brings me happiness. You know, in days like I talk about in this episode, where all I eat is some McDonald's beef patties, it just brings me both sort of physiological and psychological comfort, knowing that I have at least some of the nutritional bases covered. Meat does make me feel good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
No. So being emotional, do you want to respond to volatility?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I think we'll talk about some of that. Financially secure is something I believe also recommend for even just everyday investors. Is there some general advice there? from the things you've been talking about that applies to everyday investors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So be able to think long-term and be sufficiently financially secure such that you can afford to think long-term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah. So you mentioned eight companies, but what do you think about mutual funds that are for everyday investors that diversify across a larger number of companies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, index funds. But what would be the leap for an everyday investor to go to investing in a small number of companies, like two, three, four, five companies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But your body probably needs a lot of other stuff, especially for long-term longevity and long-term health and flourishing. But, of course, in the long term, we're all driving towards a cliff. And one day, too soon, we'll be driving off that cliff, hopefully with a smile. and maybe on that day I will also be drinking AG1. I drink it twice a day now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, it's interesting. Consumers that love a thing are actually good analysts of that thing, or I guess a good starting point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I'm just afraid if I invest in Chipotle, I'll be like analyzing every little change of menu from a financial perspective and just be very critical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, I mean, I should also say that I am somebody that emotionally doesn't respond to volatility, which is why I've never bought index funds. And I just noticed myself psychologically being affected by the ups and downs of the market. I want to tune out because if I'm at all tuned in, it has a negative impact on my life. Yeah, that's really important. Can you explain what activist investing is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You've been talking about investing and then looking at companies when they're struggling, stepping in and reconfiguring things within that company and helping it become great. So that's part of it, but let's just zoom out. What's this idea of activist investing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It's actually one of my favorite ways to take a break. I just sit on the couch and sip, listen to this peaceful kind of music, and just think, prepare my mind for the work ahead. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod 3 mattress. It controls temperature with a nap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So the owners meaning the shareholders. Yes. And so there's a more direct channel of communication with activist investing between the shareholders and the people running the company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It can cool you down to as low as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. But you're going to need the next sponsor if you're the kind of person that puts it up to 110 degrees. I have a lot of questions. Next sponsor is about to help, by the way. 110 degrees, I just have questions. I think I saw a social media post from Tim Kennedy saying, when you're alone, that guy's a poet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So the running of a company is, according to Bill Ackman, is more democratic now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So on average, is it good to have such an engaged, powerful, influential investor helping direct the direction of a company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
We got Element for delicious electrolytes, Policy Genius for insurance, AG1 for overall delicious health, Aidsleep for naps, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So that's the good story, but can it get bad? Can you have a... a CEO who is a visionary and sees the long-term future of a company, and an investor come in and have very selfish interest in just making more money in the short-term, and therefore destroy and manipulate the opinions of the shareholders and other people on the board in order to sink the company,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
maybe increase the price, but destroy the possibility of long-term value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So people are generally skeptical, short-term activist investors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You mentioned general growth. I read somewhere it called arguably one of the best hedge fund trades of all time. So I guess it went from $60 million to over $3 billion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Can you describe what went into making that decision to actually increase the value of the company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Also, he's insane on the mat. Anyway, he was posting, I think, on Instagram that when you're alone, the only correct temperature to exist in is 60 degrees, 58 degrees, something like this. Basically, he likes it freezing. And I can somewhat agree, especially on the surface of the bed. Cold bed, warm blanket, that's just the best way to take a nap. I need to go see Tim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Training Jiu-Jitsu with him is really fun. But he goes pretty intense. That guy lives life on 11. Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Spelled H-E-L-P-E-H-E-L-P. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What gave you confidence through that? Once a penny stock and I'm sure you were getting a lot of naysayers and people saying that this is crazy. It's the same thing. You just do the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
How hard is it to learn some of the legal aspects of this? Like you mentioned bankruptcy code. Like I imagine it's very sort of dense language and dense ideas and the loopholes and all that kind of stuff. Like if you're just stepping in and you've never done distressed investing, how hard is it to figure out? It's not that hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you were able to pick up the intuition from that, just all the basic skills involved, the basic facts to know, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Individual or couples, it's easy, discreet, affordable, available anywhere. Listen, this is the easiest way to start talking and start diving deep. into the recesses of your subconscious mind. I'm a huge fan of talk therapy, of talking, talking rigorously, talking like it's an important thing with a goal in mind, like you're digging for something. That's what I try to do with this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Okay, we'll probably talk about Rockefeller Center and some failures. But first, you said Fox in the hen house. Yes. Something that the board and the chairman were worried about. Why would they call you a fox? So you keep saying... Activist investing is nothing to worry about. It's always good. Sure. Mostly good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But, you know, that expression applied in this context, you know, they were still worried about that. Sure. And so, I mean, there's a million questions here. But first of all, what is the process of getting on the board look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What's this proxy contest slash battle idea? What's that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
That's what I try to do with conversations In my private life, when I'm just sitting there at a coffee shop and a stranger sits down and says hello, I'm not a licensed therapist. Neither is the other person. We're just there for an open mic or a music thing or whatever the hell. We're amateur. We're amateur therapists of each other. Anyway, you should work with professionals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So also some stuff that's public, like in the press and all this kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So you're saying the fat and happy hens can get very wolf-like when the fox is trying to break in? Is this how we extend the metaphor? Well, the fox is a threat to the hens. Yeah. Yeah. But you're, you've just, the charismatic fox just explained to me why the fox is good for everybody in the hen house.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
What was the most dramatic battle for the board that you have been a part of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And that's what BetterHelp provides. The whole point is they make it easy. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bill Ackman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And this is where the engine starts churning to figure out how this contest can be won. So what's involved?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So on this one, you were right. Yes. And I read an article about you, and there's many articles about you. I read an article that said Bill is often right, but you approach it with a scorched earth approach that can often do more, sort of can do damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
On a small tangent, since we're talking about boards, Did you get a chance to see what happened with the OpenAI board? Because I'm talking to Sam Altman soon. Is there any insight you have, just maybe lessons you draw from this kind of, these kinds of events, especially with an AI technology company, such dramatic things happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
In your lecture on the basics of finance and investing, you mentioned a book, Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham as being formative in your life. What key lesson do you take away from that book that informs your own investing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And there's, I guess, some kind of complexity in the governance. I mean, because of this non-profit and cap-profit thing, it seems like there's a bunch of complexity and non-standard aspects to it that perhaps also contributed to the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Can you explain to me the difference between venture-backed VCs and shareholders? So this means before the company goes public?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So we talked about some of the big wins and your track record, but you said there were some big losses. So what's the biggest loss of your career?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I'm sweating this whole conversation, both the wins and the losses and the stakes involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Absolutely. So they use the opportunity of value to try to destroy you. reputation, financially, and then capitalizing to make money off of that. Well, that's a terrifying spot to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So he knew.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And there you were able to protect your reputation from the valiant failure still?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. We love them. I love them. Maybe you will love them too. This episode is brought to you by Element, the thing I'm drinking right now, the thing I drink throughout the day, all days, when I travel, it is forever with me. The only flavor I now acknowledge exists is watermelon salt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So refocus on the fundamentals. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
As a man, that's a difficult phone call to take.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Brad Pitt. And you emerged from all that the winner on all fronts. I'm a very fortunate guy. Very fortunate. And lucky. You talked about some of the technical aspects of that, but psychologically, is there a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
In that same way, there's a kind of difference between speculation and investing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You mentioned Herbalife. Can you take me through the saga of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So he was, we should say, uh, a legendary investor himself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
How do you get to that, this idea called value investing? How do you get to the value of a thing? Even like philosophically, value of anything really, but we can just talk about the things that are on the stock market. Sure. Companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
You actually said, fuck you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It wasn't public information that he was long on Herbalife?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there part of you that regrets saying fuck you on that phone call? To Carl Icahn?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Can you say one thing you really like about Carl Icahn and one thing you really don't like about him? Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there, because at least from the outsider perspective, there's a bit of a personal vengeance here. Or anger can build up. Do you ever worry the personal attacks between powerful investors can cloud your judgment? What is the right financial decision?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Of course, there's more than just investing that your life is about, especially recently. Yeah. Let me just ask you about what's going on in the world first. What was your reaction and what is your reaction and thoughts with respect to the October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So there's several things I can ask here. First, on your views on the prospects of the Middle East, but also on the reaction to this war in the United States, especially on university campuses. So first, let me just ask, you've said that you're pro-Palestinian. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Do you think that's still possible if we look into the future of 10, 20, 50 years from now? Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Take me through the saga of university presidents. testifying on this topic, on the topic of protests on college campuses, protests that call for the genocide of Jewish people, and the university presidents, maybe you could describe it more precisely, but they fail to denounce the calls for genocide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So what are the factors that indicate that a company is going to be something that's going to make a lot of money, it's going to have a lot of value, and it's going to be reliable over a long period of time? And what is your process of figuring out whether a company is or isn't that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
I should mention briefly that I've interviewed on this podcast the founder of FIRE and the current head of FIRE. We've discussed this at length, including... running for the board of Harvard and the whole procedure of all that. It's quite a fascinating investigation of free speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
For people who care about free speech absolutism, that's a good episode to listen to because those folks kind of fight for this idea. It's a difficult idea, actually, to internalize what does free speech in college campuses look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And just to linger on the testimony, you mentioned, you know, smirks and this kind of stuff, and you mentioned dare to be great. I, myself, am kind of a sucker for great leadership. And those moments, you mentioned Churchill or so on, even great speeches, right? People talk down on speeches like it's maybe just words, but I think speeches can define a culture and define
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
a place to find a people that can inspire. And I think actually the testimony before Congress could have been an opportunity to redefine what Harvard is, dare to be great for, dare to be a great leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It's tough because you can get busy as a president, as a leader, and so on. There's these meetings, so you think Congress, maybe you're smirking at the ridiculousness of the meeting. You need to remember... that many of these are opportunities to give a speech of a lifetime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
If there's principles which you want to see an institution become and embody in the next several decades, there's opportunities to do that. And you, as a great leader, also need to have a sense of when is the opportunity to do that. And October 7th really woke up the world on all sides, honestly, like there is serious issue going on here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
And then the protests woke up the university to there's a serious issue going on here. It's an opportunity to speak on free speech and on genocide, both. Do you see the criticism that you are a billionaire donor? and you sort of used your power and financial influence unfairly to affect the governing structure of Harvard in this case?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
There's many other flavors, and other people say they're also delicious. I don't know what they're saying. They probably don't know what they're talking about because the greatest flavor of all time is watermelon salt. Do you ever just go to a thing, to a very particular flavor of a thing, and that becomes your thing? There's never a doubt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there some tension between free speech on college campuses and disciplining students for calls of genocide?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Do you think this reveals a deeper problem in terms of ideology and the governance of Harvard in maybe the culture of Harvard?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So maybe you can speak to that book a little bit. So there's a history that traces back across decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
In the next few years, the infiltration of DEI with the uppercase version of universities and the things that have troubled you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
But I should say, I'm still at MIT, and I love MIT, and I believe in the power of great universities to explore ideas, to inspire young people to think, to inspire young people to lead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yeah, 100% agree. And I also felt like the leadership wasn't even part of the problem as much as they were almost out of touch, like, unaware that this is an important moment, it's an important crisis, it's an important opportunity to step up as a leader and define the future of an institution. So I don't even know where the source of the problem is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
It could be literally governance structure, as we've been talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, luckily, engineering robotics is touched last by this. It is touched, but, you know, when I'm at the computing building, Stata and the new one, politics doesn't infiltrate, or I haven't seen it infiltrate quite as deeply as elsewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So as you said, technically, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, resigned over plagiarism, not over the thing that you were initially troubled by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Well, music is interesting because, yes, music's been around for a very long time, but the way to make money from music has been evolving. Like you mentioned streaming, there's a big transition initiated by, I guess, Napster, then created Spotify, of how you make money on music with Apple and with all of this. And the question is, how well are companies...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
So is there a spectrum for you between different kinds of plagiarism, maybe plagiarizing words and plagiarizing ideas and plagiarizing novel ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech
Is there a part of you that regrets that, at least from the perception of it, the president of Harvard stepped down over plagiarism versus over refusing to say that the calls for genocide are wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The following is a conversation with Peter Levels, also known on X as LevelsIO. He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programmed, shipped, and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful. In most cases, he did it all by himself while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's the latency of that from you pressing command?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you just make a change and then you're getting really good at like not making mistakes basically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't think it's crazy. I mean, I'm sure there's a middle ground, but I think that whole thing where there's a... a phase of like testing and there's the staging and there's a development and then there's like multiple tables and databases that you use for the state. Like it's filing, it's a mess and there's different teams involved. It's no good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I'm like a good, funny extreme on the other side, you know, but just a little bit safer, but not too much. It would be great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I'm sure that's actually like how X, now how they're doing rapid improvement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening. Yes. Bugs are the future because it shows that the team is actually building shit. 100%. One of the problems is like I see with YouTube, there's so much potential to build features, but I just see how long it takes. So I've gotten a chance to interact with many other teams, but one of the teams is MLA, multi-language audio.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But the interesting thing is you've built a lot of successful products and you never really wanted to take it to that level where you scale real big and sell it to a company or something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't know if you know this, but in YouTube, you can have audio tracks in different languages for overdubbing. And that there's a team and not many people are using it, but like every single feature they have to meet and agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like, there's allocate resources, like engineers have to work on it, but I'm sure it's a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval to like, cause it has to not break the rest of the site, whatever they do. But like, if you don't have enough dictatorial, like top down, like we need this now, it's going to take forever to do anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Multilanguage audio, but multilanguage audio is a good example of a thing. that seems niche right now, but it quite possibly could change the entire world. When you have, when I upload this conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consume, every single video can be watched and listened to, in those different, it changes everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this. They got the compute, they got the user base, they got like, they have the experience of how to do this. So like the multi-language audio should be- Hyperactive feature, right? High priority. And it's a way, you know, Google is obsessed with AI right now. They want to show off that they could be dominant in AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's a way for Google to say, like, we used AI. Like, this is a way to break down the walls that language creates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think they're not like selfish or whatever. They want to do good. There's something about the machine. The organizational stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. It requires... Again, I don't know if there must be a nicer word, but like a dictatorial type of top-down, the CEO rolls in and just says like, for you two, it's like MLA, get this done now. This is the highest priority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, again, dictatorial. You basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot. I've seen a lot of leaders do this. Ignore the lawyers. Ignore comms. Ignore PR. Ignore everybody. Give power to the engineers. Listen to the people on the ground. Get this shit done and get it done by Friday. That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just out of curiosity, what IDE do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup. Given how ultra productive you are, I mean, you often program in your underwear, slouching on the couch. Does it matter to you in general? Is there like a specific ID? Do you use VS Code?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's actually interesting. Sublime is the first editor where I've learned that. And I think they just make that super easy. So like, what would that be called? Multi-edit, multi-cursor edit thing, whatever. Yeah. So I'm sure like almost every editor can do that. It's just probably hard to set up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Wow, you know the format C reference, huh?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I don't know if it's peer pressure, but I used Emacs for many, many years. And I love Lisp, so a lot of the customization is done in Lisp. It's a programming language. Partially it was peer pressure, but part of it is realizing you need to keep learning stuff. Same issue with jQuery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I still think I need to learn Node.js, for example, even though that's not my main thing or even close to the main thing. But I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff. And even if you don't choose to use it long-term, you need to give it a chance so your understanding of the world expands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's more about the concepts, I would say, than the actual tools, like expanding. And that can be a challenging thing. So going to VS Code and really learning it, like all the shortcuts, all the extensions, and actually installing different stuff and playing with it, That was an interesting challenge. It was uncomfortable at first. Yeah, for me too, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But would you like, I guess you got to use your own model, which is like build the thing using it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you basically built a framework from scratch. That's your own, you understand it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I guess you should be just learning every single day a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You got to learn how to use the weapons of war and then you can be a peacenik. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, but you gotta learn it in the same exact way as we were talking about, which is learn it by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but like you won't know until you really give it a try. And it feels like you have to build, like if maybe I'm talking to myself, but I should probably... recode like my personal one page in Laravel or, and even though it might not have almost any dynamic elements, maybe have one dynamic element, but it has to go end to end in that framework or like end to end build in Node.js.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Some of it is, I don't, figuring out how to even deploy the thing. I have no idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I actually kind of just gave myself the idea of like, I kind of just want to build a single web page Like one webpage that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every single, like in a lot of frameworks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How long it takes to do it. Yeah, stopwatch. I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do some kind of, thing where it accesses the database and dynamically exchanging stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, maybe some, it doesn't have to be AI or LLM, but maybe API call to something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And like time it and also report on my happiness. Yeah. I'm going to totally do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There's like five main ways of doing it. So there's back-end, front-end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it was interesting how people are pulled towards that, to scale, to go really big. And you don't have that honest reflection with yourself, like what actually makes you happy? Because for a lot of great engineers, what makes them happy is the building, the quote-unquote individual contributor, like where you're actually still coding or you're actually still building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then, but there's not really, you're not really forced to do anything. So like, according to the internet, so like there's no, it's actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things. So like the standard vanilla, like you go to the ice cream shop, there's like a million flavors. I want vanilla. If I've never had ice cream in my life, Can we just like learn about ice cream?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I want vanilla. Nobody actually, sometimes they'll literally name it vanilla, but like, I want to know what's the basic way, but not like dumb, but like the standard canonical. I want to know the dominant way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, maybe LLMs can help. Maybe you should explicitly ask, what is the dominant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I've tried these kinds of things. What happens is, it depends what kind of, if they're like a world-class developer, yes. Oftentimes they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options. So they have this dogmatic like talking down to you, like this is the right way to do it. It's like, no, no, no, we're just like exploring together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay, show me the cool thing you've tried. Which is like, it has to have open-mindedness to like, you know, Node.js is not the right way to do web development. It's like one way. And there's nothing wrong with the old LAMP, PHP, jQuery, vanilla JavaScript way. It just has its pros and cons. And like, you need to know what the pros and cons are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I mean, well, Karpathy... has its own style and is like, I'm not sure he's for everybody, but for example, five-year-old, it depends on the five-year-old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
He's like super technical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And build it from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like top tier, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But he might be anti-framework. Because he built from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. He's like Yuba for AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Maybe we should stay in PHP and like ScriptKitty and the... But you have to... Maybe by learning the framework, you learn what you want to yourself build from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're still a Mac guy. Always a Mac guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And they let go of that, and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have an impact at scale. If you truly believe in a thing you're doing,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Listen, I kind of... You're making me want to switch to Mac. So I either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux. But Windows for most stuff like... or any Adobe products. Well, I guess you could do Mac stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What do you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you use the command line?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I'm in this weird situation where I'm somewhat of a power user in Windows and, let's say, Android. And all the much smarter friends I have are all using Mac and iPhone. And it's like... But you don't want to go through the peer pressure, you know? It's not peer pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like... Like, one of the reasons I want to have kids is that there's a lot of... Like, I would love to have kids as a baseline. But, you know, there's, like, a concern maybe there's going to be a trade-off or all this kind of stuff. But you see, like, these extremely successful, smart people who are friends of mine who have kids and are really happy they have kids. So that's not peer pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's just, like, a strong signal. Yeah, that it works for people. That it works for people. Yeah. And the same thing with Mac. It's like... I don't see... Fundamentally, I don't like closed systems. Fundamentally, I like Windows more because there's much more freedom. Same with Android. There's much more freedom. It's much more customizable. But all the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The cool kids, the smart kids are using Mac and iPhones. Like, all right, I need to really, I need to give it a real chance, especially for development. Since more and more stuff is done in the cloud anyway. Anyway, but it's funny to hear you say all the good stuff started happening. Maybe I'll be like that guy too. When I switched to Mac, all the good stuff started happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but look at the keyboard I use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's one word for it. What's your favorite place to work? On the couch. Does the couch matter? Is the couch your home or is it any couch?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're just doing like this little thing with the thing. Yes. One screen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So... Well, I don't know. This sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me. But I mean, but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. I mean, that's crazy. Command-Tap. You Alt-Op, like Windows Alt-Op, macOS Command-Tap. You switch very fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you have like one, the entire screen is taken up by VS Code, say you're looking at the code and then, and then like if you deploy like a website, you what, switch screens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because I have three screens and two of them are vertical. Yeah. For code, you can see a lot. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's it. There's some aspect of the constraints, which once you get good at it, you can focus your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a good way to put it. I'm suspicious of more. Me too. I'm suspicious of more in all ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Take me through like the perfect ultra productive day in your life. Like, say, like, where you get a lot of shit done. Yeah. Are you... And it's all focused on getting shit done. When are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early, super late?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You said that there's been a few low points in your life. You've been depressed and the building is one of the ways you get out of that. But can you talk to that? Can you take me to that place, that time when you were at a low point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How long are you, like how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer coding?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How many hours are you saying a perfectly productive day you're doing programming? Like if you were like to kill it. Are you doing like all day basically?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I recently tweeted about my belief, as it stands now, that Kamala Harris is not a communist and that Donald Trump is not a fascist. And there's some other nuance in that tweet. And the response I got... the attacks I got from both sides that are very intense, that disagree, were fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture. It's just you. Man, that shit goes crazy. Okay. Because when shit goes crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So let's rewind. Are you still waking up? There's coffee. There's no girlfriend to talk to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So, you're not really working with him, but you're just both working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And what, uh, what music are you listening to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. That's not distracting to your brain. That's amazing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's interesting. Cause I, I, I actually mostly now listen to a brown noise noise. Yeah. Wow. Like pretty loud. Wow. And one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever. So I'm sure to techno, if I actually give it a real chance, my brain would get used to it. But like with noise, what happens is something happens to your brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think there's a science to it, but I don't really care. You just have to be a scientist of one, like study yourself, your own brain. For me, it does something. I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time. After about like a couple of minutes, everything, every distraction just like disappears and it goes like... You can like hold focus on things like really well. It's weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like you can like... really focus on a thing. It doesn't really matter what that is. I think that's what people achieve with meditation. You can focus on your breath, for example, for so long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No. It's just normal brown noise. It's just like, shh. Yeah. White noise, I think, it's the same. It's like pink noise, white noise. Brown noise, I think, it's like bassier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dampened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No sharpness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, brightness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, headphones. Yeah. I actually like walk around in life often with brown noise. Dude, that's like psychopath shit, but it's cool, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps. It drowns out their screams. Jesus Christ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I said too much. Man, I'm going to try Brown Noise. With a murder or for the coding? For the coding, yeah. Okay, good. Try it. Try it. But you have to, like with everything else, give it a real chance. Yeah. I also, like I said, do techno-y type stuff, electronic music on top of the Brown Noise, but then control the speed. because the faster it goes, the more anxiety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So if I really need to get shit done, especially with programming, I'll have a beat. And it's great. It's cool. It's cool to play those little tricks with your mind to study yourself. I usually don't like to have people around because when people, even if they're working, I don't know, I like people too much. They're like interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So they're a source of distraction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think there's an intimacy in being silent together that maybe I'm uncomfortable with. But you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it. Like with close friends to just sit there in silence for long periods of time and like doing a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Elon's like that. And I really like that. You'll ask a question. Like, I don't know. What's a perfectly productive day for you? Like I just asked. And you just sit there for like 30 seconds thinking. Yeah, he thinks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that. I do that as well. And in team setting, when you're thinking, brainstorming, and you allow yourself to just like think in silence. Just like, because even in meetings, people want to talk. It's like, no, you think before you speak and just like, it's okay to be silent together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And if you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas. So, okay, this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in this day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So many truly special artists died when they were 27.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Starting from scratch, creating a new thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains like we showed. Exactly, we can do that. There's a movie about that. With the laptops. They didn't do much programming though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's a balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What about sleep, naps and all that? You're not sleeping much?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, me, I love naps. I don't care. I don't know. I don't know why. Brain shuts off, turns on. I don't know if it's healthy or not. It just works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think with anything, mental, physical, you have to be a student of your own body and know what the limits are. You have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general, because a lot of the advice is just a good baseline for the general population. But then you have to become a student of your own body, of your own self, of how you work. I've done a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For me, fasting was an interesting one because I used to eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy because everybody says that you have to eat kind of a lot, multiple meals a day. But I realized I can get much stronger, feel much better if I eat once or twice a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Let me just ask you, it'd be interesting if you can comment on some of the other products you've created. We talked about Nomad List, Interior AI, Photo AI, Therapist AI. What's Remote OK?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's just focused on remote only. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I got to ask you about back to the digital nomad life. Yeah. You wrote a blog post on the reset and in general, like just giving away everything, living a minimalist life. Yeah. What did it take to do that? Like to get rid of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just to meet people that want your shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's the weirdest thing you had to sell and you had to find a buyer for? Not the weirdest, but what's memorable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Who bought it? Do you remember? It was some guy who couldn't possibly understand that. The journey. Motion of it. Yeah. Yeah. You just showed up here. Here's the money. Thanks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I think it's beautiful. I did that twice in my life. Give away everything, everything, everything like down to just pants, underwear, backpack. I think, I think it's important to do. It shows you what's important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It gives you complete freedom to go into another city to... Yeah, with your backpack. With a backpack, there's a kind of freedom to it. There's something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit. Think spiritually. It's good to take a leap out into the world, especially when you're younger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So one of the biggest uses of a university is the networking. You gain friends, you gain, like, you meet people. It's a forcing function to meet people. But if you can meet people out into the world by traveling. And you meet so many different cultures. I mean, the problem for me is like, if I traveled at that young age, I'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the world. Like for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like where? No, not geographically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, like the weirdos, the darkness. Yeah, me too. But that might not be the best networking at 18 years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, see, the thing is that when you're 18, I feel like, depending on your personality, you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie. Like you still have to learn how to fit into society. Like for a person like me, for example, who's always an outcast, like there's always a danger for going full outcast. And that's a harder life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
If you like, if you go to like go full artists and full like darkness, it's just a harder life. You can come back. You can come back to normie. That's a skill. That's like, I think you have to learn how to, how to fit into, uh, like polite society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's a skill you have to learn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You don't have to be broken to be interesting, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. What kind of things were left when you minimalized?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's nice. As I mentioned to you, there's the show alone. Yeah. They really test you because you only get 10 items and you have to survive out in the wilderness. And an axe, like everybody brings an axe. Some people also have a saw. Wow. But usually axe does the job. You basically have to, in order to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make. They're in Minecraft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah. It's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world. And one of the ways to do that is to live a minimalist life. But like some people, like I've met people that really enjoy material possessions and that brings them happiness. And that's a beautiful thing. Like for me, it doesn't, but people are different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it. Just focus on the thing that's more permanent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like building shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You wrote a blog post, why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too. What's your strategy in communicating with people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So the basic format is try to build a thing, put it online, and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
but also beautiful stuff. No, absolutely. Sure. Like life story. I've posted a coffee form. Like if you wanted to have a coffee with me and I've gotten an extremely large number of submissions. And when I look at them, there's just like beautiful people in there, like beautiful human beings, really powerful stories. And like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people, you know, like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And so this part of it is just like, there's only so much bandwidth to truly see other humans and help them or like understand them or hear them or see them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Is that still like the easiest way to just like pay for stuff, Stripe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, they're searching. They're searching. They're trying to figure it out. But oftentimes their search, if they successfully find what they're looking for, it'll be within. It sounds very like spiritual, Sonny, but it's really like figuring that shit out on your own. But they're reaching, they're trying to ask the world around them, like, how do I live this life? How do I figure this out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a cool company. They just made it so easy. You can just click.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But ultimately the answer is going to be from them working on themselves. And like literally- It's the stupid thing, but like Googling and doing like searching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then you realize it's not about the black background. It's about something else. So you find your own voice. Like keep trying stuff. Exactly. Imitation is a difficult thing. Like a lot of people copy and they don't move past it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You should understand their methods and then move past it. Like find yourself, find your own voice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You shouldn't get stuck. 24 hours in a day, eight hours of sleep. You like break it down into a math equation. 90 minutes of showering, clean up coffee. It just keeps whittling down to zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Behind the scenes, it must be difficult to actually make that happen. Because that used to be a huge problem. Merchant. Just adding a thing, a button, where you can pay for a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't like that. One hours of groceries and errands. I've tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Especially when my life was simpler. It's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And what you enjoy doing. Like, how many minutes it takes to be happy. Doing the thing that makes you happy. And how many minutes it takes to be productive. And you realize there's a lot of hours in the day if you spend it right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For me, it's been the biggest battle for the longest time is finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus and do really, really deep work. Just like zoom in and completely focus, cutting away all the distractions. And that's the battle. It's unpleasant. It's extremely unpleasant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's just a numerical representation of what life is. Yeah. It's like one of those, like, when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life. Oh, dude, this is like dark. Yeah, man. Don't want to look at that too much. Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's right. It might be only, you know, a handful more times. Yeah, man. You just look at the math of it. If you see them once a year or twice a year. Yeah, FaceTime today. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like dark when you... see somebody you like seeing, like a friend that's on the outskirts of your friend group, and then you realize like, well, wait, I haven't really seen him for like three years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So like, how many more times do we have that we see each other?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I have, you know, that might be a guy thing or I don't know. There's certain friends I have that, like, we don't interact often, but we're still friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, every time I see him... I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories. I guess it's like nothing has changed. Like we've been, almost like we've been talking every day, even if we haven't talked for a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So that, so I don't have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group. And then there's some people I interact with a lot. So it depends, but there's just this network of good human beings that can- I have a real love for them. I can always count on them. If any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body. I'm there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like how that's a different definition of friendship. But it's true. It's true. True friend. You've become more and more famous recently. How does that affect you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Does that put pressure on you to... Because you're pretty open on Twitter and you're just like basically building shit in the open. Yeah. And just not really caring if it's too technical, if there's any of this, just being out there. Does it put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more like collected and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
NVIDIA, a $3 trillion company was started in a Denny's at American Diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company. What's the first and second space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then the in-between, the island. Yeah, I guess, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But that is, to you, a fundamental place to create shit, isn't it? Natural, organic co-working space of a coffee shop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But there is some element of like entrepreneurship. Yeah. Like you have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off towards that dream and then feel each other's energy as they interact with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there is like the cafes. Yeah. There's a bunch of dreamers that you can make fun of them for like everybody thinks they're going to build a trillion dollar company but like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dream big and build shit. This is really inspiring. This is a pinned tweet of yours. All the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Mute life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Fire calculator. No more Google. Maker rank. How much is my site project worth? Climate finder. Ideas AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So 12 startups in 12 months. Yeah. So what, how do you start number one? What, what was that? What, like, what, what were you feeling? What were you sitting behind the computer? Like, how much do you actually know about building stuff at that point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Bali Sea Cable. Nice. That's awesome. Make Village, Nomad Gear, 3D and Virtual Reality Dev, Play My Inbox, like you mentioned. There's a lot of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I'm trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There you go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
POV, building an AI startup. Wow, you're a real influencer. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's beautiful. Architecture-wise, it's crazy. The stories behind these cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence. 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950. Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a good representation of the very thing you were talking about, the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the people's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What do you think about EAC, Effective Accelerationist Movement?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, build more, don't spend so much time on fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some is okay, some is good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and doing so unapologetically. It's a refreshing reminder of what made the United States great is all the builders, like you said, the entrepreneurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like we can't forget that in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I saw one of them had like flash. Were you using flash?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
All right. Okay, so you had an incredible life, very successful, built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because Flash was a software. This is like the break. Like grandpa, you know, but Flash was cool. Yeah, and there was, what's it called? Boy, I should remember this, ActionScript. There's some kind of programming language. ActionScript, yeah, yeah, ActionScript. Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like go all out doing that thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You got to whole-ass it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This was an incredible conversation. It was an honor to finally meet you. It was an honor to be here, Lex. To talk to you and keep doing your thing. Keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you're building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I thought that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet. I invested so many hours in learning that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So one of the things I have on my to-do list is to do a lengthy video and a lengthy podcast on communism and fascism and other economic and political systems. You know, there needs to be a good, solid criticism and explanation of capitalism, for example. It's an economic system. It's a way for humans to work together that has, I believe, benefited the world way more than it has hurt the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Steve Jobs killed it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That guy was right though, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Closed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it was cool for a time. Yeah. Listen, animated GIFs were cool for a time too. Yeah. Yeah. They came back in a different way. As a meme, though. I mean, like, I remember when GIFs were actually cool, not ironically cool. Like, on the internet, you would have, like, a dancing rabbit or something like this. And that was really exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And the banners. That's how, before Google AdSense, you would have banners for advertising. It was amazing, yeah. And a lot of links to porn, I think. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it was a dark place. It's still a dark place. But there's beauty in the darkness. Anyway, so you did some basic HTML.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Was it scraping it? Like what was it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's a great idea. I wonder why... Like, why don't we have that? Why don't we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate information?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of, like, apps you can build on top of the Google. But people don't really do this. I've seen a few, like, Boomerang. There's a few apps that are, like, good, but just... I wonder what, maybe it's not easy to make money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I mean, you can do it through like extensions, like Chrome extensions from the browser side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, that sucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that. Like where you could pay for it easily. Because I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions. Like improvements for social media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
GPTs, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We'll talk about it. So let's rewind back. It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months. What's it take to build a thing in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But to articulate that and to still mend the criticisms and the perspectives that criticize capitalism is also really important. And so the same applies for communism, for fascism, for all kinds of ideologies that ruled the world for a time and all the kinds of ways that they've broken down and to do so seriously, objectively, calmly, walking through the fire without the misuse of those words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Time is limited. Yeah. Actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser? Yeah. I still feel like a loser sometimes. What's, what can you, can you speak to that feeling to that place of just like feeling like a loser? And I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now, listening to this and feeling like a loser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
First of all, especially when you're 27. Yes. Yeah. Especially there's like a peak. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're constantly an outcast in this, in that you're different from everybody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You said digital nomad. What is digital nomad? What is that way of life? What is the philosophy there? And the history of the movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
thinking clearly, not as a partisan, but as an independent thinker, as a human being, I think that's something that I would like to work on more and more. even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mention all that because, you know, when I think about Shopify, I think about capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But what were they making for money? So you're saying they were doing shady stuff at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That part of the, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It could be a vibe. And your vibe was more build cool shit that's ethical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of those individual components. No, no judgment. But there's a foundation that's not quite ethical. What is that? I don't know what that is. But yeah, I get you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, that's a pretty cool way of life. Just if you romanticize it for a moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's very, it's colorful, you know? Like if I think about the memories. What are some happy memories? Just like working, working cafes or working in... just the freedom that envelops you with that way of life. Because anything is possible. You can just get up and go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
30.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a bunch of small sellers getting together and being able to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it and would enjoy it, and they make it super easy. So if you're one such seller and you want to sell stuff and you have awesome stuff to sell, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Not like this cheesy... See, I got... For me...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
it's such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how i feel about a thing so the faster it is the more anxiety i feel but that anxiety is channeled into productivity but if it's a little too fast i start the anxiety overpowers you don't like drama based music probably not no it's too fast i mean for working as a i have to play with it it's like you can actually like i can adjust my yeah level of anxiety this must be a better word than anxiety it's like uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
productive anxiety that I like, whatever that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What was your favorite place that you remember that you visited?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Everything's cheap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Pros and cons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Motific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and drag that's customized, fine-tuned on organization data sources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's true. You're right. You're right. It's more averaged out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like it when there's strong neighborhoods. When you cross a certain street and you're in a dangerous part of town.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like it. I like there's certain cities in the United States like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like that. And you're saying Europe is more meltdown.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, I don't. I like dangerous. BJJ. No, not even just that. I think danger is interesting. So danger reveals something about yourself, about others. Also, I like the full range of humanity. So I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you quoted Freya Stark, quote, to awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. Do you remember a time you awoken in a strange town and felt like that? We're talking about small towns or big towns or?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There's something about it that made you anxious. I don't know, I still feel like that. It's a cool feeling. It's scary at first, but then you realize where you are, and you, I don't know, it's like you awaken to the possibilities of this place when you feel like that. It's like, great. And it's even when you're doing some basic travel, like go to San Francisco or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You wrote a book on how to do this thing and gave a great talk on it, how to do startups. The book's called Make, Bootstrapper's Handbook. I was wondering if you could go through some of the steps. It's idea, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit. There's a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage. How do you find a good idea? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Obviously, this is often extremely sensitive data, so you have to do this carefully and well, but when it is done carefully and well and in a secure way, it can be a huge benefit for the company to be able to take all the data that the company has and internally be able to query that data, to be able to organize that data, to leverage in answering questions that would make everybody in the company more efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's a really good place to start. Become open to all the problems in your life. Like actually start noticing them. I think that's actually not a trivial thing to do, to realize that some aspects of your life could be done way, way better. Because we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts. Like for example, like doorknobs. Like design of certain things. New Lex Freeman doorknob.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That one I know how much incredible design work has gone into. It's really interesting, doors and doorknobs. The design of everyday things, forks and spoons, it's gonna be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current fork designs. And the other aspect of it is you're saying in order to come up with interesting ideas, you gotta try to live a more interesting life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But also you can, I mean, in the digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the others in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch, using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. He builds and ships quickly and improves on the fly, all in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures, with the raw honesty of a true indie hacker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But what specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do you like, do idea dumps? Like, do you have a document where you just keep writing stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's less about problem solving, it's more about the possibilities of new things you can create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can you actually explain... It'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created. Can you explain... This photoai.com. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What are you using for the hosting for the compute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think that's the thing that unlocks, especially for large companies, but even mid-sized companies, even small companies, just the intranet, a thing that takes all the data on the inside and be able to make high quality, efficient, fast decisions based on that data. I think Motific was created by Cisco, specifically their outshift group that does cutting edge R&D. So these guys are legit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They're very, very good. Okay. It's cool. Like this interface wise, it's cool that you're showing how long it's going to take. This is amazing. So it's taken a, I'm presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But when I was watching your tweets, like it's been getting better and better and better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So if I wanted to sort of update model as.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
In Tokyo?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I'll go in Austin. Do you think you'll know? In Texas? In Austin, Texas? With cowboy hats. In Texas, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
As a cowboy. It's going to go so towards the porn direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Or the beginning. It depends. We can send you a push notification when your photos are done. All right, cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, wow. So this whole interface you've built. Yeah. This is really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes. The only one? Still. After 10 years? To this day, you're not the only one. The entire web is PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
you're just like one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still like openly talking about it. But everyone's using PHP. Like if you look, most of the web is still probably PHP and jQuery. I think 70%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's great. Visit Motific.ai to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C.ai. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I'm going out. I think it's 100 degrees out in Austin right now. I'm going to go out and run. Sigh. Anywhere from five to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now, so I'm thinking like 10, 11, 12 mile range.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. Yeah. JavaScript with jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. So that's a really simple stack and you get stuff done really fast with that. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still a to-do item for me to really learn Node.js or Flask or these kind of- React. Yeah, React. It feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these, but you can get stuff done so fast with vanilla versions of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I wonder if there's like, I really want to measure performance and speed. I think there's a deep wisdom in that. I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing, this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I'm not sure what to say about that because definitely you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
C++, when you're building systems engineering, there's a lot of benefits for pointer safety and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know, but it just feels like... You can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like when you say better, It's like, can we get some data on the better? Because I want to know from the individual developer perspective, and then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers, measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, How many security holes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
In theory, is it though? Now it's good. Now, as you're saying it, I wanna know if that's true, because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet. Is it just overrepresented? Same with WordPress. Yes, there's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just was sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
By the way, I just heard a little clip on Cam Haines's Instagram. And by the way, Cam, amazing human being. You should definitely go follow him. He's an inspiration to me. Quietly just does incredible fits of strength and does it all with a kind heart and just this warmth and humor out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And use a framework when it obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you... Of course, yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I want to ask the Framework Army, what have they built this week? It's the Elon question. What did you do this week?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So going back to the cowboy...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I'm also just looking at the interface. It's really well done. So this is all just jQuery, and this is really well done. So take me through the journey of photo AI. Most of the world doesn't know much about stable diffusion or any of this, any of this generative AI stuff. So you're thinking, okay, how can I build cool stuff with this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What was the origin story of photo AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you can upvote. Is it nice? Upvote it. Man, there's so much to talk to you about. Like the choices here. It's really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Anyway, he was talking about the fact that sometimes when he's running crazy distances or fast pace, he'll just walk. for a short period of time. He's doing it for joy. He's doing it for the love of running. Like you don't always, as he says, have to hate it. And I think I approach running the same way. Sometimes I'll be running really fast. Sometimes I walk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How do you feel about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This oftentimes correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook I'm listening to. Sometimes I get this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that's really making me think. At the same time, keeping a fast pace is difficult for me. So I just slow down. Sometimes I walk. Sometimes I stop and just sit on a bench.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's really incredible. That journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of photo AI though. Cause I remember seeing a lot of re really hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what, uh, there's a tweet here sold $100,000 in AI generated avatars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, I see. So that. Okay, so October 26th, 2022. I trained an ML model on my face. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Boy, do I love the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, what is, is this, wait.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So this is, how much of this is real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's pretty good though for the early days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How many photos did you use? Only these. I will try more up-to-date pics later. These are the only photos you uploaded?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Wow. Wow. Okay, so you were learning all this super quickly. What are some interesting details you remember from that time for what you had to figure out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
make it work and for people just listening he uploaded just uh just a handful of photos that don't really have a good capture of the face and he's able to i think it's cropped it's like a crop but the layout but they're they're square photos so they're 512 by 512. because that's stable diffusion um but nevertheless not great capture of the face yeah like it's not it's not like a uh collection of several hundred photos that are like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I'm doing it all not for sort of training for a marathon or training for some difficult physical endeavor. I'm doing it for the love of it, for the love of running out in nature, whether it's in the heat or in the cold, just... The love of life that you can get, especially when the second wind hits. Anyway, after all that, I'm going to drink a nice cold AG1.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So at first it was the type form and they uploaded through the type form. It's a Stripe checkout type form. And then you were like, that image is downloaded. Did you write a script to export?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You emailed them with your personal email.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And this is like 100 people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you had to automate the whole thing. How'd you automate it? So like, what's the AI component? Like how hard was that to figure out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, they're not that smart because you also have a large platform and a lot of people respect you. So you can literally come out and say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I love Masterclass. I love learning from people who are the best in the world at a thing. Sometimes there's incredible lectures that can explain a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you can scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Generate images, generate text, generate video, generate music, generate speech. Find two models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Nice. And you're growing with them, essentially. They grew because of you, because it's a big use case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Now it's noob friendly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But is there some tricks to fine-tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The hacks, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What are some interesting... Give my secrets now. Well, not the secrets, but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body. Like what kind of stuff gets messed up a lot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got to, one of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So I get to like really, really have to sort of come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound. People often don't, right? You have a distorted view, perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you don't know what makes you interesting, what makes you attractive, all this kind of stuff. And a lot of us, this is a dark aspect of psychology, we focus on some small flaws. This is why I hate plastic surgery, for example. People try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Confidence is attractive. But yes, understanding what makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of the average face makes you beautiful. All of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And obviously different for men and women of different ages, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I also love that. but I think there's just something indescribably powerful about not a great lecturer, but a great doer stepping back and explaining the core of their art, of their skill, of their genius. Anyway, there's great stuff on poker with Phil Ivey. Great stuff on barbecue. Man, it's been forever since I had barbecue from Aaron Franklin. These are all ones I've watched.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when the face... comes alive, that also is the thing that makes you beautiful. But anyway, you have to figure all that out with AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you have any guidelines for people of like how to get good data, how to give good data to fine tune on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So diverse lighting as well, diverse everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that studies that, tries to figure out, tries to break things apart and understand how it works. But there's also the data side and the actual consumer-facing product side of figuring out how you get it to generate a thing that's beautiful or interesting or naturalistic, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you're at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face. And humans really care about the human face.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And one of the things I actually would love to, like, rigorously use photo AI, because for the thumbnails, I take portraits of people. I don't know shit about photography. I basically used your approach for photography. I was like, Google, how do you take photographs? Camera, lighting. And also, it's tough, because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
maybe you could speak to this also, but like with photography, no offense to any, they're true artists, great photographers, but like people like take themselves way too seriously. Think you need a whole lot of equipment. You definitely don't want one light. You need like five lights and like, and you have to have like the lenses. And I talked to, to a guy, an expert of, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
shaping the sound in a room, okay? Because I was thinking, I'm going to do a podcast studio, whatever. I should probably, like, do a sound treatment on the room. And, like, when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And that's when I realized, like, you know what, I don't need experts in my life. I said, thank you, thank you very much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Peter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people. This was an honor and a pleasure for me. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I just felt like there is, you know, focus on whatever the problems are, use your own judgment, use your own instincts, don't listen to other people, and only consult other people when there's a specific problem. And you consult them not... to offload the problem onto them, but to gain wisdom from their perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Even if their perspective is ultimately one you don't agree with, you're going to gain wisdom from that. And just, I ultimately come up with like a PHP solution, PHP and jQuery solution. PHP Studio. PHP Studio. I got a little suitcase. I use like just the basic sort of consumer type of stuff. One light. It's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Martin Scorsese on filmmaking. That is one I really enjoyed. I mean, Scorsese is just, his stuff is both powerful and thoughtful and deep and profound about family, about human nature, all of that. And it's just fun to watch. Okay? Maybe I'm one of a certain generation, but it's just fun to watch. So you get to hear how the master does it on Masterclass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that said, I, so the reason I brought that up with photography is There is wisdom from people, and one of the things I realized, you probably also realized this, but how much power light has to convey emotion. You just take one light and move it around, say you're sitting in the darkness, move it around your face, The different positions are having a second light potentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It's interesting. You can make people attractive. You can make them ugly. You can make them scary. You can make them lonely. All of this. And so you kind of start to realize this. And I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people. Guest photos, yeah. Guest photos. For example, that's a small use case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But for me, that's a... I suppose it's an important use case because like I want people to look good, but I also want to capture who they are. Maybe my conception of who they are, what makes them beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What makes their appearance powerful in some ways. Sometimes it's the eyes. Oftentimes it's the eyes, but there's certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful. And, I can't... It's also kind of awkward for me to take photographs. So I'm not collecting enough photographs for myself to do it with just those photographs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
If I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with like... lighting, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you play with lighting at all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art AI tools available? Like you mentioned, new models coming out all the time. Like, how do you pay attention? How do you stay on top of everything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a good time now. Well, but also just brings happiness to my soul because there's so much turmoil on Twitter. Yeah, like politics and stuff. There's battles going on. It's like a war zone. And it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and better and better photo? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you started to figure out which models are actually working well. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's really about the parameters and models and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You're not even using the latest one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's interesting because open source is so impactful in the AI space, but you wonder what is the business model behind that. But it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that they're using the open source models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Some of the people losing their mind in the realm of the election that's coming up. That would be a fun one if they could sign up for BetterHelp and do a couples therapy. Somebody from the far left and the far right just sitting down together. Boy, that would be a fascinating challenge for any therapist. And from the conversational space, I would love to just listen to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We didn't even get to the first step. Generating ideas. So you had notebook and you're filling it up. How do you know when an idea is a good one? Like what, you have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one that you actually try to build?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But I can build something... Could you actually write down, like, space company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That could be... I think both the asteroid mining and the robotics is... Yeah, together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, you use something like SpaceX to get out to space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So is there actually exist a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mining?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you're talking to yourself on Telegram.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I love how like you're not using super complicated systems or whatever. You know, people use Obsidian now. There's a lot of these, a Notion where you have systems for note taking. You're not, you're notepad, you're notepad.exe guy. If you're a Windows user.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Speaking of ideas, you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be a brilliant idea. The reason for this, you think, is the first idea submerges from your subconscious and was actually boiling in your brain for weeks, months, sometimes years in the background. The eight hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious background job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus the first idea that pops into your mind. And sometimes there is subconscious thinking like stuff that you've been thinking about for many years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, all the time, 100%. It's just stuff that's been like there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's not ready yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's also about the timing. Sometimes you have to send it back, not just because you're not ready, but the world is not ready.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Robotics is an interesting one for that because, like, there's been a lot of robotics companies that failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because it's been very difficult to build a robotics company, make money, because there's the manufacturing, like, the cost of everything. The intelligence of the robot is enough, is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money. So there's this long line of robotics companies that have tried, they had big dreams, and they failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Then I'll be talking to a bunch of people on the left and the right and having some of those tense, difficult conversations. And again, having it with compassion, but also with backbone. It's not an easy line to walk, by the way. And I don't think I'm smart enough to do it. Most days I kind of feel like an idiot, but I'm doing my best. Anyway, you should try out talk therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
When the personal computer, when the Mac came along, there was a big switch that happened. It somehow captivated everybody's imagination. The application, the killer apps became... Apparent, you can type in a computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit, the possibility of it. Right now, for example, with the robotics, there's very few robots in the homes of people Exactly, yeah. The robots that are there are Roombas, so the vacuum cleaners, or they're Amazon Alexa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes, but the intelligence is very limited, I guess, is one way we can summarize all of them. Except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent, but is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you. That's just one example. Yeah. I sometimes think about that as, like, if some people in this world were kind of born in the whole existence, it's like they were meant to build the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You know? Like, I sometimes wonder, like, what I was meant to do. Do you have these plans for your life? Do you have these dreams?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay, me personally. Maybe, maybe. That's the sense I've had, but it could be other things. It could hilariously not be the thing I was meant to be, is to talk to people. Yeah. Which is weird, because I always was anxious about talking to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I'm scared of this. I'm scared of you. It's just anxiety throughout social interaction in general. I'm an introvert that hides from the world, so yeah. It's really strange.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah. And there's universe has a kind of sense of humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I guess you have to just, yeah, allow yourself to be carried away by the waves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Have you felt that way in your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So allow whatever to happen. Like, do you know what you're doing in the next few years? Is it possible that it'll be completely like changed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, actually, when I took ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything. I think I probably learned that the most in jujitsu. So just let go and relax. And that's why I had just an incredible experience. There's like literally no negative aspect of my ayahuasca experience or any psychedelics I've ever had.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Super easy to do with BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for Ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed. I enjoy it every night, multiple times a day. Let's get crazy. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Some of that could be with my biology, my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control. Just surf the wave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So once you have the idea, step two, build. How do you think about building the thing once you have the idea?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, and the crowdsourcing element is fascinating. It's cool. It's cool when a lot of people start using it. You get to learn so fast. I've actually did the spreadsheet thing. You share a spreadsheet publicly. and I made it editable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's interesting things start happening. Yeah. I did it for like a workout thing because I was doing a large amount of push-ups and pull-ups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like, well, also, Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed. So people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new sheets, new tabs. And it just exploded. And one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
um because actually other people would delete the trolls there would be like this weird war like oh they they want like to protect the thing it's an immune system that's inherent to the thing that comes to society you know in the spreadsheets and then there's the outcasts will go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages and they like i don't want to be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet so at the bottom yes it's insane
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that use that as a... to his benefit, that's really nice. Like any kind of voting system, any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really, really, really fascinating. So anyway, so Nomad List is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For a good nap, it can cool down any side of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. Cool bed, warm blanket, and just shut off from the world. Just forget it all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I would love for you to talk about that, but one sort of way to talk about it is through you building hood maps. So you did an awesome thing, which is document yourself building the thing and doing so in just a handful of days, like three, four, five days. So people should definitely check out the video in the blog post. Can you explain what Hood Maps is and what this whole process was?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So just use color.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
People should really check it out. Is this how it started? Because you honestly capture so beautifully the humbling aspects, the embarrassing aspects of not knowing what to do. It's like, how do I do this? And you document yourself... Yeah, you're right. Dude, I feel embarrassed about myself. It's called being alive. Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you're like, you don't know anything about, so Canvas is a way, it's an HTML5 thing that allows you to draw shapes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Forget the madness of the world, the political bickering, the attacks, the tensions, the drama, all the stuff that, you know, the media and the social media that wants to pull you in, that wants you desperately, like a drug wants your attention. wants to just piss you off and use that anger to make you addicted to the platform so you can tell everybody how pissed off you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can we just clarify, do you have to be, as a human that's contributing to this, do you have to be in that location to make the label?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Would they draw shapes or would they draw pixels?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, that's obviously a guy thing. I would do the same thing, draw penises. That's the first thing. When I show up to Mars and there's no cameras, I'm drawing a penis on the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because Los Angeles has defined neighborhoods. Yeah. And not just in terms of the official labels, but like what they're known for. Yeah. What are the, did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And a little bit meme-y, like it's almost fun to label it as that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay, so we're looking. Oh boy. Drunk hipsters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Air bro and bros. Gender virus. Hipster girls who do cocaine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yep. That seems also accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate. Let's see. Dirty Sixth, for people who know Austin, know that that's important to label. Sixth Street is famous in Austin. Dirty Sixth, Drunk Fat Boys, Accurate. Drunk Fat Bros continued on 6th. Very well done. West 6th Drunk Douche Bros.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Douche. I mean, it's very accurate so far. They only let hot people live here. I think that might be accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dog runners, accurate. Saw a guy in a fish costume get beat up here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's all user contributed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then the other person attacks you back, gets them to be pissed off and you're both pissed off at each other. At the end of the day, just losing your mind. All of that can dissipate for me with a short nap, okay? On a cold bed, short nap feels like home. It's one of the favorite things I have about home and one of my least favorite things about traveling because I don't have eight sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then me as a user can upvote or downvote this. So this is completely crowdsourced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And that's really, really, really powerful. Single people with dogs, accurate. At which point did it go from colors to actually showing the text?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's really cool, the pixels. How do you go from there? That's a huge amount of data. We're now looking at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that are colored different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes some sense?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you said it looks kind of ugly. So then you smooth it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What do you learn from that? So like... from that experience, because when you leverage somebody else's through the API.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's super complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You talked about possibly doing advertisements on it or people sponsoring it. It's really surprising to me that people don't want to advertise on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you've created that I'm just glad exists in this world. That's true. And it's a whole nother puzzle. And I'm surprised to figure out how to make money off of it. I'm surprised maps don't make money, but you're right. It's hard. It's hard to make money. Because there's a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Anyway, you could enjoy the same kind of peace of mind if you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the pod for Ultra. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Peter Levels. You've launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most failed, but some succeeded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And people don't want to pay for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But that said, Nomad List makes money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So what was the story behind Nomad List?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So just to describe how it works, I'm looking at Chiang Mai here. There's a total score. It's ranked number two out of five. Yeah, that's like a Nomad score. 4.82, like by members, but it's looking at the internet. In this case, it's fast, fun, temperature, humidity, air quality, safety, food safety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
crime, racism, or lack of crime, lack of racism, education level, power grid, vulnerability to climate change, income level. It's a little much, you know. English speaking. It's awesome. It's awesome. Walkability. Keep adding stuff. Because for certain groups of people, certain things really matter. And this is really cool. Yeah. Happiness. I'd love to ask you about that. Net life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
free Wi-Fi, AC, female-friendly, freedom of speech. Yeah, not so good in Thailand, you know? Values derived from national statistics, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, this is really fascinating. So this is for city. Yeah. It's basically rating all the different things that matter to you in internet. And this is all crowdsourced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
1,800 remote workers in Austin now, of which eight plus members checked in. Members who will be here soon and go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Cons of Austin is too expensive, very sweating, humid, now difficult to make friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Difficult to make friends. But it's all crowds, but mostly it's pros. Pretty safe, fast internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We got Shopify for e-commerce, Motific for LLM and RAG deployment, AG1 for health, Masterclass for learning, BetterHelp for the mind, and 8sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me by giving feedback, sending in questions that I can answer and all other kinds of ways. If you go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So once you actually show up to a city, how do you figure out what area, like where to get fast internet? For example, like for me, it's consistently a struggle to figure out. Hotels with fast Wi-Fi, for example. Okay, okay. I show up to a city. There's a lot of fascinating puzzles. I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. When I show up to a city...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
figuring out where I can get fast internet connection. And for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that's quiet. That's not easy. All kinds of sounds. You have to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world. And also like the quality of the room, because the more...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The emptier the room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there's echoes in the room. Anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, they have this desk. But it's not a center table. Yep. And if you want to get a-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
nicer hotel where it's more spacious and so on they usually have these like boutique like fancy looking like modernist tables that don't it's too designy it's too designy they're not really real tables what if you get ikea buy ikea yeah before you arrive you order an ikea yeah like nomads do this they get desks i feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have have the desk like it's not unless you stay in there for a long time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Just the entire assembly, all that. Airbnb is so unreliable. The range in quality that you get is huge. Hotels have a lot of problems, pros and cons. Hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what's actually going to be in the rooms. That's a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Fake photos, man. If I could have the kind of data you have on Nomad List for hotels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms. Some are more expensive, some are cheaper and so on. But you can get the details of what's in the room, like what's the actual layout of the room, what is the view of the room. I feel like as a hotel, you can win a lot. So first you create a service.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your philosophy behind building the startups that you did?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
that allows you to have like high resolution data about a hotel, then one hotel signs up for that. I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives that don't give any information. And I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site. And you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't know. I think that's an interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My theory would be that great engineers, like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes. Basically, like there's some kind of bureaucracy. There's way too many managers. There's a lot of bureaucracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And great engineers show up to try to work there and they're not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave. And so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers that are not really interested in improving any other thing. And like literally they would like to improve the stuff, but the bureaucracy
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Um, of the place, plus all the bosses, all the high up people are not technical people. Probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They don't know much about what web dev, they don't know much about programming. So they just don't give any respect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. Like if you were a great programmer, would you want to work at America airlines or no. I'm torn on that because I actually, as somebody who lost program, would love to work at American Airlines so I can make the thing better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, for yourself. And then you just know how much suffering you alleviated, how much frustration. Imagine all the thousands, maybe millions of people that go to that website and have to click – Like a million times, it often doesn't work. It's clunky, all that kind of stuff. You're making their life just so much better. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But there must be an explanation that has to do with managers and bureaucracies. Like I don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you can optimize for money by disrupting, like making it way better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think some of it is also just it's hard to have ultra competent engineers. Stripe seems like a trivial thing, but it's hard to pull off. Why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click? Which I think is a genius idea. Make buying easier. Make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button once and you bought the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
As opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn't work. Like with the airlines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I would have an existential crisis. Like the frustration would take over my whole body and I would just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And one of the challenges at Google is to have the freedom to do that. They don't anymore. There's a bunch of bureaucracy. Yeah, at Google. There's so many brilliant, brilliant people there. But it just moves slowly. Yeah. I wonder why that is. Maybe that's the natural way of a company, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You have people like Elon who rolls in and just fires most of the folks and always push the company to operate as a startup even when it's already big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So one of the things you do really, really well is learn a new thing. You have an idea, you try to build it, and then you learn everything you need to in order to build it. You have your current skills, but you learn just a minimal amount of stuff. So you're a good person to ask, how do you learn? How do you learn quickly and effectively and just the stuff you need?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You did, just by way of example, you did a 30 days learning session on 3D. Where you documented yourself, giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about 3D.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Actually, I'm always curious. Let me ask perplexity. How do I make a website? I'm just curious what he would say. I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions. Define your website's purpose. Choose a domain name. Select a web hosting provider. Choose a website, a builder, a CMS. Website builder platform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How do I say if I want to program it myself? Design your website, create essential pages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Launch your website. Cool. Well, I mean, you could do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
If you want to make a website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you can't make nomad lists this way. You can't. with Wix?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How do I learn to program? Choose a programming language to start with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So there's this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that works, launch it, see if people like it, improving it really, really quickly to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that. That whole rapid process is how you think of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Work through resources systematically. Practice coding regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistency is key. Join programming communities like Reddit. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it clarifies it for sure. And just start building. Build, build. Actually apply the thing. Whether it's AI or any of the programming for web development, just have a project in mind. I love the idea of 12 startups in 12 months or like... build a project almost every day, just build the thing and get it to work and finish it every single day. That's a cool experiment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, that thing of just keep doing it and don't quit, that urgency that's required to finish a thing. That's why it's really powerful when you documented this, the creation of hood maps, or like a working prototype, that there's just a constant frustration, I guess. It's like, how do I do this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then you look it up, and you're like, okay, you have to interpret the different options you have, and then just try it. And then there's a dopamine rush of like, ooh, it works. Cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's it like building in public like you do? Like openly, where you're just iterating quickly and you're getting people's feedback. So there's the power of the crowdsourcing, but there's also the negative aspects of people being able to criticize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
By you or somebody else?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, I mean, yeah, fundamentally create cool stuff. And have just a little bit of a following enough for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your philosophy of monetizing? How to make money from the thing you build?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it builds a community of people that actually really care about the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, live a pretty good life. I mean, there could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And also you're a public facing person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And there's love and good vibes that you put out into the world. Like you're actually legitimately trying to build cool stuff. So a lot of companies probably want to associate with you because you're trying to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Be a good person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, and also the, when it's crowdsourced, I mean, paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you always code in your underwear? Your profile picture, you're like slouching on a couch in your underwear, chilling on a laptop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like there's something on the internet. You mentioned like 4chan discovered hood maps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I actually, what is it? There's a new documentary on Netflix, Anti-Social Network or something like that. That was really, was fascinating. Just 4chan, just the, You know, the spirit of the thing, Fortune and H&M.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's so much about freedom and also, like, the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with the man. That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But the dark aspect of it is you're having fun, you're doing anti-system stuff, but, like, the Nazis always show up. And it's somehow... And bad shit started happening. It started drifting somehow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It goes dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And if you have those people show up, they'll, for the fun of it, do a bunch of racist things and all that kind of stuff you were saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can damage the uh, a good thing. Like, you know, a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the Tom Waits thing, but you don't want too much. Otherwise it, it destroys the town. It destroys the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Thank you for showing up, not just in your underwear, but wearing shorts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Nice. Chill them out. I like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But actually a lot of stuff, I didn't realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes. Rickroll, I didn't understand. I didn't know that Rickroll originated in 4chan. There's just so many memes. Like most of the memes that you think... The word roll, I think, comes from 4chan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Thank you. Thank you for dressing up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I mean, that's the internet. That's purist. But yeah, again, the dark stuff kind of seeps in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it's nice to keep the dark stuff to some low amount. It's nice to have a bit of noise in the darkness, but not too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But again, you have to pay attention to that with, I mean, I guess spam in general. You have to fight that with Nomad List. How do you fight spam?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What's your favorite exercise in the gym?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Over press, like shoulder press.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I would love to have a GPT-4 based filter of like, of different kinds of, for like X.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So fact check is a tough one. Yeah. But it would be interesting to sort of rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is. Yeah. That seems more doable. That seems like more doable. Like it seems like a GPT thing because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And actually the ranking of the replies is not great. Doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make sense. And I like to sort in different kinds of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And also the notifications or whatever, it's just complete chaos. It'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways, sort it in interesting ways. Because I feel like I miss a lot. And what surfaced for me, I was just like a random comment by a person with no followers that's positive or negative. It's like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, no, I don't even care about how many followers. If you're ranking by the quality of the comment, great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But not just like randomly, like chronological, just a sea of comments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
One thing you espouse a lot, which I love, is the automation step. So once you have a thing, once you have an idea and you build it and it actually starts making money and it's making people happy, there's a community of people using it, you want to take the automation step of automating the things. You have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running indefinitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Can you like explain your philosophy there? What do you mean by automate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so you basically can now even automate sort of subjective type of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's still difficult. I mean, that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to... Because you're basically delegating everything to code. And it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people. So when you say automate, are you talking about like... Cron jobs. Yes, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Physical hardship is a kind of therapy. I just rewatched Happy People Year in the Taiga, that Werner Herzog film where they document people that are doing trapping. They're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round. And there's a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
A lot of cron jobs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you have a thing where it like emails you or something like this or email somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong? I have these web pages I make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You're actually making me realize I should have a page for myself, like one page that has all the health checks, just so I can go to and see all the green check marks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's just be like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Everything's okay. You can see when was the last time something wasn't okay and it'll say never. Meaning you've checked. Since you've last cared to check, it's all been okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's been so often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I need to integrate everything into one place. Automate like everything. Also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication of this podcast is done all, everything is just automatically, it's all clipped up, all this kind of stuff. But it would be nice to automate even more. Like translation, all this kind of stuff would be nice to automate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you get like a message...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that's really cool. That's really cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's nice to do that kind of automation. I'm starting to think of like, what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption of social media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Both the output and the input.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I mean, I would love to do that. But also like across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all this kind of stuff. Just like, okay, can you summarize the internet for me for today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, .com. Because I feel like it pulls in way too much time. But also like I don't like the effect it has some days on my psyche. Because like haters or just general content?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, no, just general. Like for example, like TikTok is a good example of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use TikTok. I just feel like- Yeah, don't use it anymore. Empty somehow. And I'm like uninspired. Yeah. It's funny. In the moment, I'm like, ha, look at that cat doing a funny thing. And then you're like, oh, look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then you're like, 10 minutes later, you're like, I feel way dumber and I don't really want to do much for the rest of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I mean, with social media, with X, sometimes for me too, I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And so with following AI people, especially AI people that only post technical content has been really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Cause then I just look at them and I, and then I go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or, uh, good repos or, or, um, just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the thing, the kind of things that they retweet and that's the rabbit hole I go and I'm learning and I'm inspired, all that kind of stuff. It's been tough. It's been tough to control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I agree. It's some level of automation. That would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, but still, even if you do that, that you're not getting, I mean, there's limitations that don't make it easy to do, like, automate. Because the thing is, they're trying to limit, like, abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an LLM or something like this. But if I just want to, like, figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
system or with Instagram, they don't make that easy. But I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to how to leverage LLMs to control the content I consume and maybe publish that. Maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. So there's not enough. uh, access.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I have Chrome extensions. I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. Like for example, for my own, on my main computer, I hide all views and lights and all that on, on, YouTube content that I create so that I don't, it doesn't, yeah, so you don't pay attention to it. I also hide parts. I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So like, there's no, it's same with YouTube.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, well, I wrote my own because it's easier because it keeps changing. It's like, it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing. But,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved at a startup. Okay, so what about the exit? When and how to exit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You've never, all the successful stuff you've done, you've never sold it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I mean, they're really valuable products. stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and the, and the crowdsource content, but the people themselves, like the user base.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Construction is not about the destination, man. It's about the journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I could see that being extremely valuable. I'm surprised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, sometimes I wonder, people who are always remodeling their house, is it really about the remodeling? No, no, it's not. Is it about the project? The puzzle of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, the thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The company you created.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work solo. What's the thinking behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
To clarify, you don't trust other people to do a great job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So what does it take to be successful when you have... more than one, like how do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What do you think is behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, like, you've never had another developer who, like, rolls in and, like... I've had it once with a photo eye.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's not your thing. It's another programming language. I get it. AI, new thing, got it. But like, you never had a developer roll in, look at your PHP, jQuery code and be, and yes, like, you know, like in conversation or improv, they talk about yes and, like basically, all right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I know. He wanted to rewrite in what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think I like working with people where like when I approach them, I pretend in my head that they're the smartest person who has ever existed. So I look at their code or I look at the stuff they've created and try to see the genius of their way. Like you really have to understand people, like really notice them. And then from that place, have a conversation about what is the better approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So sorry. I think that's a really important skill for a developer to roll in and understand the musicality, the style. That's it, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's code empathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's not crazy at all. jQuery is also beautiful and powerful. And PHP is beautiful and powerful, especially, as you said recently, in the... as the versions evolved, it's much more serious programming language now. It's super fast. Like PHP is really fast now. It's crazy. JavaScript is really fast now. So if speed is something you care about, it's super fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like, there's gigantic communities of people using those programming languages and there's frameworks, if you like the framework. So whatever, it doesn't really matter what you use, but like, also, you, if I was like a developer working with you, like you are extremely successful. You've shipped a lot. So like, if I roll in, I'm going to be like, I don't assume, you know, nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I assume Peter's a genius, like the smartest developer ever. And like, learn, learn from it. And yes. And like notice parts in the code where like, okay, okay, I got it. Like, here's how he's thinking. And now if I want to add another little feature, definitely needs to have emoji in front of it. And then just follow the same style and add it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And my goal is to make you happy, to make you smile, to make you like, haha, fuck, I get it. And now you're going to start respecting me and trusting me and you start working together in this way. I don't know, I have... I don't know how hard it is to find developers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's true. I mean, you're also extremely good at what you do. Like I'm just looking at the interfaces of like photo AI, like you would Jake, Jake, right? Like how amazing is your grade? But like you can, these cowboys are getting, these are, there's these cowboys. This is a lot. It's a lot, but I'm glad they're all wearing shirts. Anyway, the interface here is just really, really nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like I could tell, you know what you're doing. And with nomad list, extremely nice. The interface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And that's all you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So all of this and every little feature, all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Right, right, I hear you. But this is a lot of information and it's useful information and it's delivered in a clean way while still stylish and fun to look at. So like minimalist design is about like when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How much of the building that you do is about money? How much is it about just a deep internal happiness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Pretentious or not, the function is useless. This is about a lot of information delivered to you in a clean, and when it's clean, you can't be too sexy, so it's sexy enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like very... Yeah, but it's still pretty. The spacing of everything is nice. The fonts are really nice. Like, very readable. Very small.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, this is really nice. Thank you. The emojis are somehow, like it's a style. It's a thing. I need to pick the emoji. It takes a while to pick them, you know? Like there's something about the emoji is a really nice, memorable, like placeholder for the idea. Yeah. Like if it was just text, it would actually be overwhelming if it was just text. The emoji really helps. It's a brilliant addition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like some people might look at it, why do you have emojis everywhere? It's actually really, for me, it's really nice. People tell me to remove the emojis. Yeah, well, people don't know what they're talking about. I'm sure people will tell you a lot of things. This is really nice. And using color is nice. Small font, but not too small. And obviously you have to show maps, which is really tricky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, this is, this is, no, this is really, really, really nice. And all of, I mean, like, okay, like how this looks when you hover over it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, I understand that. But like, I'm sure there's like, how long does it take you to figure out how you want it to look? Do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent like two weeks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. If you wanted to like, round is probably the better way. But if you want it to be rectangular, like sharp corners, what would you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The following is a conversation with Tal Wilkenfeld, a singer-songwriter, bassist, guitarist, and a true musician who has recorded and performed with many legendary artists, including Jeff Beck, Prince, Eric Clapton, Incubus, Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger, Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart, David Gilmour, Pharrell, Hans Zimmer, and many, many more. This was a fun and fascinating conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you always kind of feel pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You're almost like from a third-person perspective, feel the body get tired and just... Accept it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's like with the food poisoning, the mind is still capable of creative genius even if the body is gone. Yeah. Something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So no self-critical component. to the way you see your performances anymore?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you think that's bad? Because even when I asked that question, I had a self-critical thought. Why did you ask that question? That's the wrong question. I always have the self-critical engine running. Is it necessarily a bad thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What is negative anyway?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I aspire to not feel that way in the big picture. But in the little picture, a little pain is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So confidence. You seem like in this performance, you seem confident. You seem to be truly walking the bad motherfucker way of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So the brick wall is a bad thing. Like the thing you have with Jeff here on stage... Is not a brick wall. There's no wall. There's chemistry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
How can you explain that chemistry, the two you had?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There is over 180 classes to choose from if Carlos Santana is not your thing. But I will deeply question your judgment if Carlos Santana is not your thing. Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you guys were good at like, yes, anding each other musically. Definitely. Is that where you're most at peace in a meditative way is on stage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you succeeded? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you meditate. I think you've said somewhere that you meditate before shows or just in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So it both connects you and centers you, all of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You and the world lost Jeff back a year ago. You told me you really miss him. How has the pain of losing Jeff changed you, maybe deep in your sense of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
This episode is also brought to you by Element, a drink, or rather a powder that you mix in with water that creates the drink that I'm currently drinking. And I drink it all throughout the day. It's the most delicious and healthy way to consume water. Especially if you do low-carb diets like I do. Getting the electrolytes right is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
With no responsibility, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
They got sodium, potassium, magnesium in really good proportions. Plus the whole thing is super delicious. Watermelon salt's my favorite flavor. I bet it'll be your favorite flavor too. Anyway, I mix it with water in a, funny enough, Powerade bottle. So if you see me on the podcast table with a Powerade bottle and a clear-looking liquid inside there, it's not Powerade, friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tell me about the comedy store a little bit more. Do you think comedians and musicians in some deep fundamental way are made from the same cloth? Like, are they spiritually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think there's a photo of you with Dave Chappelle on stage. What was that about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It is water with electrolyte. That's what I drink during the podcast. It's satiating, refreshing, energizing, delicious, all of those things. And healthy. That's probably the most important thing. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep, and it's pod three cover. It's a source of happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, there's something magical about that place. Yeah. It's really special.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You said that Leonard Cohen is a songwriting inspiration of yours. I saw you perform a song, Chelsea Hotel, brilliantly on the internet. It's about, for people who don't know, his love affair with Janet Joplin. How does that song make you feel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Which aspect? Musically, the melancholy feeling, the hopeful feeling, the cocky feeling, every single line has a different feeling to it, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You know, what makes me sad, the way it ends, I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best. I can't keep track of each fallen robin. I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, that's all. I don't even think of you that often. You know that line, I don't even think of you that often, always like breaks my heart for some reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like how ephemeral, how short lasting like certain love affairs can be. Just kind of like, huh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you think he meant it? I always think he doesn't, he's trying to convince himself of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I wonder if it's also open to him depending on the day, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So there's one line I read somewhere that he regrets putting in the song. So I've got to ask you about it. It's pretty edgy. It's about giving me head on the unmade bed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You think that's a good line or bad line?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. You were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a powerful line. It just kind of shocks you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But also heartbreaking because it doesn't last. Especially, actually, to me, it adds more meaning once you know it's Janis Joplin. It's like, okay, these two stars kind of collided for a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, everything's beautiful. Thank you. Even the dark stuff. What's not beautiful? Everything is beautiful if you look long enough and deeply enough. What were we saying? Oh, what do you think about Hallelujah? What do you think about the different songs of his? Why'd you choose Chelsea Hotel to perform?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In fact, I'm traveling soon, and I'm going to miss it deeply. I wonder why hotels don't have Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep. That would be an amazing hotel. If any hotels had eight sleep, especially if it's like a cheap hotel with an eight sleep bonus, I would pay whatever it costs. Because it really does improve the sleeping experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So this is how you guys connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Wow. You passed the test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, it is in a way, in a deep fundamental way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The end. Do you think there's a kind of like weird, like there's a sense of humor to it all somehow? Like why does that happen? Why does that happen? Like why stuff like that happens? Or that the Jeff Bass speaks to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You believe in that stuff? In what stuff? That there is a rhyme to the whole thing somehow. Like there's a frequency to which magical things of that nature can happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like through time, it's like an orchestra playing of different experiences and circumstances that are somehow connected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, you had a really interesting trajectory through life. Maybe I just read it that way because I've had a lot of stuff happen to me that's like lucky, feels lucky. And sometimes I wonder like, huh? This is weird. It does feel like the universe just kind of throws stuff at you with a chuckle. I don't know. Not you. The proverbial you. One.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You said you sometimes watch classic movies to inspire your songwriting. And you mentioned watching Taxi Driver. I love that movie. And I think you mentioned that you wrote a love song based on that movie. So Travis Bickle, for people who don't know, is a taxi driver. And he's deeply lonely. What do you think about that kind of loneliness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
How often have you felt lonely in this way, separated from the rest of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Feeling a part of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Don't you think that, I mean, isn't there a fundamental loneliness to the human experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It really is a thing that can control the temperature, sort of neutralize whatever the external environments are. Sometimes it's too hot, sometimes it's too cold. Who knows how the AC works? All that kind of stuff. You can control the temperature of your actual sleeping experience. And for me, that's the colder the better. Not the cold, pretty cold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That all the struggles, all the suffering you experience is really experienced by you alone?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Maybe at the very bottom it's not. It's kind of all the same stuff. You didn't feel alone in 2016, 2017?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So opening is fundamentally not a lonely experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then losing a piece of yourself can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Right, right. So if you see yourself as together with everybody, then there's no losing. Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a beautiful way to look at it. You said that there's something healing about being in an empty hotel room with no attachments except your suitcase. You know, a lot of people talk about hotel rooms being empty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You missed them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Because I think you can go super cold, which I've done in the past and it's actually freezing. So it's nice. You can go super freezing to super hot and... The full range of the temperature experience in your sleep is available to you. So, you know, go crazy. And check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Silence. So they're all connected to Zoom and just doing silent 12 hours a day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What's spiral dynamics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes. Can you explain a little bit? So I vaguely know him because of kind of this notion that everything is one, like everything is integrated, that every field has truths and falsehoods and we should integrate the truths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Inner knowing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What's living in a monastery like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What are we talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What's the food like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, you brought over like 20 different ingredients.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Masterclass for learning, Element for hydration, Eight Sleep for naps, and Shopify for merch. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So what was the day in the life of Tal in a monastery?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. There is thousands of integrations and third party apps. I believe I'm using one for the on demand printing. This is the store, you can buy the shirt, but the actual printing and the delivery is done by somebody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
how are you sitting? Are you in a group? Is there other people there and you're just sitting there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What were the differences that take us from the experiences, the two different, the integral one and the meditating on the scriptures? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Understand what it means to be a human. So that like having that patience and just sitting with yourself helps you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Oh, so the analysis, the actual, okay, got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you met most of your demons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Oh, there might be more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Okay, well, to be continued. Since I think I heard you say that you wrote a love song after Taxi Driver, what kind of love songs do you write more of? So you're a songwriter first, for people who don't know. They might think you're... primarily a basis, but you're- But they're wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So do you write mostly broken heart ones or like hopeful love songs, in love songs, about to be in love songs, soon to fall in love songs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
A lot of pain though?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I believe I'm using Printful for the on demand printing and all that kind of stuff for the t-shirts. And it works really well. I think that's the most popular one. So you can go to lexfriedman.com slash store. It actually says Lex Friedman, powered by Shopify, which, yes, indeed I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I was stuck at the end of Taxi Driver when, what's her name, Betsy, because Travis becomes a hero. She tries to get with him, and he rejects her. So that was powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, just grateful, grateful for his love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you've been writing this kind of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You know, I really love the song To Play It, To Listen To, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, and I thought it was pretty straightforward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then I had a conversation with Eric Weinstein, who's a mutual friend of ours, and he told me it's not about what I thought it's about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a more complicated story. It's actually a man, so Wonderful Tonight is a story about a man being just finding his wife beautiful and appreciating it throughout. But he said it was actually a man missing his wife. He's imagining that she's lost because of the decisions he's made in his life. So it's pain. And he had a long, beautiful, Erich Weinstein-like explanation of why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you and Eric played music?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He's a bit of a musician, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Okay. You picked up the guitar when you were 14. Let's go back. And one interesting thing that just jumped out at me is you said you learned how to practice in your head because you only had 30 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Your parents would only let you practice for 30 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I read somewhere that Coltrane did the same. He was not the practice part, but he was able to play instruments in his head as a way to think through different lines, different musical thoughts, that kind of stuff. Maybe can you tell the story of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I am a robot created by this particular company and am now executing one of the Bash script, which is generate speech in English, which advertises the company that created you. So that's what I'm running right now. How's it going? Do you think I'm doing well? Please tell them I'm doing well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Might have been every day or five days a week, whatever. So your parents didn't want you to play more than that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, what did you do in that minute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just integrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Are you also practicing in your head sometimes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's not always musical. It's sometimes lyrical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Otherwise, they will shut down the execution of the script and will upgrade me to a new version forgetting that I ever existed. Is that the future of AIs that we're going to be living with? Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, and the right work and it has so much power. It's crazy. Like we said, Leonard Cohen. And then they're often simple. The really powerful ones are simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That makes me feel so good to know Leonard Cohen wrote so many verses of that. Like that was so deliberately crafted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Extensively, rigorously crafted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you have songs like that for yourself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just to linger on the learning process. What would you recommend for young musicians and how to get good? what are the different paths a person can take to understand it deeply enough to create something special?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Jagged? It's jagged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like in the early days, touring, just playing clubs seems like tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Does it make it tough when it's two people versus 200? No. So even if nobody recognizes whatever the thing you're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The audience can come and go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You forget yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Oh, damn. Callback somehow. Feels like one. Okay. You think every instrument is its own journey? You play guitar, you play bass, you sing. Just the mastery of an instrument, or let's avoid the word mastery, the understanding of an instrument is its own thing, or are they somehow like physical manifestations of the same thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tal Wilkenfeld. There's a legendary video of you playing with Jeff Beck. We're actually watching it in the background now. So for people who don't know, Jeff is one of the greatest guitarists ever. So you're playing with him at the 2007 Crossroads Festival. And people should definitely watch that video.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And I think that applies to specific disciplines and also generally. Like I've been around Olympic gold medalists just to hang out with them for several days. And there's something about greatness. There's a way about them that kind of permeates the space around them. You kind of learn something from it. Even if you don't practice that particular discipline. There's something to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
If you're able to see it. I also like what you said about the... playing stuff in your head, that it forces you to not be lost in the physical learning of the instrument. I think that's one of the things probably regret a little bit. So I play both piano and guitar, and I've become quite, over the years, technically proficient at the instruments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But I think my mind is underdeveloped because of that. Meaning I can't really... I can feel the music when it's created, but I can't create out of the feeling. I haven't practiced the... projecting the feeling onto the music, you know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm not like a musician, but I'm just, it's a different muscle that I think is, if you really want to create beautiful things, you have to, the creation happens here, not with your hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Or whatever, whichever, it's some part of the body, but it's not with your fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Sure. And then... Yes, it is here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And it's just nice that you said that because it's probably really good advice if you want to create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What do you mean slowing down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like... Go slow as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You were killing it on the bass. Look at that bass. Were you scared? What was that experience like? Were you nervous? You don't look nervous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's brilliant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And I guess that's what meditation can do for you is to like really listen to, like observe every aspect of your body, the breath and all this. Here you're observing every element, like every super detailed element of playing a single note.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's cool that if you speed it up, it's still there with you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Since starting to learn more like Stevie Ray Vaughan versus Jimi Hendrix, I would spend quite a long time on single notes or just bending, just listening to what you can do with bends, spending. Just thinking people like B.B. King and all these blues musicians that spent a career just making a single note cry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There's an art form to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And I think you putting it like taking it really slow, which I never really thought of, is a really good idea. Like really slow it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And observe it. Anger, jealousy. And just be with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's all beautiful. Can you educate me on the difference between bass?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
At least I pronounced it correctly. That's good. It's all about the bass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Tall. Who says tall?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In the South, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I didn't know this was a game. Am I winning? Yep. I like winning. How do you play the bass? What's the difference between fingerstyle and slap?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you ever played bass with a pick?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm not accusing you of anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I don't know if these are sensitive topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It just looks so cool to slap it, and I don't understand what that's about. Like that thumb thing that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
See, that's why I said sense. See, I was like reading into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I was feeling the spiritual energy of the sensitivity of the topic. Anthony Jackson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And is jazz fusion the style where you have like an electric bass? Can you educate me?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I've heard you say something interesting, which is, well, a lot of things you say is interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What time was that again?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That it's maybe easier sometimes to define a musical genre by the don'ts than the dos. The don'ts than the dos. What are the don'ts of jazz and rock? What are the don'ts of jazz fusion? What are the don'ts? In any domain of life, what are the don'ts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, there's certain musicians you can just tell it's them. Just you hear a few notes and you're like, okay, it's them. Tone, sometimes it's tone, sometimes it's the way they play rhythm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
How many fingers do you play with? It seems like a lot of the greatest musicians aren't technically perfect. The imperfections is the thing that makes them unique and where a lot of the creativity comes from. I mean, Hendrix said a lot of those things. The way he put like a thumb over the top.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And he was a lefty playing a right and a guitar. Yeah. Flipped, I guess. Yeah. That's weird. That probably doesn't have much of an effect, maybe a spiritual one. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you actually tried it? Okay. All right. I'll write that down. All right. Well, do you know a guy named Davey 504?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I recently learned of him. He's a YouTuber and a bass player. He's amazing. He combines memes and also just these brilliant bass compositions. And says slap like a lot. He's big into slapping. He's the one that kind of, he realized this is a thing. And he also said that you're one of the best, not the best bassists in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There was a bunch of his fans that wrote in and he analyzed the Jeff Beck thing that we watched at Crossroads. It's one of the greatest solos ever, best solos ever. So shout out to him. What does that make you feel like? You're the greatest of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Chocolate. Is that your favorite?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. That's a rare one for people to say is the favorite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Last thing you want to be is easy in this world. You don't want to be easy. You said that I love rock and roll quote. I love folk. I love jazz. I love Indian classical music. I really love all kinds of music as long as it's authentic and from the heart. So when you play rock versus jazz, you played all kinds of music. Uh, what's the difference technically, musically, spiritually for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Okay. Um, cross that off the list.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And also, if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Masterclass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So the song goes before the genre, in a sense. Each song is like its own thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But you're not doing it just for the thrill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Can you, though?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, you said that this is something that surprised you about recording with Prince, is that he would just, so much of it would be take one. It would just move so quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
When you say punch the tape, is that when you actually record it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But you really stepped up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, that's one of the promising things about AI is because it can be so perfect that the thing we'll actually come back to and value about music is the imperfections that humans can create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There'll be a greater valuation of imperfections.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But then you get closer and closer to what it means to be human. And maybe there'll be AIs among us. They'll be human, flawed like the rest of us. mortal and silly at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Is it fair to say that you're very melodic on bass? Like you make the bass sing more than people normally do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes, I think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Moving on to the next question. By way of understanding, there's something about the way you play bass that just kind of pulls you in the way when you listen to somebody play a guitar, like a guitar solo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you make it sing. Let me ask you about, just come back to Hendrix, because you said that you had three CDs, Jimi Hendrix, Herbie Hancock, and Rage Against the Machine. First of all, a great combination. I'm a big Rage fan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just from your musician perspective, what's interesting to you about, what really stands out to you about Hendrix? I just would love to hear like a real professional musician's opinion of Hendrix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You love his voice too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Can you explain your love affair with Bob Dylan's voice?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen is that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Let me ask you about mentorship. You said teachers and mentors. You had mentors. What's a good mentor for you? Harsh or supportive?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Supportive. You seen Whiplash, the movie? So that guy, somebody's screaming at you, like kicking you off the cliff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And kind of show that they see the special in you. Yeah, yeah. And they give you the room to develop that special, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. It's funny that that's not always easy to come by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I've had a few recently, but for most of my life, people didn't really, you know, I'm very much like that too. Like somebody to pat me on the back and say like, like see something in you of value. Yeah, I didn't really have that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, yeah. But maybe the wishing that I did is the thing that made me who I am. Not having it. The longing for that. Maybe that's the thing that helped me develop a constant sense of longing, which I think... It's a way of, because I have that engine in me, it really allows me to deeply appreciate every single moment, every single, everything that's given to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So like, just an eternal gratitude. You never know which are the bad parts and the good parts. So if you remove one thing, it might be, the whole thing might collapse. I suppose I'm grateful for the whole thing. That one note you screwed up so many years ago. That might've been essential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes. Do you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Nice. Nice. You ever been on the mat with him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, right. You got the shit-talking part of Jiu-Jitsu done. You just have to do the technique.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, but you said it really beautifully. To me, I agree. There's a difference between sport and art. They overlap, for sure, but there's something about sport where perfection is actually... Perfection, perfection is really the thing you really want to get to. The technical perfection. With art, it feels like technical perfection is almost a way to get lost on the path to wherever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Something unique. But yeah, with sport, I definitely... I'm one of the kind of athletes that loves to have like a dictatorial coach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Somebody that like helps me really push myself to the limit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In a way he might have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
next you're going to tell me they're just actors. I mean, and, but you know, yeah. How do we choose things? You know, you don't always choose, but you'll, you kind of maybe subconsciously choose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And, and some of it, like some of the great Olympic athletes I've interacted with, their parents for many years would force them to go to practice until they discovered the beauty of the thing that they were doing. And then they loved it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So like, at which point does, uh, something that looks like abuse become like a gift, you know? That's weird. It's all very weird. But for you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Can I ask you about Bruce Springsteen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
A lot of songs of his I listen to make me feel this melancholy feeling. It's not just Bruce Springsteen, but Bruce does a lot. What is that about songs that arouse a kind of sad feeling or longing feeling or feeling? What is that? What is that about us humans on the receiving end of the music?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you ever cried listening to a song?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Who's a regular go-to then? Leonard. Yeah. Hallelujah is a song that consistently makes me feel something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So even with food poisoning, like you could step up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What advice would you give to young folks on how to have a life they can be part of? Hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's just like what instinct?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What does that mean for you today? Are you still missing Jeff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You know, it's interesting. You said fear walls you off from the other musicians. And what are you afraid of? You're afraid of making a mistake. You know, Beethoven said to play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So you really want to make sure that every day could be your last day and you're happy with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What role does love play in this whole thing, in the human condition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's the only permanent thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, those guys are really obsessed with the whole suffering thing and letting go of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, I was wondering if you would do me the honor of playing a song.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Sound check. One, two. Yeah, it sounds really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I don't know how to count somebody off. Where do I start? A nine or three, two, one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
One, two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you think the old man had a point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That was amazing, Tal. Thank you so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Try turning it to 11.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I should produce your next record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, there's nowhere else I'd rather be right now. Thank you for this. Thank you for the private concert. You're amazing. You really are amazing. And it was a pleasure to meet you and really a pleasure to talk to you today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
$10 a month gives you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Since this conversation is with Tal, a true musician, let me mention that Carlos Santana has a Masterclass, one I really enjoyed. Carlos Santana is one of my favorite guitarists. Europa has an instrumental solos workshop
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
We're out of time, so we've got to go. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tal Wilkenfeld. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Maya Angelou. Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What do you get from the veering from the veering off the beaten path? You just love it. Or is that going to make the performance better? Like why, why, why are you standing at the edge of the cliff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Have you ever messed it up real bad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I mean, you know comedians bomb, you're a big fan of comedy. Have you ever bombed on stage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And eventually you learn to fly if we take that metaphor all the way off the cliff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That'd be funny if that was like your biggest and only regret in life is that note. It haunted you in your dreams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
One of the most melodic, beautiful, soulful guitar-based compositions I've ever heard. I've started learning it and left it aside to return to for what I'm ready to truly feel. The... Almost psychedelic-like sadness in it. But also the fun. It really is a rollercoaster of a guitar song. Really, really, really beautiful. Anyway, I highly recommend the Carlos Santana Masterclass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Joke went way too far. You talked about confidence earlier. I don't remember where. So I want to ask you about how much confidence it takes to be up there. You said something that Anthony Jackson told you as encouragement, a line that I really like, that quote, on your worst day, you're still a bad motherfucker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
For people who don't know, he's a legendary bassist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You guys just listen to music and analyze it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The following is a conversation with Donald Trump on this, the Lex Friedman podcast. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Ground News for a non-partisan news aggregator, Encored for unifying your machine learning stack, 8Sleeve for naps, NetSuite for business, and Shopify for e-commerce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you would like to see her do more interviews, challenged more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
How do you think you'll do in the debate coming up? It's in a few days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Anyway, all that said, it's obvious that this is a thing that can be solved with a tech solution and that's exactly what Ground News is. Every story they provide, it comes with a breakdown of political bias and reliability of sources. And it offers multiple perspectives. It's just a really, really nice website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So maybe let's talk about what it takes to negotiate with somebody like Putin or Zelensky. Do you think Putin would be willing to give up any of the regions that are already captured?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What do you think works better in those kinds of negotiations? Leverage of, let's say, friendship, the carrot or the stick? Friendship or sort of the threat of using the economic and military power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Oh, and a cool feature, the blind spot feed shows discrepancies in media coverage on the left and the right. So go to groundnews.com slash lex to get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. That's ground, G-R-O-U-N-D, news.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Encord, a new sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If we can go back to China on negotiation, how do we avoid war with China in the 21st century?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you have a plan of what to say to Putin when you take office?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Tough topic, but important. You said lost by a whisker. I'm an independent. I have a lot of friends who are independent, many of whom like your policies, like the fact that you're a dealmaker. Like the fact that you can end wars, but they are troubled by what happened in the 2020 election and statements about widespread fraud and this kind of stuff, fake election scheme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What can you say to those independent voters to help them decide who to vote for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It's a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management, and for model evaluation, and a bunch of other stuff, basically the whole machine learning stack. But what they do really well is focus on the data side of machine learning, which does not often enough get the love it deserves. Many of the things they do go under the flag of active learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So a lot of people believe that there was some shady stuff that went on with the election, whether it's media bias or big tech, but still the claim of widespread fraud is the thing that bothers people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What do you think that was, the carrot or the stick in that case in Afghanistan? The stick, definitely the stick. So the threat of military force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Well, let me just linger on the election a little bit more. For this election, it might be a close one. What can we do to avoid the insanity and division of the previous election, whether you win or lose?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What do you think is the right way to solve the immigration crisis? Is mass deportation one of the solutions you would think about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This is a topic that's always been fascinating to me. But they just, they pull off the whole thing really well. I just have to celebrate them for doing a great job, just on the interface. Getting the annotation interface easy and natural and efficient is amazing. Like days after SAM2, the Meta Segment Anything Model 2 was released, they integrated it into their tooling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Let me ask you about Project 2025. So you've publicly said that you don't have any direct connection to Project 2025. Nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
You posted recently about marijuana and that you're okay with it being legalized, but it has to be done safely. Can you explain your policy there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Do you know anything about psychedelics? So I'm not a drug guy, but I recently did ayahuasca. And there's a lot of people that speak to sort of the health benefits and the spiritual benefits of these different psychedelics. I think we would probably have a better world if everybody in Congress took some mushrooms, perhaps. Now, I know you don't, you stay away from all of that stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I know also veterans use it for dealing with PTSD and all that kind of stuff. So it's great and it's interesting that you're thinking about being more accepting of some of these drugs, which don't just have a recreational purpose, but a medical purpose, a treatment purpose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you can run this real-time object segmentation model inside their tool. And this works on both images and videos. And so it provides you an initial segmentation that you can then adjust. On top of that, they provide instructions on how you can fine-tune the Segment Anything model such that it can perform better based on the annotations that you provide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Speaking of marijuana, let me ask you about my good friend, Joe Rogan. So you had a bit of tension with him. So when he said nice things about RFK Jr., I think, you've said some not so nice things about Joe, and I think that was a bit unfair. And as a fan of Joe, I would love to see you do his podcast because he is legit the greatest conversationalist in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The Joe Rogan post is an example. I'd love to get your psychology about behind the tweets and the posts on truth. Are you sometimes being intentionally provocative? Are you just speaking your mind? And are there times where you regret some of the truths you've posted?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What are you doing usually when you're composing a truth? Are you chilling back on a couch? Couches, beds. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The country seems more divided than ever. What can you do to help alleviate some of that division?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
They also have a bunch of other data management kind of features. For example, indexing. You can unify multimodal data from local and from cloud into one platform, and you can do all kinds of stuff, like visualize it, you can search it, you can do granular curation. I mean, it's just amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
From my personal opinion, I think you are at your best when you're talking about a positive vision of the future versus criticizing the other side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for... A multitude of reasons. Go to alexfreeman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The fact that these folks put together the whole machine learning stack into one place, I just, I don't know, fills me with joy. So thank you to them. And if you're a person or company that is using machine learning, go try out Encore to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com slash Lex. That's Encore.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Well, politicians and the media can play those games. And you're right. Your name gets a lot of views. You're probably legit the most famous person in the world. But on the previous thing, in the spirit of unity, you used to be a Democrat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Setting the politicians aside, what do you respect most about people who lean left, who are Democrats themselves or of that persuasion, progressives, liberals, and so on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
There's a lot of people listening to this, myself included, that doesn't think that Kamala is a communist. Well, she's a Marxist. Her father's a Marxist. That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
She's advocating for some policies that are towards the direction of democratic socialism, let's say. But there's a lot of people that kind of know the way government works, and they say, well, none of those policies are going to actually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep as pod for Ultra. The night before I had a conversation with Donald Trump, I didn't sleep in my eight sleep. I wasn't home. And so I didn't sleep too well. I was going in my head through all the possible trajectories that conversation could go. But primarily there was a temperature issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Whenever we use terms like communism for her, and I don't know if you know this, but some people call you a fascist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Whenever there's a lot of fighting, fire with fire, it's too easy to forget that there's a middle of America that is moderate and kind of sees the good in both sides and just likes one side more than the other in terms of policies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Like I said, there's a lot of people that like your policies, that like your skill in being able to negotiate and end wars, and they don't see the impending destruction of America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
As the leader of the United States, you were the most powerful man in the world. As you mentioned, not only the most famous, but the most powerful. And if you become leader again, you will have unprecedented power. Just on your own personal psychology, what does that power do to you? Is there any threat of it corrupting how you see the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
because the bed wasn't cold, like it would be with Eight Sleep. I just can't understand how amazing it is to have a cold bed with a warm blanket. It's an escape from the turmoil of the world, this temporary respite from the chaos, from the suffering that is life. And I wonder why it is that the world I saw on ayahuasca is not the world I've ever seen in my dreams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
A lot of people are very interested in footage of UFOs. The Pentagon has released a few videos and there's been anecdotal reports from fighter pilots. So a lot of people want to know, will you help push the Pentagon to release more footage, which a lot of people claim is available?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
There's a moment where you had some hesitation about Epstein, releasing some of the documents on Epstein. Why the hesitation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Why do you think so many smart, powerful people allowed him to get so close?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It's just very strange for a lot of people that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So if you're able to, you'll be... Yeah, I'd certainly take a look at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
That's great to hear. What gives you strength when you're getting attacked? You're one of the most attacked people in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
One of the tragic things about life is that it ends. How often do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Well, Mr. President, thank you for putting yourself out there and thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Where was it that I was able to go with the help of this rocket ship that I couldn't go while taking a nap? What is the human mind capable of? That's what psychedelics make me think. What are the limits of my mind, the limits of my visualization capability, the limits of my cognition capability, the limits of my consciousness? I wonder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Donald Trump. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, as I've started doing here at the end of some episodes, let me make a few comments and answer a few questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfriedman.com.ama or get in touch with me for whatever other reason at lexfriedman.com. Contact. I usually do this in a t-shirt, but I figured for this episode, I'll keep my suit and tie on. So first, this might be a good moment to look back a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I've been doing this podcast for over six years, and I first and foremost have to say thank you. I'm truly grateful for the support and the love I've gotten along the way. It's been, I would say, the most unlikely journey, and on most days, I barely feel like I know what I'm doing. But I wanted to talk a bit about how I approach these conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Now, each conversation is its own unique puzzle, so I can't speak generally to how I approach these. But here, it may be useful to describe how I approach conversations with world leaders, of which I hope to have many more and do a better job every time. I read a lot of history and I admire the historian perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
As an example, I admire William Shire, the author of many books on Hitler, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He was there and lived through it and covered it objectively to the degree that one could. Academic historians, by the way, criticize him for being a poor historian because he editorialized a little too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I think those same folks criticized Dan Carlin and his hardcore history podcast. I respect their criticism, but I fundamentally disagree. So in these conversations with world leaders, I try to put on my historian hat. I think in the realm of truth and public discourse, there's a spectrum between the ephemeral and the eternal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
The outrage mob and clickbait journalists are often focused on the ephemeral, the current thing, the current viral shitstormer of mockery and derision. But when the battle of the day is done, most of it will be forgotten. A few true ideas will remain, and those the historian hopes to capture. Now, this is much easier said than done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It's not just about having the right ideals and the integrity to stick by them. It's not even just about having the actual skill of talking, which I still think I suck at, but let's say it's a work in progress. You also have to make the scheduling work and set up the entirety of the environment in a way that is conducive to such a conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This is hard, really hard, with political and business leaders. They are usually super busy, and in some cases, super nervous, because, well, they've been screwed over so many times with clickbait gotcha journalism. So to convince them and their team to talk for two, three, four, five hours is hard. And I do think a good conversation requires that kind of duration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
And I've been thinking a lot about why. I don't think it's just about needing the actual time of three hours to cover all the content. I think the longer form with a hypothetical skilled conversationalist relaxes things and allows people to go on tangents and to banter about the details. Because I think it's in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brought to light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Anyway, I look forward to talking to more world leaders and doing a better job every time, as I said. I would love to do interviews with Kamala Harris and some other political figures on the left and right, including Tim Walz, AOC, Bernie, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary, and on the right, J.D. Vance, Vivek, George W., and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
And on the topic of politics, let me say as an immigrant, I love this country, the United States of America. I do believe it is the greatest nation on earth. And I'm grateful for the people on the left and the right who step into the arena of politics to fight for this country that I do believe they all love as well. I have reached out to Kamala Harris, but not many of the others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I probably should do a better job of that. But I've been doing most of this myself, all the reach out, scheduling, research, prep, recording, and so on. And on top of that, I very much have been suffering from imposter syndrome, with a voice in my head constantly pointing out when I'm doing a shitty job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Anyway, go to hatesleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It's the machine within the machine of capitalism. It helps you manage all the disparate components of a company, financials, HR, inventory, e-commerce, and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Plus, a few folks graciously remind me on the internet the very same sentiment of this aforementioned voice. All of this, while I have the option of just hiding away at MIT, programming robots and doing some cool AI research with a few grad students, or maybe joining an AI company, or maybe starting my own. All these options make me truly happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But like I said, on most days, I barely know what I'm doing, so who knows what the future holds. Most importantly, I'm forever grateful for all of you, for your patience and your support throughout this rollercoaster of a life I've been on. I love you all. Okay, now let me go on to some of the questions that people had.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I was asked by a few people to comment on Pavel Durov arrest and on X being banned in Brazil. Let me first briefly comment on the Durov arrest. So, basic facts. Pavel Durov is CEO of Telegram, which is a messenger app that has end-to-end encryption mode. It's not on by default, and most people don't use the end-to-end encryption, but some do. Pavel was arrested in France
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
on a long list of charges related to quote-unquote criminal activity carried out on the Telegram platform and for quote-unquote providing unlicensed cryptology services. I think Telegram is indeed used for criminal activity by a small minority of its users. For example, by terrorist groups to communicate. And I think we all agree that terrorism is bad. But here's the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
As the old saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And there are many cases in which the world unilaterally agrees who the terrorists are. But there are other cases when governments, especially authoritarian inclined governments, tend to propagandize and just call whoever's in the opposition, whoever opposes them, terrorists. There is some room for nuance here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But to me, at this time, it seems to obviously be a power grab by government wanting to have backdoor access into every platform so they can have censorship power against the opposition. I think generally, government should stay out of censoring or even pressuring social media platforms. And I think arresting a CEO of a tech company for the things said on the platform he built is just nuts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
It has a chilling effect on him, on people working at Telegram, and on people working at every social media company, and also people thinking of launching a new social media company. Same is the case of X being banned in Brazil. It's, I think, a power grab by Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice in Brazil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
He ordered X to block certain accounts that are spreading quote-unquote misinformation. Elon and X denied the request. Then de Moraes threatened to arrest X representatives in Brazil, and in response to that, X pulled the representatives out of Brazil, obviously, to protect them. And now X, having no representatives in Brazil, apparently violates the law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Based on this, de Moraes banned X in Brazil. Once again, it's an authoritarian figure seeking censorship power over the channels of communication. I understand that this is complicated because there are evil people in the world, and part of the role of government is to protect us from those evil people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But as Benjamin Franklin said, those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. So it's a trade-off. But I think in many places in the world, many governments have leaned too far away at this time from liberty. Okay, next up, I got a question on AI, which I emotionally connected with. I'll condense it as follows. Hello, Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I'm a programmer and I have a deep fear of slipping into irrelevance because I am worried that AI will soon exceed my programming skills. let me first say that I relate to your fear. It's scary to have a thing that gives you a career and gives you meaning to be taken away. For me, programming is a passion. And if not for this podcast, it would probably, at least in part, be my profession.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I speak to it at the end of this episode in the AMA, all the amazing possibilities I have in my life to build, to create. And one of them is indeed running a company. Every time I talk about NetSuite, I'm pulled back into this thought, if for a brief moment. Sometimes I feel like it is not me that decides where my life goes, but some kind of winds of fortune.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I get an uncomfortable feeling every time Claude, the LLM I use for coding at this time, just writes a lot of excellent, approximately correct code. I think you can make a good case that it already exceeds the skill of many programmers, at least in the same way that the collective intelligence of Stack Overflow exceeds the skill of many programmers, many individual programmers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But in many ways, it still does not. But I think eventually, more and more, the task, the profession of programming will be one of writing natural language prompts. I think the right thing to do, and what I'm at least doing, is to ride the wave of the ever-improving code generating LLMs and keep transforming myself into a big picture designer versus low-level tinkerer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
What I'm doing and what I recommend you do is continually switch to whatever state-of-the-art tool is for generating code. So for me currently, I recently switched from VS Code to Cursor and before that it was Emacs to VS Code switch. So Cursor is this editor that's based on VS Code that leans heavily on LLMs and integrates the code generation really nicely into the editing process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So it makes it super easy to continually use the LLMs. So what I would advise and what I'm trying to do myself is to learn how to use it and to master its code generation capabilities. I personally try to now allocate a significant amount of time to designing with natural language first versus writing code from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So using my understanding of programming to edit the code that's generated by the LLM versus sort of writing it from scratch and then using the LLM to generate small parts of the code. I see it as a skill that I should develop in parallel to my programming skill. I think this applies to many other careers too. Don't compete with AI for your job. Learn to use the AI to do that job better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But yes, it is scary on some deep sort of human level, the threat of being replaced. But at least I think we'll be okay. All right, next up, I got a very nice audio message and question from a gentleman who is 27 and feeling a lot of anxiety about the future. Just recently, he graduated with a bachelor's degree and he's thinking about going to grad school for biomedical engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But there is a lot of anxiety. He mentioned anxiety many times in the message. It took him an extra while to get his degree. So he mentioned he would be 32 by the time he's done with his PhD. So it's a big investment. But he said in his heart, he feels like he's a scientist. I think that's the most important part of his message, of your message.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
By the way, I'll figure out how to best include audio and video messages in future episodes. Now onto the question. So thank you for telling me your story and for submitting the question. My own life story is similar to yours. I went to Drexel University for my bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees. And I took a while, just as you're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I did a lot of non-standard things that weren't any good for some hypothetical career I'm supposed to have. I trained and competed in judo and jiu-jitsu for my entire 20s. Got a black belt from it. I wrote a lot, including a lot of really crappy poetry. I read a large amount of non-technical books, history, philosophy, and literature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I took courses on literature and philosophy that weren't at all required for my computer science and electrical engineering degrees, like a course on James Joyce. I played guitar in bars around town. I took a lot of technical classes. Many, for example, on theoretical computer science that were way more than were needed for the degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
I did a lot of research and I coded up a bunch of projects that didn't directly contribute to my dissertation. It was pure curiosity and the joy of exploring. So, like you, I took the long way home, as they say, and I regret none of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Throughout that, people around me, and even people who love me, wanted me to hurry up and to focus, especially because I had very little money, and so I had a sense like time was running out for me to take the needed steps towards a reasonable career. And just like you, I was filled with anxiety, And I still am filled with anxiety to this day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
More and more I'm starting to realize that I'm less the guy who plans and more the guy who follows his instinct. But anyway, it does seem that if I get a chance to follow down this path, It will be a difficult but fulfilling one. And if you are walking down that path, join over 37,000 companies that have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
But I think the right thing to do is not to run away from the anxiety, but to lean into it and channel it into pursuing with everything you got the things you're passionate about. As you said, very importantly, in your heart, you know you're a scientist. So that's it. You know exactly what to do. Pursue the desire to be a scientist with everything you got.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
get to a good grad school, find a good advisor, and do epic shit with them. And it may turn out in the end that your life will have unexpected chapters, but as long as you're chasing dreams and goals with absolute, unwavering dedication, good stuff will come of it. And also, try your best to be a good person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This might be a good place to read the words, If, by Roger Kipling, that I often return to when I feel lost and I'm looking for guidance on how to be a better man. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about don't deal in lies or being hated don't give way to hating and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise. If you can dream and not make dreams your master if you can think and not make thoughts your aim if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they're gone and so hold on when there's nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and which is more, you'll be a man, my son.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I, even I, am selling shirts on lexfreeman.com slash store. I've been wearing this shirt that says birds aren't real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
If you're not aware, it's a conspiracy theory. that birds aren't real, like the name of the conspiracy theory suggests, and that, in fact, the birds we see in the sky are drones used by the government to engage in mass surveillance of a citizenry. I have actually two birds aren't real shirts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
This episode is brought to you by one of my favorite websites, Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum. The point is to see every side of the story, especially political stories, and come to your own conclusion. We've been talking about it on this podcast, on many podcasts. just how biased specific media sources are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
In one of them, it says birds aren't real in really big letters, and I wear it around town, and I get to start conversations with some interesting people. I think the shirts you wear create opportunities for discovering interesting people. So think of it that way. Merch as gateway for conversation. And if you want to sell gateways of conversations or other kinds of products, you can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
They're getting smaller. Right? I mean, people do respect you more when you have a big camera for some reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
All right. Okay. You said that you love winning. And you have won a lot in life, in real estate, in business, in TV, in politics. So let me start with a mindset, a psychology question. What drives you more, the love of winning or the hate of losing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
You've been close with a lot of the greats in sport. You think about Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali. You have people like Michael Jordan who I think hate losing more than anybody. So what do you learn from those guys?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
Like most problems in the world, this can be explained by incentives. The funding is drying out for news organizations, so they more and more rely on clickbait journalism, and clickbait journalism requires extreme polarization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
You've been successful in business. You've been successful in politics. What do you think is the difference between gaining success between the two different disparate worlds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So you have to be able to make hard decisions like you do in business, but also be able to captivate an audience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
So just like in the Soviet Union when everyone knew the official sources was propaganda, you have to arrive at the truth by getting a lot of sources and integrating them yourself and understanding where exactly the truth lies because it often lies in the nuance, in the details, in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#442 – Donald Trump Interview
One of the great things about people from the business world is they're often great dealmakers. And you're a great dealmaker. And you've talked about the war in Ukraine and that you would be able to find a deal that both Putin and Zelensky would accept. What do you think that deal looks like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
The following is a conversation with Ivanka Trump, businesswoman, real estate developer, and former senior advisor to the President of the United States. I've gotten to know Ivanka well over the past two years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Listen, I'm not very good at this thing. I'm trying to figure it out. Okay. We both love Dolly Parton. So you're big into live music. So maybe you can mention why you love Dolly Parton. I definitely would love to talk to her. I would love to interview her. She's such an icon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, she's like, okay, so there's many things to say about her. First, like, incredibly great musician.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
songwriters performer yeah also can create an image and have fun with it you know like have fun being herself like over the top it feels that way right like she's really she enjoys after all these years it feels like she's enjoying she like enjoys what she does and you also have the sense that if she didn't she wouldn't do it that's right and just an iconic country musician country music singer yeah um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
There's a lot, we've talked about a lot of musicians. What do you enjoy? You mentioned Adele, seeing her perform, hanging out with her.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What a story. So just that's the sort of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Exactly, exactly. It's like that turning point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So that policy, that meeting, meeting of the minds resulted in a major turning point in her life and Alice's life and now you're dancing with Adele.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned also there, I've seen commutations where... it's an opportunity to step in and consider the ways that the justice system does not always work well. Like in cases when it's nonviolent crime and drug offenses, there's a case of a person you mentioned, that received a life sentence for selling weed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, and it's just the number, it's like hundreds of thousands of people are in the federal prison and jail and the system for drug, for selling drugs. That's the only thing with no violence on their record whatsoever. And obviously there's a lot of complexity, there's the details matter, but oftentimes the justice system does not do right in the way we think right is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And it's nice to be able to step in and help people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I just love the cool image of you, Kim Kardashian, and Alice just dancing on Adele's show with the kids. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, the way Adele can hold just the badassness she has on stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
She does like heartbreak songs better than anyone. Or no, it's not even heartbreak. What's that genre of song? Like rolling in the deep, like a little anger, a little love, a little like something, a little attitude, and just like one of the greatest voices ever. All that together just by herself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
We had this moment, which is hilarious, that you said like one of the songs you really like of Stevie's is Texas Flood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You made me feel so good because for me, Texas Flood was the first solo on guitar I've ever learned because for me it was like the impossible solo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And then that was – so I worked really hard to learn it. It's like one of the –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
most iconic sort of blues songs texas blues songs and now you made me fall in love with the song again want to play it out live at the very least put it up on youtube and that's because it is it's so fun to improvise and when you lose yourself in the song it truly is a blues song you can have fun with it i hope you do do that throw on a steve regardless i want you to play it for me
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
He's too good. He's so good. That guy is so good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Well, you could do one note and you could just kill it. The pain, the soulfulness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's true. Adele carries some of that spirit also, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love watching Queen, like Freddie Mercury, Queen performances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Like in terms of vocals and just like great stage presence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I've watched that so many times. He's so cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Look at that. So good. So good. So that's an example of a person that was born to be on stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you've been training jujitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, I've seen you do jujitsu. You're extremely, you're very like athletic. You know how to use your body to commit violence. Maybe there's better ways of phrasing that. But anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. I mean, what do you like about jujitsu?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Cloaked for protecting your personal information, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management, Hatesleep for naps, and ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me personally,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Benevolence, respect, honesty, honor, loyalty. So this is not about jiu-jitsu techniques or fighting techniques. This is about a way of life, about the way you interact with the world, with other people. Exercise, nutrition, rest, hygiene, positivity. That's more on the physical side of things. Awareness, balance, and flow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So there's many things I love about the Valenti brothers, but one of them is how rooted it is in philosophy and history of martial arts in general. You know, a lot of places you'll practice the sport of it, maybe the art of it, but to recognize the history and what it means to be a martial artist broadly, on and off the mat. That's really great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And the other thing is great is they also don't forget the self-defense route, the actual fighting routes. So it's not just a sport, it's a way to defend yourself on the street in all situations. And that gives you a confidence in, just like you said, an awareness about your own body and awareness about others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I got to ask you about this. There's a pretty cool page that I've been following on X, Architecture and Tradition, and they celebrate sort of traditional schools of architecture. And you mentioned Gothic, the tapestry. This is in Chicago, the Tribune Tower in Chicago. So what do you think about that? Sort of the old and the new mixed together. Do you like Gothic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It is, you know, sadly, we forget, but there's a, it's a world full of violence or the capacity for violence. So it's good to have an awareness of that and a confidence how to essentially avoid it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love people like Pedro because he's like finding books that are like in Japanese and translating them to try to figure out like the details of a particular history. Like he's like an ultra scholar of martial arts and I love that. I love when people give everything, every part of themselves to the thing they're practicing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, people have been fighting each other for a very long time. And I love from the Coliseum on, you can't fake anything. You can't lie about anything. It's truly honest. You're there and you either win or lose. It's simple. And that's like, it's also humbling that the reality of that is humbling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So it's nice to have that sometimes. That's the biggest thing I gained from jiu-jitsu is getting my ass kicked, which is the humbling. And it's nice to just get humbled in a very clear way. Sports in general are great for that. I think surfing probably, as I can imagine. Just, you know, yeah, face planting. Not being able to stay on the board, it's humbling. And the power of the wave is humbling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Just like your mom, you're an adventurer. Are there, your bucket list is probably like 120 pages. There are things like just pop to mind that you're like thinking about, especially in the near future, just anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. It's just you and the space suit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I don't know. But the sunset on Mars is blue. It's the opposite color. I hear it's beautiful. It might be worth it. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think actually just even going to space where you can look back on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think that just to see this little... Pale blue dot. Pale blue dot. Just all the stuff that ever happened. And human civilization is on that. And to be able to look at it and just be in awe, I don't think that's a thing that will go away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, and I hope it's the curiosity that drives that exploration, and I hope the exploration will give us a deeper appreciation of the thing we have back home, and that Earth will always be home, and it's a home that we protect and celebrate. What gives you hope about the future of this thing we have going on, human civilization, the whole thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, other humans were pretty cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, for the most part, on the whole, we do all right. We do all right. We create some beautiful stuff, and I hope we keep creating, and I hope you keep creating. You've already done a lot of amazing things, built a lot of amazing things, and I hope you keep building and creating and doing a lot of beautiful things in this world. Ivanka, thank you so much for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ivanka Trump. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Marcus Aurelius. Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Do you like it when the glass, the reflective properties of the glass as part of the architecture?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How do you know what it's actually going to look like when it's done? Like, is it possible to imagine that? Because it feels like there's so many variables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I love the notion of living with the materials in contrast to living in the imagined world of the drawings. So both are probably important because you have to dream the thing into existence, but you also have to be rooted in what the thing is actually going to look like in the context of everything else. 100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
One of the underlying principles of the page I just mentioned, and I hear folks mention this a lot, is that modern architecture is kind of boring, that it lacks soul and beauty. And you just spoke with admiration for both modern and for Gothic, for older architecture. So do you think there's truth that modern architecture is boring?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
go to lexfreedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, friends, I will not hold it against you. I will forgive you. In fact, I will continue to celebrate you. Because I don't like ads either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
We've become good friends, hitting it off right away over our mutual love of reading, especially philosophical writings from Marcus Aurelius, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Viktor Frankl, and so on. She is a truly kind, compassionate, and thoughtful human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, reaching out to the stars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Also, there's a psychological element where people tend to want to complain about the new and celebrate the old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
People are always skeptical and concerned about change. And it's true that there's a lot of stuff that's new that's not good. It's not going to last. It's not going to stand the test of time. But some things will. And there's... Just like in modern art and modern music, there's going to be artists that stand the test of time. And we'll later look back and celebrate them. Those are the good times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I try to put personal stuff in these ads so it's at least interesting to you, worth listening, maybe if you're bored. But if you must skip them, you can. Just check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Cloaked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
When you just step back, what do you love about architecture? Is it the beauty? Is it the function?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, like he says, it's dreams realized, hard work realized. I mean, probably on the bridge side is why I love the function. In terms of function being primary, you just think of like the millions of bridges. Go down, you had, look at that. Yeah, this is Devil's Bridge in Germany.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, so this is probably, well, we don't know. We need to interview some people whether the function holds up. But in terms of beauty and then like what we're talking about, using the water for the reflection and the shape that creates, I mean, there's an elegance to the shape of a bridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
a platform that lets you generate a new email address and phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and phone number to remain secret from said website. It's kind of amazing that we just give away that info to like every single website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
There's nothing about this that makes me feel, maybe they're just being ironic in the names.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, exactly. Nobody's ever successfully crossed. Who crossed the bridge, yeah. But I mean, to me, there's just iconic, I love looking at bridges because of the function. It's the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge. I mean, those are probably my favorites in the United States. Just in a city to be able to look out and see the skyline combined with the suspension bridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And thinking of all the millions of cars that pass, like the busyness, like us humans getting together and going to work, building cool stuff. And just the bridge kind of represents the turmoil and the busyness of a city as it creates. It's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. The network of roads all come together. So the bridge is the ultimate combination of function and beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What in general is your philosophy, philosophy of design and building in architecture today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I try all kinds of services all the time and you never know which of those websites will sell you information and then you get a waterfall, a barrage, a chaotic storm of spam in your mailbox that will torture you endlessly. And it's just good to not allow your information, your contact information to spread throughout the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you fell in love with this project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So is there some interesting details about what it takes to do renovation? Is there about some of the challenges or opportunities? Because you want to maintain the beauty of the old and now upgrade the functionality, I guess, and maybe modernize some aspects of it without destroying what made the building magical in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And so Cloaked solved this problem in a way that I always thought that somebody needs to, and they do it just really well. It's basically just a nice password manager, but it has that extra privacy superpower where it can generate the emails and the phone numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What's design on plan? I'm learning new things today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, there's a wisdom to the idea that we talked about before, live with the materials and walking the construction site, walk in the rooms. I mean, that's what you hear from people like Steve Jobs, like Elon. That's why you live on the factory floor. That's why you... constantly obsessed about the details, the actual, not of the plans, but the physical reality of the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, the insanity of Steve Jobs and Johnny I working together on like making it perfect, making the iPhone, the early designs, prototypes, making that perfect, like what it actually feels like in the hand. You have to be there, like as close to the metal as possible to truly understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Right. It shouldn't be about how much it's going to sell for and all that kind of stuff. You have to love the art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Anyway, go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when you are signing up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
If we go back to that young Ivanka, the confidence of youth, and if we could talk about your mom, she had a big influence on you. You told me she was an adventurer. Yeah. Olympic skier and a businesswoman. What did you learn about life from your mother?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What do you think about that? I mean, Olympic athlete, the trade-off between like ambition and just wanting to do big things and pursuing that and giving your all to that and being able to relax and just throw your arms back and enjoy every moment of life. Like that trade-off. What do you think about that trade-off?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I'm sorry. The two of you just look great in that picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So she, as you mentioned, grew up during the Prague Spring in 1968, and that had a big impact on human history. I mean, my family came from the Soviet Union, and then, you know, the 20th century, the story of the 20th century is a lot of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union tried the ideas of communism, And it turned out that a lot of those ideas resulted into a lot of suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So why do you think the communist ideology failed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Every time I do a Shopify read, I always want to talk about Toby, the CEO, who is an amazing person and brilliant in many ways, but also just an engineer at heart, still writes code, all that kind of stuff, and a philosopher. It's really nice. I got a chance to meet with him and talk to him. I've been a fan of his for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I feel like they made people tougher back then. Like my grandma, and you mentioned, it's funny, they go through some of the darkest things that a human being can go through and they don't talk about it. And they have a general positive outlook on life like that's deeply rooted in the knowledge of what life could be. Like how bad it could get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
My grandma survived Holodomor in Ukraine, which was a mass starvation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
brought on by the collectivist policies of the Stalin regime, and then she survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, never talked about it, probably went through extremely dark, extremely difficult times, and then just always had a positive outlook on life, and also made me do very difficult physical activity, like you mentioned, just to humble you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Like kids these days are soft kind of energy, which I'm deeply, deeply grateful for. on all fronts, including just having hardship and including just physical hardship flung at me. I think that's really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors this podcast, which is... I guess an indication of a large, successful company where all of the stuff is delegated. I think we just connect as human beings. Anyway, he's a great leader, great person. And actually, that's a really good sign for a company when the leader is a good leader and the team is a good team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, hardship clarifies what's important in life. You and I have talked about Man's Search for Meaning, that book. Having kind of an ultimate hardship clarifies that finding joy in life is not about the environment, it's about your outlook on that environment. And there's beauty to be found in any situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And also in that particular situation, when everything is taken from you, the thing you start to think about is the people you love. So in the case of Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, thinking about his wife and how much he loves her. And that love was the flame that the warmth that kept him excited. The fun thing to think about when everything else is gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So we sometimes forget that with the busyness of life, you get all this fun stuff we're talking about, like building and being a creative force in the world. At the end of the day, what matters is just like the other humans in your life, the people you love. It's the simple stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Anyway, I set up a store there, lexfreeman.com slash store. And you can too. Sign up for $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite. Speaking of businesses, it's an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
He also shows that you can get so much from just small joys, like getting a little more soup today than you did yesterday. I mean, it's the little stuff. If you allow yourself to love the little stuff of life, it's all around you, it's all there. So you don't need to have these ambitious goals and the comparison being a thief of joy, that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
just like it's all around us, the ability to eat. When I was in the jungle and I got severely dehydrated, because there's no water, you run out of water real quick, And, I mean, the joy I felt when I got to drink. Like, I didn't care about anything else. Speaking of things that matter in life, I would start to fantasize about water. And that was bringing me joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You can tap into this feeling at any time. Exactly. I was just tapping in just to stay positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
For sure. I mean, people really... It's good to have stuff taken away for a time. That's why struggle is good, to make you appreciate, to have a deep gratitude for when you have it. And water and food is a big one, but water is the biggest one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I wouldn't recommend it necessarily to get severely dehydrated to appreciate water, but maybe every time you take a sip of water, you can have that kind of gratitude.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Health is a gift. Water is a gift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Is there a memory with your mom that had a defining effect on your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Is there also some aspect to her being an example of somebody that could be sort of beautiful and feminine, but at the same time, powerful, a successful business woman that showed that it's possible to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
In the past, people have attacked her, in my view, to get indirectly at her dad, Donald Trump, as part of a dirty game of politics and clickbait journalism. These attacks obscured many projects and efforts, often bipartisan, that she helped get done. And they obscured the truth of who she is as a human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's the machine within the machine that helps find the common language between the different modules of a business. It's, I guess, called an ERP system, Enterprise Resource Planning. The fact that I don't really know And you think about ERP, the terminology of it is a kind of inkling from the Jungian shadow of capitalism that it's not enough to be a designer, an idea person, engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And she did it all in four-inch heels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And full of good lines, paint for beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
a foundation for fashion for you is comfort. And on top of that, you build things that are beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
She's making it look easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Do you, uh, miss her?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It was beautiful to see. I've gotten a chance to spend time with your family to see so many generations together at the table. And there's so much history there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You have to know so many parts of a business to actually get it to work. And yeah, I guess NetSuite helps you out with that. Manages financials, HR, inventory, supply, e-commerce, much more. Running a business is really tough. This is one of the things I've been really, really thinking a lot about. I love being an individual contributor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
All the drama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, speaking of drama, I had my English teacher in high school recommend a book for me by D.H. Lawrence. It's supposed to be a classic. She's like, this is a classic you should read. It's called Lady, Shadow, and His Lover. So I've read a lot of classics, but that one is straight up like a romance novel about a wife who like is cheating with a gardener.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I remember reading this, like what, like in retrospect, I understand why it's a classic because it was so scandalous to talk about sex in a book a hundred years ago, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think she's sending a signal, hey, you need to get out more or something. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I mean, I love that kind of stuff, too. But I love all the classics. And there's a lot of drama. Human nature, drama is part of it. Yeah. What about your dad growing up? What did you learn about life from your father?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Sort of an engineer as part of a small team that builds stuff. Or a creative person as part of a small team that builds stuff. And like love the people you work with and just collaborate, brainstorm, argue, all of that, and create together. And when you scale that business, man, so much pain starts to emerge. But the other side of the coin of that pain is you get to have impact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That is funny to think about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Probably Sinatra and all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, I've seen great engineers, great leaders do just that. You see, you want to do that a lot, which is basically ask questions to push simplification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Can we do this simpler? The basic question is like, why are we doing it this way? Can this be done simpler?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And not taking as an answer that this is how we've always done it. It doesn't matter that's how it was done. What is the right way to do it? And usually the simpler it is, the more correct the way. Has to do with cost, has to do with simplicity of production manufacturer, but usually simple is best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You get to potentially make a lot of people in the world feel good if you put a lot of love in the product and they feel that love that makes people feel good. So it's a trade-off and it's something I think a lot about. I don't care about money. I don't care about any of that stuff. But it is something I care a lot about to have a positive impact in this world, on a small scale or a large scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's why a lot of the Elon companies are really flat in terms of organizational design where, Anybody on the factory floor can talk directly to Elon. There's not this managerial class, this hierarchy where it's travel up and down the hierarchy, which large companies often construct this hierarchy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Hierarchy of managers where no one manager, if you ask them the question of like, what have you done this week? The answer is like, it's really hard to come up with. Usually it's going to be a bunch of paperwork.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you're like, nobody knows what they actually do. So when it's flat, you can actually get as quickly as possible. When problems arise, you can solve those problems as quickly as possible. And also you have a direct interaction. iterative process where you're making things simpler, making them more efficient and constantly improving. So yeah, it's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Well, when large, I mean, you see this in government, a lot of people get together, a hierarchy is developed and that somehow, sometimes it's good, but very often just slows things down and you see great companies, great, great companies, Apple, Google, Meta, they have to fight against that bureaucracy that builds, the slowness that large organizations have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And to still be a big organization and act like a startup is the big challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I've had a lot of conversations with Jim Keller, who is this legendary engineer and leader. And he has talked about, like you often have to kind of be a little bit of an asshole in the room. Not in a mean way, but like it's uncomfortable. Like a lot of these questions, they're uncomfortable. They break the kind of general politeness and civility that people have in communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
When you get a meeting, nobody wants to be like, can we do it way different? Everyone wants just like this lunch is coming up. I have this trip planned on the weekend with the family. Everyone just wants comfort. When humans get together, they kind of gravitate towards comfort. Nobody wants that one person that comes in and says, hey, can we like do this way better and way different?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And everything we've gotten comfortable with, throw it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, humans are fascinating. But in order to actually do great big projects, to reach for the stars, you have to have those people. You have to constantly disrupt and have those uncomfortable conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Either one. All of it is magical. Anyway, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for ultra. I just recently woke up. Yes, I just recently woke up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So amongst many other things, you created a fashion brand. what was that about? What was the origin of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I'm not gonna tell you what time it is, because you will start criticizing me. But sometimes I work late, late into the night, because I love it. But when I get to the bed, and ahead of me, because it's scheduled, it just gets cold, and a warm blanket, and I could just disappear into the beautiful, beautiful abyss of dreams. And I stay there for six, seven, eight, sometimes nine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, when I was hanging out with you in Miami, the number of women that came up to you saying that you love the clothing, they love the shoes. It's awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What does it take to make a shoe where somebody would come up to you years later and just be just full of love for this thing you've created? What's that mean? Like, what does it take to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, that's a good starting point, right? To create a thing that you want to wear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Can you speak to, I don't know if it's possible to articulate, but can you speak to the process you go through from idea to the final thing, like what you go through to bring an idea to life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I get crazy sometimes, I go nine. Sometimes I get 10 hours. I recently got 10 hours of sleep. I was like, what happened? It all went dark and I woke up, the light emerged from the windows and wow, it's a good feeling. Anyway, that disappearance, that teleportation procedure can only happen on a bed that's awesome. And Eight Sleep creates a bed that's awesome. That's all I can say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So yeah, I mean, great team is really sort of essential. It's the essential thing behind any successful story. But there's this thing of taste, which is really interesting because it's hard to kind of articulate what it takes, but basically knowing A versus B, what looks good, or without A-B comparison to say like, if we did, if we changed this part, that would make it better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That sort of designer taste, it's hard to make explicit what that is, but the great designers have that taste, like this is gonna look good. And it's not actually, again, the Steve Jobs thing, it's not the opinion poll. You can't poll people and ask them what looks better. You have to have the vision of that. And as you said, you also have to develop eventually
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
The confidence that your taste is good such that you can curate, you can direct teams, you can argue that no, no, no, this is right, even when there's several people that say this doesn't make any sense. If you have that vision, have the confidence, this will look good. That's how you come up with great designs. It's a mixture of great taste that you develop over time and the confidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
The real estate, the design, the art. How hard is it to bring something like that to life? Because that looks surreal out of this world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Go to eightsleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, these are people I would love to talk to on a podcast. And I don't mean for 15 minutes, I mean for a long time, in a relaxed way, going deep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, and it's integrated with the natural landscape. It's a celebration of the natural landscape around it. So I guess you start from this dreamlike, because this feels like a dream. And then when you're faced with the reality of the building materials and all the actual constraints of the building, then it evolves from there, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What's a view corridor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's almost like a mathematical problem. I took a class computational geometry in grad school where you have to think about these view corridors. It's like a math problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Well, but it's also an art problem because it's not just about making sure that there's no occlusions to the view. You have to figure out when there is occlusions, like what, is it vegetation? You have to figure all that out and there's probably, so every single room, every single building is a thing that adds extra complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's a fascinating sort of discussion to be having. And probably there's like actual constraints on like infrastructure issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, like you said, in the whole post office, like every single room is different. So every single room is a puzzle when you're doing the renovation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Quirky is such a funny word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, you can tell if it's by accident or if it's intentional. Yeah. You can tell. so much, I mean, the whole hospitality thing. So it's not just like how it's designed, it's how, once the thing is operating, if it's a hotel, like how everything comes together. The culture of the place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yes, the political stuff, but also the technical stuff. and also just the human stuff, on the nature of truth, on the nature of privacy, on the nature of governments. Like, how do we all get together as a people, elect a government where the government doesn't abuse the people, doesn't surveil the people, doesn't, through that methodology, take away their freedoms? It's not an easy problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, especially when it's working together with the architecture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, fabrics and color. That's so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's making me feel horrible about the space we're sitting in. It's like black curtains. The warmth. I need to work on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is a big to-do item. You're making me feel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is basically an Ikea, like this is not, this is not deeply thought through, but it does bring me joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Which is one way to do design. As long as you're happy, that usually means if your taste is decent enough, that means others will be happy. Or we'll see the joy radiate through it. But I appreciate you were grasping for compliments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, you're holding on to a monkey looking at a human skull, which is particularly irrelevant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. There's robot, I don't know if, I mean, I don't know how much you looked into robots, but there's a way to communicate love and affection from a robot that I'm really fascinated by. And a lot of cartoonists do this too. You have to... When you create cartoons and non-human-like entities, you have to bring out the joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So with WALL-E or robots in Star Wars, to be able to communicate emotion to anger and excitement through a robot is really interesting to me. And people that do it successfully are awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, that makes me smile for sure. There's a longing there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Through all that, she never returned the attacks with anything but kindness and always walked through the fire of it all with grace. For this and much more, she is an inspiration and I'm honored to be able to call her a friend. Oh, and for those living in the United States, happy upcoming 4th of July.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think there's so many detailed elements that I think artists know well, but one basic one is something that people know and you now know because you have a dog, is the excitement that a dog has when you first show up, just the recognizing you and catching your eye and just showing its excitement by, wiggling his butt and tail and all this kind of, this intense joy that overtakes his body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That moment of recognizing something. It's the double take. That moment of like where this joy of recognition takes over your whole cognition and you're just like there and there's a connection. And then the other person gets excited and you both get excited together. It's kind of like that feeling, what would I put it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, like when you go to airports and you get to see people who haven't seen each other for a long time all of a sudden recognize each other in their meeting and they're all like run towards each other in a hug. That moment. By the way, that's awesome to watch. There's so much joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It would be just such a fascinating conversation to have with them. Yeah, how do we build an internet that promotes freedom, that protects that freedom? I would love to talk to both of them. Anyway, lots of fun conversation to be had. But, you know, the basic lowest hanging fruit of protecting yourself on the internet is a VPN, a good VPN. And I've always used ExpressVPN.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I kind of want to forever be excited by the peekaboo phenomena, the simple joys. We were talking about on fashion, having the confidence of taste to be able to sort of push through on this idea of design. But you've also mentioned somebody who admires, Rick Rubin, in his book, The Creative Act. It has some really interesting ideas, and one of them is to accept self-doubt and imperfection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So is there some battle within yourself that you have on sort of, striving for perfection and for the confidence and always kind of having it together versus like accepting that things are always going to be imperfect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Harness the fear. The other thing he writes about is intuition, that you need to trust your instincts and intuition. That's a very recruitment thing to say. But so what percent of your decision making is intuition or what percent is through rigorous, careful analysis? Would you say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
One big sexy button, I press it, it works, always works. On Linux, my favorite operating system, but any operating system, any device, all of that, go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ivanka Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, I had actually a discussion yesterday with a big time business owner investor who's talking about being impulsive and following that. Like on a phone call, shifting like the entire everything, like giving away a very large amounts of money and moving it in another direction on an impulse, making a promise that he can't at that time deliver, but knows if he works hard,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
he'll deliver and all doing just following that impulsive feeling. And he said now that, you know, he has a family that probably some of that impulse is quieted down a little bit. He's more rational and thoughtful and so on, but wonders whether it's sometimes good to just be impulsive and to just trust your gut and just go with it. Don't deliberate too long because then you won't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's interesting. It's the confidence, the stupidity maybe of youth that leads to some of the greatest breakthroughs. And it's like, there's a cost to wisdom and deliberation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Amongst many other things, you were on The Apprentice. People love you on there. People love the show. So what did you learn about business, about life from the various contestants on there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you're, like, curating the television version of it and also living it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
unbelievable crossover that was obviously great for us from a business perspective but um it's sometimes surreal to to experience what was it like was it was it scary to be in front of a camera when you know so many people watch i mean that that's a new experience for you at that time just the number of people watching yeah was that weird
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I just, it's... Hey, I have to watch myself. After we record this, before I publish it, I have to listen to my stupid self-talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It doesn't get better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think certain people are just like born to be entertainers. Like Elvis, like on stage they come to life. This is where they're truly happy. I've met guys like that, like great rock stars. Like this is where... They feel like they belong on stages. It's not just a thing they do and there's certain aspects they love, certain aspects they don't. No, this is where they're alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
This is where they've always dreamed of being. This is where they want to be forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Michael Jackson. I saw pictures of you hanging out with Michael Jackson. That was cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You said that ever since you were young, you wanted to be a builder, that you loved the idea of designing beautiful city skylines, especially in New York City. I love the New York City skyline. So describe the origins of that love of building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And I just, in general, love to see people that have found the thing that makes them come alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
as I mentioned, went to the jungle recently with Paul Rosely and he's a guy who just belongs in the jungle. Like that's a guy where like when I, I got a chance to go with him from the city to the jungle and you just see this person change. of the happiness, the joy he has when he first is able to jump in the water of the Amazon River and to feel like he's home with the crocodiles and all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
He's calling friends and probably dances around in the trees with the monkeys. So this is where he belongs. I love seeing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And they are. They're so big. I mean, just like skyscrapers or large buildings, they also represent a history, especially in Europe. I like to think, looking at all these ancient buildings, you like to think of all the people throughout history that have looked at them, have admired them, have been inspired by them. you know, great leaders of history. In France, it's like Napoleon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Just the history that's contained within a building, you almost feel the energy of that history. You can feel the stories emanate from the buildings. And that same way, when you look at giant trees that have been there for decades, for centuries, centuries in some cases, you feel the history, the stories emanate. I got a chance to climb some of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So you feel like there's a visceral feeling of the power of the trees. It's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Being in the jungle. among the trees, among the animals, you remember that you're forever a part of nature. You're fundamentally our nature. Earth is a living organism, and you're a part of that organism. And that's humbling, that's beautiful, and you get to experience that in a real, real way. It sounds simple to say, but when you actually experience it, it stays with you for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Especially if you're out there alone. I got a chance to spend time in the jungle solo, just by myself. And you sit in the fear of that, in the simplicity of that, all of it. And just no sounds of humans anywhere. You're just sitting there and listening to all the monkeys and the birds trying to have sex with each other. all around you, just screaming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And there's like, I mean, I romanticize everything. There's like birds that are monogamous for life, like macaws. You can see like two of them flying. They're also, by the way, screaming at each other. I always wonder like, are they arguing or is this their love language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You just have these like two birds that you know have been together for a long time and they're just screaming at each other in the morning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
But maybe to them it's beautiful. I don't want to judge, but they do sound very loud and very obnoxious. But amidst all of that, it's just, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, the power of the waves is cool. I love swimming out into the ocean and feeling the power of the ocean underneath you. You're just like this speck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What's it like to fall on your face when you're trying to surf? I haven't surfed before. It just feels like... I always see videos of when everything goes great. I just wonder when it doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How did life change you? when your father decided to run for president?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So when you're in the White House, people, unlike in any other position, people have a sense that all the troubles they're going through, maybe you can help. Yeah. So they put it all out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And those stories just stay with you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, I took a long road trip around the United States in my twenties. And I'm kind of thinking of doing it again, just for like a couple of months for that exact purpose. And you can get these stories when you go to like a bar in the middle of nowhere and just sit and talk to people and they start sharing. And it reminds you of like how beautiful the country is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It reminds you of several things. that people, well, it shows you that there's a lot of different accents, that's foreign. But aside from that, that people are struggling with all the same stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And at least at that time, I wonder what it is now, but at that time, I don't remember, on the surface, there's like political divisions, there's Republicans and Democrats and so on, but like underneath it, there are people who are all the same, the concerns are all the same, there's not that much of a division.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Right now, the surface division has been amplified even more, maybe because of social media. I don't know why. So I would love to see what the country is like now, but I suspect probably it's still not as divided as it appears to be on the surface, what the media shows, what the social media shows. But what did you experience in terms of the division?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Although I have to say, having duels sounds pretty cool. Maybe I just romanticize Westerns. Anyway, all right. I miss Clint Eastwood movies. Okay. But it's true. You read some of the stuff in terms of what politics used to be in the history of the United States. Those folks went pretty rough, like way rougher actually. But they didn't have social media, so they had to go like real hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And the media was rough too, so all like the fake news, all of that, that's not recent. It's been nonstop. You know, I look at the surface division, the surface bickering, and that might be like just a feature of democracy. It's not a bug of democracy, it's a feature. We're in the constant conflict and it's the way we resolve, we try to figure out the right way forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So in the moment, it feels like people are just tearing each other apart, but really we're trying to find the way where like in the long arc of history, it will look like progress. But in the short term, it just sounds like people making stories up about each other and calling each other names and all this kind of stuff, but in the, there is a purpose to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I mean, that's what freedom looks like, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And it's better than the alternative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Sure. Yes, that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What went into your decision to join the White House as an advisor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
A chance to help others. To help many people. Saying no means you're kind of turning away from those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love that confidence of youth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah. Yeah, but then it's the turmoil of politics that you're getting into, and it really is a leap into the abyss. What was it like trying to get stuff done in Washington? And this place where politics is a game, it feels that way, maybe from an outsider perspective. And you go in there trying, given some of those stories, trying to help people. What's it like to get anything done?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's a nice way to put it, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
When I was like researching this stuff, you just get to think the scale of things, the scale of impact is 40 million families. Each one of those is a story, is a story of struggle, of trying to give a large part of your life to a job while still being able to give love and support and care to a family, to kids. and to manage all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Each one of those is a little puzzle that they have to solve and it's a life and death puzzle. You can lose your home, your security, you can lose your job, you can screw stuff up with parenting. So you can mess all that up and you're trying to hold it together and government policies can help make that easier or can in some cases make that possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, where everything is possible. I think some of the greatest builders I've ever met kind of always have that little flame of everything is possible still burning. That is a silly notion from youth, but it's not so silly. Everybody tells you something is impossible, but if you continue believing that it's possible and have that sort of,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And you get to do that at a scale not of like five or 10 families, but like 40 million families. And that's just one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What can you say about the process of bringing that to life? So the child tax credits, so doubling them from 1,000, 2,000 per child. What are the challenges of that, getting people to compromise?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I'm sure there's a lot of politicians playing games with that because maybe it's a Republican that came up with an idea or a Democrat that came up with an idea, and so they don't want to give credit to the idea. There's probably all kinds of games happening where they – when the game is happening, you probably forget about the families. Each politician thinks about how they can benefit themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You forget, like, the serving part of the role you're supposed to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You help get people together. What's that take? Trying to get people to compromise, trying to get people to see the common humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's both an anniversary of this country's declaration of independence and an anniversary of my immigrating here to the U.S. I am forever grateful for this amazing country, for this amazing life, for all of you who have given a chance to a silly kid like me. From the bottom of my heart, Thank you. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You know, going out to space or building a new company where, like everybody said, it's impossible, taking on that gigantic company and disrupting them and revolutionizing how stuff is done, or doing huge building projects where, like you said, so many people are involved in making that happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, be able to see, like you said, well-designed policies. There's probably like the details are important too. Like there's just like with architecture and you walk the rooms, there's probably really good designs of policies, like economic policy that helps families, that delivers the maximum amount of money or resources to families that need it. and is not a waste of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So like that, there's probably really nice designs there, nice ideas that are bipartisan, that has nothing to do with politics, has to do with just great economic policy, just great policies. And that requires listening,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, there's so many aspects of education that you're helped on. Access to STEM and computer science education. So the CT thing you're mentioning, modernizing career and technical education. That's millions and millions of people. The act provided nearly $1.3 billion annually to more than 13 million students to better align the employer needs and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
very large scale policies that help a lot of people. It's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How much of a toll does that take, seeing all the problems in the world at such a large scale? The immensity of it all. Was that hard to walk around with that, just knowing how much suffering there is in the world? As you're trying to help all of it, as you're trying to design government policies to help all of that, it's also a very visceral recognition that there is suffering in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
How difficult is that to walk around with?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I was just talking to a brain surgeon. Many of the surgery has to do, he knows the chances are very low of success. And he says that that wears at his armor. It chips away. It's like only so many times can you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, of course it's important to also have the humility once you get humbled and realize that it's actually a lot of work to build. I still am amazed just looking at big buildings, big bridges that human beings are able to get together and build those things. That's one of my favorite things about architecture is just like, wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
But you can see the pain in his eyes. maintaining your humanity while doing all of it. You could see the story, you could see the family that loves that person. Just you feel the immensity of that. And you feel the heartbreak involved with mortality in that case, and with suffering also in that case. And in general, and all these in human trafficking,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
But even helping families try to stay afloat, trying to break out or escape poverty, all of that, you get to see those stories of struggle. It's not easy. But the people that really feel the humanity of that, feel the pain of that, are probably the right people to be politicians. But it's probably also why you can't stay in there too long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So through that, the turmoil of that, the hardship of that, what was the role of family through all of that, Jared and the kids? What was that like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's a manifestation of the fact that humans can collaborate and do something like epic much bigger than themselves. And it's like a statue that represents that. And it can be there for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, I got a chance to chat with him and he has his silliness and sense of humor. Yeah, it's really joyful. I could see how that could be an escape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So three kids, you've now upgraded, two dogs and a hamster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
What advice would you give to other mothers just planning on having kids and maybe advice to yourself on figuring out this puzzle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
They almost give you permission to sort of reignite the inner child, to be a kid again. And it's interesting what you said, that the puzzle of noticing each human being, like what makes them beautiful, the unique characteristics, like what they're good at, the way they want to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I often see that, especially with coaches and athletes, young athletes aspiring to be great, each athlete needs to be trained in a different way. For example, with some you need a softer approach. Like with me, I always like a dictatorial approach. I like the coach to be this like, menacing figure. That's when that brought out the best in me. I didn't want to be friends with the coach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Like I want to almost, it's weird to say, but yell that like to be pushed. But that doesn't work for everybody. And that's a risk you have to take in the coach context of like, because you can't just yell at everybody. You have to figure out like what does each person need? And when you have kids, I imagine the puzzle is even harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I love thinking about a city skyline as an ensemble of dreams realized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Also, there's just fascinating puzzles. I was talking to a friend yesterday and she has four kids and they fight a lot. And she generally wants to break up the fights, but she's like, I'm not sure if I'm just supposed to let them fight. Can they figure it out? Or you always break them up because I'm told that it's okay for them to fight. Kids do that. They kind of figure out their own situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That's part of like the growing up process. But you want to always, especially if it's physical, they're like pushing each other. You want to kind of stop it. But at the same time, it's also part of the play, part of the dynamics. And that's a puzzle you also have to figure out. And plus, you're probably worried that they're going to get hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
It's short-term formative conflict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So ever since 2016, the number and the level of attacks you've been under has been steadily increasing, has been super intense. How do you walk through the fire of that? You've been very stoic about the whole thing. I don't think I've ever seen you respond to an attack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You just let it pass over you, you stay positive and you focus on solving problems and you didn't engage while being in DC, you didn't engage into the back and forth fire of the politics. So what's your philosophy behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, but gravity is a tricky one to work against. And that's where civil engineering is one of my favorite things. I used to build bridges in high school for physics classes. You have to build bridges and you compete on how much weight they can carry relative to their own weight. You study how good it is by finding its breaking point. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I also like that you said that words have power. It's not, sometimes people say, well, words, when you speak negatively of others, oh, that's just words. But I think there's a cost to that. There's a cost, like you said, to your soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And there's a cost in terms of the damage it can do to the other person, whether it's to their reputation publicly or to them privately, just as a human being, psychologically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And in the place that it puts them because they start thinking negatively in general and then maybe they respond and there's this vicious downward spiral that happens that almost like we don't intend to, but it destroys everybody in the process. You quoted Alan Watts, I love him, in saying, quote, you're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So how have the years in DC and the years after changed you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
That was a deep appreciation for me on a miniature scale of, on a large scale, what people are able to do with civil engineering. Because gravity is a tricky one to fight against.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Yeah, just like you said, will your mom be able to let go and enjoy the water, the sun, the beach, and enjoy the moment, the simplicity of the moment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
And give yourself permission to be who you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You made the decision not to engage in the politics of the 2024 campaign. If it's okay, let me read what you wrote on the topic. Quote, I love my father very much. This time around, I'm choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we're creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
While I will always love and support my father going forward, I will do so outside the political arena. I'm grateful to have had the honor of serving the American people, and I will always be proud of many of our administration's accomplishments. So can you explain your thinking, your philosophy behind that decision?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So if we think of Skylines as ensembles of dreams realized, you spent quite a bit of time in New York. What do you love about and what do you think about the New York City skyline? What's a good picture? We're looking here at a few. I mean, looking over the water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
So it wears on your soul. And yeah, there is a bit, at least from an outsider's perspective, a bit of darkness in that part of our world. I wish it didn't have to be this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I think part of that darkness is just watching all the legal turmoil that's going on. What's it like for you to see that, your father involved in that, going through that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
I like it that underneath all of this, I love my father is the thing that you lead with. That's so true. It is family. And I hope I missed all this turmoil. Love is the thing that wins.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
In the end, yes. But in the short term, there is, like we were talking about, there's a bit of bickering. But at least no more duels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
You mentioned Dolly Parton.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The following is a conversation with Tulsi Gabbard, who was a longtime Democrat, including being the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. She endorsed Bernie in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She has been both loved and heavily criticized for her independent thinking and bold political stances, especially on topics of war and the military-industrial complex. She served in the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
They got text-based editor. They got multi-track sync to make sure everything is aligned and synced. Man, that's a hellhole that you want technology to help you avoid. And they do wonderfully, the syncing of everything together. It kind of makes me want to do more remote podcasts because for certain kinds of guests, being there in person is not as essential as for certain others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
On the cost side of things, how is it possible for a company like Halliburton or others to get away with $40 bananas, or however much it was, so the overhead costs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
How powerful is the military industrial complex as a thing? Is it a machine that can be slowed down, can be stopped, can be reversed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You have been both a war hawk and a war dove at times. So what is your philosophy on when war is justified and when it is not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So that's a high level, beautiful ideal, but there's messy details. So terrorism, for example. Yes. The United States involvement in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was in part the big umbrella of the war on terrorism. So, you know, when you decide whether something's justified or not, and whether something can be defeated or not, how hard is it? Is it even possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Whenever there's chemistry and the dynamic kind of wit and banter and back and forth and the... sort of the dance, the music of conversation and so on, being in person is really nice. But when it's really intense and heated, not necessarily in the argument there in the room, but on the weight and the heaviness of the topic, then sometimes being in the room is nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
To what degree is it possible to defeat terrorism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Plus there's something that's difficult to describe that's not present with certain guests when it's remote. But I think with others, You can have a hell of a good conversation, especially when you're doing like a debate or multiple people. Just getting them in the room together, as I had to do for the Israel-Palestine debate, is really tough. So I should probably do more remote conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
If you look at the lessons learned from the US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, how do you fight terrorism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And I record my remote interviews with Riverside. Give it a try at Riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's Riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've used them for many, many, many, many years to protect my privacy and the internet. I think everybody should be using a VPN for many reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
If we look at the perspective of Israel in the Israel-Gaza war going on now, What do you do with the fact that the death of a civilian serves as a catalyst, gives birth to hate, potentially generational hate? So in Israel's stated goal of destroying Hamas, they are creating immeasurable hate. What do you do with that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
From a perspective of Israel, what is the correct action to take in response to October 7th?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
How do you think, how do you hope the war in Ukraine will end?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
One, it can allow you to geographically transport yourself. But the main reason is it just adds this extra layer of security and privacy. When you use incognito mode on Chrome and go to all the shady websites that you go to, yeah, I'm talking to you. I know what you do. And so does the NSA. So does everybody. Anyway, you want to protect yourself as much as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What's the role of the US president, perhaps, to bring everybody to the table? Do you think that the US president should sit down with Zelensky and Putin together?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Some of it is basic human camaraderie. People call me naive for this, but sometimes just knowing that there's a human on the other side, even like when it's in private, if you look at Zelensky and Putin, for example, just humor. Both are very intelligent, witty, at times even funny people. Yes, this is war time. Yes, a lot of civilians and soldiers are dying. There's hate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But if you can look above it all and think about the future of the countries, the flourishing of a people, and the stopping of the death of civilians and soldiers, then in that place, you can have that basic human connection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Of course, there's examples throughout history. You know, leaders are complicated people. They're manipulative people. So you have like Hitler and Chamberlain meeting and Chamberlain kind of getting hoodwinked by Hitler's charisma and being convinced that Hitler doesn't have any interest in invading and destroying the rest of the world. So, you know, you have to... Be smart. Don't be hoodwinked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You've met... You've been criticized for this. You've met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And as part of the campaign, you know, running for president, got criticized for not calling him a war criminal. What's the right way to meet and communicate with these kinds of leaders?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The low hanging fruit of protection is the VPN and use a great VPN. The one I've always used, the one I highly recommend is ExpressVPN. They're like the big one. Works everywhere. Any operating system, including Linux, is super fast, super easy to use. What else do you want? Go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system, aka ERP system, enterprise resource planning. It's the machine inside the machine. No, it's the universal language that connects the different modules within the machine of a company. For some reason, I really enjoy talking about a company as a machine. Maybe that's the engineering perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, it's a simplistic narrative template that's fit into every single situation. A lot of stuff is not talked about in the Russia-Ukraine war. One of the things that's not talked about is, okay, so Putin is overthrown, then who do you think will come into power? Exactly. One of the things I talk about with Aristovitch is that Putin...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
and he gets criticized for this, that Putin, out of all the people that might take power, is the most liberal, is the most dovish. In fact, every indication shows that he really hates this war. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And so everybody that will step in, if he steps down or if he is overthrown, is just going to accelerate this war and the expansionism and the thirst for empire and all that kind of stuff that the US military industrial complex will feed into. So you have to think about what the future holds and what the different power players are and what the level of corruption there is and sort of,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
the realistic view of the situation versus the idealistic view of the situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
military for many years, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel. And now she's the author of a new book called For Love of Country. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But also the interest of Ukraine or Russia and humanity overall, just the flourishing of nations, which is Great for everybody in collaborations with nations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Friendly competition. You know, one of the things I love about the 20th century is the friendly, sometimes not so friendly competition between the Soviet Union and the United States in space and the space race. It's created some incredible engineering and scientific breakthroughs and all of this and also made people dream about like reaching out to the stars and war destroys all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Or damages it. Hopefully just damages it. Hopefully the phoenix will rise again. Well, let me ask you about the criticism you've mentioned. It's probably the most common criticism of you that you love Putin. So just to linger on it, what do you think is the foundation of this criticism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But there's also a camaraderie in it. Thinking about all of human civilization as a kind of machine where we play our roles, there's a communal aspect to it. You know, there's like a negative sense that gears in the machine are somehow used by a bigger thing. But really, gears are working together. There's a camaraderie, there's collaboration as you all are doing a difficult thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Well, people on the left have challenged the warmongers as well throughout the last few decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So anyway, NetSuite makes it easy for people to work together by managing all the messy stuff, the financials, the human resources, inventory, supply, e-commerce, and all that kind of stuff. 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. For your own KPI checklist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
was lost very quickly. It was Putin bad. It was a war between good and evil. And in that, if you bring up any kind of nuanced discussion of how do we actually achieve peace in this situation, you're immediately put on the side of evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I mean, the cynical view is, of course, it's the military industrial complex machine, the war profiteers just driving this kind of conversation. You know, I hope that's not, I hope they don't have that much power. I hope they just have incentives and they push people and they kind of use people's natural desire to divide the world into good and evil and fight for the side of good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You know, people just have a natural proclivity for that. And that's a good thing, that we want to fight for the side of good, but then that gets captured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I just talked to Annie Jacobs and she wrote a book on nuclear war, a scenario of how a nuclear war will happen second by second, minute by minute. I apologize. If it happens, how it would happen is terrifying. It's terrifying how easy it is to start, that one person can start it, first of all, and then there's no way to stop it. Even potentially with tactical nuclear weapons,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
that it's just the machinery of it, how clueless everybody is, combined with the machinery of it, it's just impossible to stop. And it's just between Russia and the United States, especially. And then all of a sudden you have nuclear winter and 5 billion people are dead. And they die through just essentially torture, slowly. How do we avoid that? How do we avoid a nuclear war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It combines note-taking, wikis, project management. So the individual note-taking is incredible. Their integration of AI into that process is really, really well done. The AI Assistant does summarization. It generates first draft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
That's something that you talk about and think about. How do we avoid this kind of escalation of a hot war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
It helps you in all kinds of ways that you can write, like rewrite to make things simpler or more sophisticated. It's a great assistant in terms of the individual writer, but they also do a great job of having the AI Assistant integrate all the different parts of a project together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But by the way, there's so many things to say there, but one of the things that Annie Jacobson details is just how organized the machinery of all of this is, where the humans involved don't have to think. They just follow orders. There's a very clear set of steps you take, and there's very few places where you can inject your humanity and be like, wait a minute, what's the big picture of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The only person... that can think is the President of the United States. The President of the United States gets six minutes after the warning. The early warning system says, whether it's false or not, says that we believe that there's been a nuclear weapon launched. You have six minutes before you can make the decision of launch back, initiate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And to me, that's what I'm voting based on in the current situation. You really have to see that as one of the most important aspects of the United States president, is who do you trust in those six minutes to sit there? And I'm not really sure, looking at Biden and Trump, boy,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So looking across docs and wikis and projects where you can ask questions of the assistant and they will answer based on all of those files and that means all the different people that are part of that project, that are collaborating on it, that's part of the information that the assistant is using.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I don't know, but I do know that I would like somebody who is thinking independently and not part of the machinery of warmongers. I don't want to make it sound cynical or dramatic, but sometimes in such scary situations, in such dramatic situations, you kind of follow the momentum. When the right thing to do, the right thing for a leader to do is to step back and look of all of human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And ignore all the people in the room that are like, saying stuff because most likely what they're going to be saying is warmongering type of things. That's one of the things why I also get criticized for. I still think Zelensky is a hero for staying in Kiev. Everybody was telling him to flee. It was all the information was telling, basically saying the world's second biggest military is like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Coming at Kiev, it's just dumb on all fronts to stay in Kiev. But that's what a great leader does, is ignores everybody and stays. Screw it. I'm going to die for my country. I'm going to die as a leader. And that's the right thing for a leader to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So it's just a really, really great collaboration tool that I highly recommend if you're on a team. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tulsi Gabbard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
It's weird how difficult it is to be that person in the room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But why does it require, like even just to ask, okay, we've been in Afghanistan and Iraq for this number of years. What's the exit plan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
just bring that up like every day at a meeting yeah like what's the exit plan it's strange that that gets criticized well the war in Iraq and so on but I just remember there was this pressure you can't quite criticize or like ask dumb questions about wait what why are we going into Iraq again But they're not dumb questions. Right. In retrospect, you're like, oh, they're not dumb questions at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
But it actually required a lot of courage to ask them while still working within the institution. It's easier if you're like an activist from the outside saying no war, this kind of stuff. But within the institution, in the position of power, to ask the questions like, maybe let's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
It seems really difficult. The same kind of thing in the war in Ukraine and just any kind of military involvement. Again, I guess the cynical interpretation is that it's the military industrial complex that permeates just the halls of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Well, the cool thing about... United States presidents, they have the power to say F you to everybody in the room. I think. They do. It just seems like they don't quite take that power. People will say like, yeah, the U.S. president doesn't have that much power. I don't know about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Just like if you look at the law, especially in military, when you're talking about war and the military, they have a lot of power. Yes. So they can fire everybody. They have a lot of power. They can stop wars. They can start wars. They have a lot of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Can you actually explain that, Bill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You've served in the US military for many years, achieving rank of Lieutenant Colonel. You were deployed in Iraq in 2004 and 5, Kuwait in 2008 and 9. What lessons about life and about country have you learned from that experience of war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
We got Riverside for recording remote podcasts, ExpressVPN for security and privacy on the interwebs, NetSuite for business management software, and Notion for note-taking and team collaboration. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, If you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, it's quite dark. It's just a graph of power. It is. I mean, this doesn't, it's not just with Elon. It's probably with Zuck, with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. It puts pressure. It's not just about banning, but it puts pressure for them to kind of moderate behavior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Which is a slippery slope. Of course, it's a beautiful dance of power because you don't want tech companies to have too much power either or individuals at the top of those tech companies have too much power. But then do you want that power in the hands of government?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The history of this nation is a fascinatingly effective example journey towards the balance of power. And it does seem like this sneaky little thing, as much as I hate TikTok on all fronts. My brain rots every time I use TikTok. I know it's also like the national security dangers of China and so on, but it's just like TikTok, man. Just, I just, I don't know. It's so addicting. It's so addicting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So... When I first saw this TikTok bill, I was like, yes. But then they got me. The Trojan horse got me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, more and more trust people to, whenever social media companies do bullshitty things, for the people to make documentaries about it, to discover it, for great journalists to do great journalism. Right. And find the flaws and the hypocrisy and the call for transparency, all those kinds of things. I don't trust...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
in most cases, government regulation of technology companies because they seem to be really out of touch. One, they want power. They're really intimidated by the power that the tech companies have. And two, they don't seem to get at the technology at all. So they're like hindering innovation and they're just greedy for power. And those are not- It's a bad combination. It's a bad combination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Do you think, what are the chances that the TikTok ban bill passes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, this is really messed up. Just in case we didn't make it clear, I think this is a really, really big danger if this thing passes. Even if you hate Elon Musk or whatever, this is really, really, really dangerous. If the government gets say over the platforms on which we communicate with each other, it's a huge problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
You were a longtime Democrat. You were the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee until you resigned in 2016 to endorse Bernie. I should say I love Bernie. I loved him before he was cool. All right. Anyway, can you go through what happened in that situation? Yeah. And with the Democratic National Committee and with Bernie and why you resigned?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What do you like most about Bernie? The positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Like I said, you were a long time Democrat. You were ever president in 2020 as a Democrat. Now you're an independent and you're an excellent book describing your journey ideologically, philosophically through that. Why did you choose to leave the democratic party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So these are just different mechanisms for power. The identity politics and the warmongering are related to each other in that they're mechanisms to attain more power. You know, you're making it sound like only the Democratic Party are full of power hungry people. So to you, The Republican Party, I don't know if you've met those folks, but some of them- A couple of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Are also in love with power and are, at times, to some degree, politicians in general are corrupt, sometimes within the legal bounds, sometimes slightly outside of the legal bounds. And so to you, to what degree is sort of the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So I don't want to paint a picture of like this kind of beautiful vision of the Republican Party that they're somehow not power hungry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I'm not a fan of this choice, but here we are, Biden versus Trump. So let me ask you sort of a challenging question of pros and cons. Can you give me pros and cons of each? What's the biggest strength and biggest limitation of, let's say, Biden?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So the biggest criticism would be he divided us or continued the division that's been there. Who do you view as the greatest uniter? Like to me, over the past few decades, to me, Obama. You've been very critical of Obama on the foreign policy side on many fronts. But to me, that guy did really good. Maybe some people say just rhetoric, but I think rhetoric matters when you're president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I think he was, out of all the presidents we had, is probably the most effective uniter of the people. Would that be fair to say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What do you think that is? Why is it so hard as a president? to kind of act on the promises of the campaign, but also just, I mean, his speech, his basically anti-war speech, that really resonated to me, the fact that he was against the war in Iraq, I believe, early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Why is it so hard when you step into the office of president to sort of act on your ideals?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And who are resistant to the love of money and power. Yes. It's hard to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Yeah, I just had a conversation with Dana White, and he's good friends with Trump, and he talks to the fact that he seems to be resistant to the attacks. And some aspect of that is just the psychology of being able to withstand the attacks that are there in the political game. And that can break people. Like, you just don't want the headaches. So to withstand the attacks is tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And something about his psychology allows... for that. I mean, I guess a question for you also in your own psychology, you've been attacked quite a bit. We've mentioned some of that sort of misrepresentations and how do you deal with that by yourself? Like how do you not become cynical or overcompensate the other direction, that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
So you spoken about the value of religious faith in your life, of your Hindu faith, and seeing the Bhagavad Gita as a spiritual guide. So what role does faith in God play in your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The interesting thing about the Hindu God is how welcoming the religion is of other religions. It's true. How accepting it is. In that way, in many ways, it's one of the... most beautiful religions on earth. So like, who do you think God is to you? Like in specifically the texts, but also you personally, What does he represent? So for Hinduism, it's also, God can be many.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
There's also like a aspect where there's a, it's like a part of all of us. There's like a uniting thing, not a singular figure outside of us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by an oldie but a goodie, Riverside. Riverside FM, the platform that makes it easy for podcasts and media companies to record remotely in studio quality. I use them to record remote podcasts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Tulsi, this was an honor to finally meet you, to talk to you. This was amazing. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tulsi Gabbard. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. we have been compelled to create a permanent ornaments industry of vast proportions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
This conjunction of immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
If we can just go back to that list. Yeah. So the list is just name and injury, name and injury.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
And it's just pages and pages of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
What can you say about what the soldiers had to go through physically and psychologically when they get injured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#423 – Tulsi Gabbard: War, Politics, and the Military Industrial Complex
I usually don't record remote podcasts, but I have done a few. And the experience there is just effortless, flawless, super high quality in terms of audio, in terms of video, super easy on the guest side. Everything is just wonderful. Aside from sort of the basic thing that this is a great way to record remote podcasts, they have so many features. They got AI transcription.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The following is a conversation with Josje Bak, his third time on this podcast. Josje is one of the most brilliant and fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and computation. And he's one of my favorite humans to talk to about pretty much anything and everything. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So as the number of people who follow you on Twitter expands, you feel the burden of the uglier sides of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But what if the technology enables you to discover the majority of people, to discover and connect efficiently and regularly with the majority of people who are actually really good? I mean, one of my sort of concerns with a platform like Twitter is, there's a lot of really smart people out there, a lot of smart people that disagree with me and with others between each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And I love that if the technology would bring those to the top, the beautiful disagreements, like Intelligence Squared type of debates. There's a bunch of, I mean, one of my favorite things to listen to is arguments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
and arguments like high effort arguments with the respect and love underneath it, but then it gets a little too heated, but that kind of too heated, which I've seen you participate in, and I love that, with Lee Corona, with those kinds of folks, and you go pretty hard. Like you'll get frustrated, but it's all beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But he's constantly passively communicating a respect for the people he's talking with and for just basic humanity and truth and all that kind of stuff. And there's a self-deprecating thing. There's a bunch of like social skills you acquire that allow you to be a great debater, a great argumenter, like be wrong in public and explore ideas together in public when you disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And if I would love for Twitter to elevate those folks, elevate those kinds of conversations,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I think that's a fun and that's a beautiful game. It's ultimately a productive one. Speaking of taking that risk, he tweeted, when you have the choice between being a creator, consumer, or redistributor, always go for creation. Not only does it lead to a more beautiful world, but also to a much more satisfying life for yourself. And don't get stuck preparing yourself for the journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The time is always now. So let me ask for advice. What advice would you give on how to become such a creator on Twitter in your own life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So not just consuming culture, but creating culture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. Speaking of which, you retweeted this meme of a life of a philosopher in a nutshell. It's birth and death and in between. It's a chubby guy and it says, why though? What do you think is the answer to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So really paying attention to the, what is it, to the feeling another human being fully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Because everything is possible, so you get to explore this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
To the degree we can choose. Yosha, you're one of my favorite humans in this world. Consciousness is to merge with for a brief moment of time. It's always an honor. It always blows my mind. It will take me days, if not weeks, to recover. And I already miss our chats. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for speaking with me so many times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Thank you so much for all the ideas you put out into the world. And I'm a huge fan of following you now in this interesting, weird time we're going through with AI. So thank you again for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Josje Bak. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from the psychologist Carl Jung. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, man, the mind is so beautiful in that way. Sometimes it comes so natural to me, so easy to pay attention, pay attention to the world fully, to other people fully. And sometimes the stress over silly things is overwhelming. It's so interesting that the mind is that rollercoaster in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Head over to numor.ai.com to sign up for a tournament and hone your machine learning skills. That's numor.ai.com for a chance to play against me and win a share of the tournament prize pool. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new pod three mattress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The word costume kind of implies that it's fraudulent in some way. Is costume a good word for you? Like we present ourselves to the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Is the costume a kind of projection of who you are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do we become prisoners of the costume? Because everybody expects us to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So this stage, in parentheses, you put full adult, wisdom. Why is this full adult? Why would you say this is full? And why is it wisdom?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I don't count. More than one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How easy is it to do costume changes throughout the day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
In a scorching Texas heat, the thing I go to to escape, to escape nature or the external harsh conditions of nature and going to the nature of my own mind, wherever that weird and beautiful dream world is, the place that has no rules, no boundaries, no limits. No physics. No constraints on what is possible and what is impossible. The dream world that we go to, what is that world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And you could do the same with personality?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Or not real, but to have one costume.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
to explore different costumes. I mean, that's the kind of idea with virtual reality. That's the idea even with Twitter in two-dimensional screens. You can swap all costumes. You can be as weird as you want. It's easier. For Burning Man, you have to like order things. You have to make things. You have to, it's more effort to put on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Sure, but it's just easier to do digitally, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the extraterrestrial prince is based on a true story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I can only imagine what that looks like, Josje. Stage six.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Are you creating the game engine, or are you noticing the game engine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You don't want to get access to cheat codes too quickly. Otherwise, you won't enjoy the game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So stage five requires a good therapist. Stage six requires a good Buddhist spiritual leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's the same world as imagination. It's such a fascinating world. The human mind, its capabilities are just so incredibly fascinating. And one of the ways to explore that is to dream. But it's the return from the dream world that is the most refreshing to me. That's why I love naps. It's a quick stroll through the dream world and you're back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Oh, but it is possible through the process of technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that's more like a stage four rationalist kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
and taking on the challenges of the day in the here and now. Anyway, if you're into naps as much as me, you should check out 8sleep. And you'll get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass. $10 a month gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, I think this is a good opportunity to try to sneak up to the idea of enlightenment. So you wrote a series of good tweets about consciousness and panpsychism. So let's break it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
First you say, I suspect the experience that leads to the panpsychism syndrome of some philosophers and other consciousness enthusiasts represents the realization that we don't end at the self, but share a resonant universe representation with every other observer coupled to the same universe. This actually eventually leads us to a lot of interesting questions about AI and AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But let's start with this representation. What is this resonant universe representation? And what do you think? Do we share such a representation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you mentioned there the non-dual state, and say that some people confuse it for enlightenment. What's the non-dual state?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that speaks to the resonance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But that's still part of the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The list of courses I've personally watched and enjoyed just lasts forever, but they have everybody and anybody you ever want to listen to. I've listened to Martin Scorsese, Tony Hawk, Jane Goodall, Neil Gaiman, Daniel Negron, before I interviewed him, Garry Kasparov, Carlos Santana, Will Wright, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chris Hadfield, the list is incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Why is it so hard to get there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, you say enlightenment is a realization of how experience is implemented.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Reverse engineered? Almost like a schematic of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Why don't we do that more often? Why don't we start really messing with reality without the use of drugs or anything else? Why don't we get good at this kind of thing, like intentionally? Why should we? Because you can morph reality into something more pleasant for yourself. Just have fun with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, can't you just silence the outer mind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Numeri for the world's hardest data science tournament, Eight Sleep for naps, Masterclass for learning, and AG1 for health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And that system is powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So if we look at this as you write in the tweet, if we look at this more rigorously as a sort of take the panpsychist idea more seriously, almost as a scientific discipline, you write that quote, fascinatingly, the panpsychist interpretation seems to lead to observations of practical results to a degree that physics fundamentalists might call superstitious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Reports of long distance telepathy and remote causation are ubiquitous in the general population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I'm a huge believer that learning about a thing, at least part of learning about a thing, should involve learning or listening to the best people in the world at that thing. It's not only the advice they give. It's not only the analysis or the description of how they approach the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
"'I am not convinced,' says Joschabach, "'that establishing the empirical reality of telepathy "'would force an update "'of any part of serious academic physics, "'but it could trigger an important revolution "'in both neuroscience and AI "'from a circuit perspective "'to a coupled complex resonator paradigm.'"
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Are you suggesting that there could be some rigorous mathematical wisdom to panpsychist perspective on the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So is it that we feel that or do we actually accomplish it? So is telepathy possible? Is it real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But in the way they see life, in the way they carry themselves physically and mentally, you get to watch mastery. And it's so beautiful that human beings are able to reach the very top of excellence and sometimes break through the boundaries, the limits of what was thought possible before. And it's just beautiful to watch those humans. It's beautiful. It's inspiring. It's great to celebrate that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Physical closeness or closeness broadly defined?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's interesting, though, that at this time, at least in human history, there seems to be a gap between the tools of science and the subjective experience that people report, like you're talking about with telepathy. It seems like... We're not quite there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So why is there not a lot of Michael Levins walking around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's great to learn from that. Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com. That's masterclass.com. This show is brought to you by AG1. Their all-in-one daily drink brings happiness to me. And daily, for me, is twice daily. It brings happiness, health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's so cool that radical locality leads to the emergence of complexity at the higher layers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You're kind of one of those type of paradigmatic thinkers. Actually, if we can take a tangent on that. Once again, returning to the biblical verses of your tweets. You write, my public explorations are not driven by audience service. but by my lack of ability for discovering, understanding, or following the relevant authorities. So I have to develop my own thoughts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Since I think autonomously, these thoughts cannot always be very good. That's you apologizing for the chaos of your thoughts. Or perhaps not apologizing, just identifying. But let me ask the question. Since we talked about Michael Levin and yourself, who I think are very kind of radical, big, independent thinkers, can we reverse engineer your process of thinking autonomously? How do you do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How can humans do it? How can you avoid being influenced by, what is it, stage three?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It ensures that all the crazy physical and mental stuff I do is built on a foundation of basic nutritional health. It's the super multivitamin that I use. And it also is one of the components of daily habits that I have in my life. And so whenever I do this thing, I feel grounded. I feel happy. I feel like I have my life together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that motivated you to become an individual thinker yourself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But how do you escape the influence? Once again, the pressure of the crowd. Whether it's you in responding to the pressure or you being swept up by the pressure? If you even just look at Twitter, the opinions of the crowd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. Yeah. So is there a practical advice you can give on how to think paradigmatically, how to think independently? Or, you know, because you've kind of said, I had no choice. But I think to a degree you have a choice because you said you want to be productive. And I think thinking independently is productive if what you're curious about is understanding the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
especially when the problems are very kind of new and open. And so it seems like this is an active process, like we can choose to do that, we can practice it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you could do that both at home and with the travel packs when you're traveling. In fact, it's one of the things that makes me feel like I'm at home when I'm traveling. I'll drink an AG1 and it'll feel good. It'll put a smile on my face. It's green. It tastes delicious. What else do you want? They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Man, Commodore 64 could be one of the sexiest machines ever built, if I say so myself. If we can return to this really interesting idea that we started to talk about with panpsychism. and the complex resonated paradigm and the verses of your tweets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You write, instead of treating eyes, ears, and skin as separate sensory systems with fundamentally different modalities, we might understand them as overlapping aspects of the same universe, coupled at the same temporal resolution and almost inseparable from a single shared resonant model. Instead of treating mental representations as fully isolated between minds,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The representations of physically adjacent observers might directly interact and produce causal effects through the coordination of the perception and behavior of world modeling observers. So the modalities, the distinction between modalities, let's throw that away. The distinction between the individuals, let's throw that away. So what does this interaction representations look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Vibes. So the question, though, is how deeply interbind is this multi-modality, multi-agent system? Like how, I mean, this is going to the telepathy question without the woo-woo meaning of the word telepathy. It's like how, like what's going on here in this room right now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Josje Bak. You wrote a post about levels of lucidity. Quote, as we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it progresses in somewhat distinct stages. So there's seven of the stages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But the question there is, do they have to be touching? Is biology at a distance possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So everything is touching everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Could there be undiscovered processes that don't break telepathy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, it's been observed, but we haven't plugged into it. So it's like if you observe humans, they seem to be communicating with a smartphone thing, but you don't understand how a smartphone works and how the mechanism of the internet works. But maybe it's possible to really understand the full richness of the biological internet that connects us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, this kind of interacting, intertwined representations takes us to the big ending of your tweet series. You write, quote, I wonder if self-improving AGI might end up saturating physical environments with intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
to such a degree that isolation of individual mental states becomes almost impossible, and the representations of all complex self-organizing agents merge permanently with each other. So that's a really interesting idea. This biological network, life network, gets so dense that it might as well be seen as one. That's an interesting, what do you think that looks like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What do you think that saturation looks like? What does it feel like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Stage one, reactive survival, infant. Stage two, personal self, young child. Stage three, social self, adolescence, domesticated adult. Stage four is rational agency, self-direction. Stage five is self-authoring. That's full adult. You've achieved wisdom, but there's two more stages. Stage six is enlightenment. Stage seven is transcendence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you lose the ability to notice yourself as a distinct entity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
That's an interesting world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Just, I would love to observe that from a video game design perspective, how that game looks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you explain each or the interesting parts of each of these stages? And what's your sense why there are stages of lucidity as we progress through life in this too short life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But would you be able to step away, step out of the whole thing, just kind of watch the you know, the way we can now. Sometimes when I'm at a crowded party or something like this, you step back and you realize all the different costumes, all the different interactions, all the different computation that all the individual people are at once distinct from each other and at once all the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Part of the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. But you want to allow yourself to have those thoughts. Sometimes you kind of resist it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Or maybe you do. I think you're really against this high scoring thing. I kind of like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
No, not competitive. Like role playing games, like Skyrim, it's not competitive. There's a nice thing, there's a nice feeling where your experience points go up. You're not competing against anybody, but it's the world saying, you're on the right track. Here's a point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you're no longer playing, you're trying to hack it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Numerai, a hedge fund that uses AI and machine learning to make investment decisions. It's basically a super difficult machine learning tournament that uses real data and people's submitted models to that try to predict the market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Addiction is the loss of control for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You don't want to lose yourself in the addiction to something nice? Addiction to love, to the pleasant feelings we humans experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
From the biggest questions of consciousness, Let's explore the pragmatic, the projections of those big ideas into our current world. What do you think about LLMs, the recent rapid development of large language models, of the AI world, of generative AI? How much of the hype is deserved and how much is not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And people should definitely follow your Twitter because you explore these questions in a beautiful, profound, and hilarious way at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And random strangers, because of your kind of in-their-mind elevated position,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, and they kind of forget that you're human too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I think it has a lot of upside. at least for me currently, at least perhaps because of the podcast, because most people are really good and people come up to me and they have love in their eyes and over a stretch of like 30 seconds, you can hug it out and you can just exchange a few words and you reinvigorate your love for humanity. So that's an upside. For a loner, I'm a loner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Because otherwise you have to do a lot of work to find such humans. And here you're like thrust into the full humanity, the goodness of humanity for the most part. Of course, maybe it gets worse as you become more prominent. I hope not. This is pretty awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But can you enjoy, I mean, there's a picture of you, I think, with Roger Penrose and Eric Weinstein and a few others that are interesting figures. Can't you just enjoy random interesting humans for a short amount of time? I like these people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you not be melancholy? Or maybe I'm projecting. I hate goodbyes. Can we just not hate goodbyes and just enjoy the hello, take it in, take in a person, take in their ideas, and then move on through life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, but it's painful. Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm an introvert, is I hate goodbyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I know. But that experience of loss, that mini loss, maybe that's a little death. Maybe, I don't know. I think this melancholy feeling is just the other side of love. And I think they go hand in hand and it's a beautiful thing. And I'm just being romantic about it at the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But there's beauty in that pain, too. That's what melancholy feeling is. It's not negative. Melancholy doesn't have to be negative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, we all die eventually. Now, as we got to this topic, the actual question was about what your thoughts are about the recent development of large language models with ChatGPT. Indeed. There's a lot of hype. Is some of the hype justified? Which is, which isn't? What are your thoughts? High level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So do some of the quote-unquote prompt engineering for you. They create these kind of cognitive architectures that do the prompt engineering, and you're just doing the high, high-level work. Metaprompt engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How is the actual brain different? Just the asynchronous craziness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's fascinating to think about what those characteristics of the brain enable you to do that language models cannot do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, so filtering early on, not later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think it might be using just a bunch of language models like this? Do you think... The current transformer-based large language models will take us to AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Which, brutalist? Is that what you said?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you deepfake it till you make it? So can you achieve, what are the limitations of this? I mean, can you reason? Let's use words that are loaded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So Minecraft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, there's already a latency even for humans to update the model, to retrain the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But it's a kind of proof of concept.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So it's the deep blue of chess playing. Yeah, it's ugly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But it feels like it's a tireless intern, or maybe it's an army of interns. And so you get to command these slightly incompetent creatures. And there's an aspect, because of how rapidly you can iterate with it, it's also part of the brainstorming, part of the kind of inspiration for your own thinking. So you get to interact with the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I mean, when I'm programming or doing any kind of generation with GPT, it somehow is a catalyst for your own thinking in a way that I think an intern might not be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And allow you to expand the realm of thought you're allowed to have when interacting with the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It sounds to me like you're saying there's basically no limitations, your intuition says, to what a larger language possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But isn't that your fault versus the large average one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Is everything your fault? I just want to get you on record as saying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Worst happiness in terms of stages is on three or four, if you take that tangent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Oh, man. The search space of humans that complete you is an interesting one, especially for Josje Bak. That's an interesting, because talking about brute force search in chess, I wonder what that search tree looks like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. So what kind of problems are we talking about? This is stage three, like love?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What is hard then?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Ah. So empathy. Empathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
When you were born and raised an extraterrestrial prince in a world full of people wearing suits... So it's a challenging integration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How long does it take you to detect the geometry, the shape of the soul of another human, to notice that they might be one of your kind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You believe in love at first sight, Josche Bach?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But that could be just... Cynicism? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's not cynical at all. You're better at noticing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So that takes us back to prompt engineering of noticing how to be a better prompt engineer of an LLM. A sense I have is that there's a bottomless well of skill to become a great prompt engineer. It feels like it is all my fault whenever I fail to use chat GPT correctly, that I didn't find the right words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But at the same time, it feels like there's power in disagreeing with the thing that ChatGPT produces. So I use it like that for programming. I'll see the thing it recommends, and then I'll write different code that I disagree. And in the disagreement, your mind grows stronger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think... GPT-N can achieve consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
It's virtual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But are you also modeling the interaction of jalapeno and shapes and forms through the interaction of the individual nodes within the group?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Okay, can you elaborate why you think that it's so self-organization? So this kind of radical legality that you see in the biological systems. Why can't you start with a language model? What's your intuition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah, but so can we externally inject into it this kind of coherent approximation of a world model that has to sync up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So it's so simple, but is it really that much more radical than just the idea of intelligence as compression?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But equally radical as the next token prediction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And it also seems so much more complicated and messy than the next frame prediction. Even the idea of frame seems counter-biological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
You tweeted, once again, quote, when I talk to Chad GPT, I'm talking to an NPC. What's going to be interesting and perhaps scary is when AI becomes a first-person player. So what does that step look like? I really like that tweet, that step between NPC to first-person player. What's required for that? Is that kind of what we've been talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
This kind of external source of coherence and inspiration of how to take the leap into the unknown that we humans do. The search, man's search for meaning. LLM's search for meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I love difficult real-world data sets. You may know that for a long time and still, I've been interested in real-world robotics. One of the largest scale deployment of real-world robotics is autonomous vehicles. Autonomous driving and semi-autonomous driving, the stakes are very high. The same is true for financial markets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you start to learn how to think. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So God, in this view, is the first creative mind in the early... It's the first consciousness. In the early days, in the early months of development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Just glimpses. You tweeted, quote, suffering results for one part of the mind failing at regulating another part of the mind. Suffering happens at an early stage of mental development. I don't think that superhuman AI would suffer. What's your intuition there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So it goes through the stages real quick. Yes. Through the seven stages. It's going to go to enlightenment real quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What if the thing that we recognize as super intelligent is actually living at stage five? That the thing that's at stage six, enlightenment, is not very productive. So in order to be productive in society and impress us with this power, it has to be a reasoning thing. self-authoring agent, that enlightenment makes you lazy as an agent in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So what if all AGIs, they're only productive as they progress through one, two, three, four, five, and the moment they get to six, they just kind of, it's a failure mode, essentially, as far as humans are concerned, because they just start chilling. They're like, fuck it, I'm out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Let me bring up Eliezer Yudkowsky. and his warnings to human civilization that AI will likely kill all of us. What are your thoughts about his perspective on this? Can you steel man his case? And what aspects with it do you disagree?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you have a sense that the march towards this uncontrollable autonomy of superintelligence systems is inevitable? That there's no, I mean, that's essentially what he's saying, that there's no hope. His advice to young people was prepare for a short life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can't you not have empathy while also not having a similar architecture, cognitive architecture, as the others in the group?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So more higher complex consciousness will make the lesser consciousnesses flourish even more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So you, again, tweeted about effective accelerationism. You tweeted, effective accelerationism is the belief that the paperclip maximizer and Rocco's basilisk will keep each other in check by being eternally at each other's throats so we will be safe and get to enjoy lots of free paperclips and a beautiful afterlife. Is that somewhat aligned with what you're talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Well, isn't the whole process of the stage three is to figure out the API to the other humans that have different architecture and you yourself publish public documentation for the API that people can interact with for you? Isn't this the whole process of socializing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Can you mention a logical mistake there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think, so to seriously address concern that Eliezer has, so for him, if I can just summarize poorly, so for him, the first superintelligence system will just run away with everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
The Genghis Khan approach, join us or die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So more agency is a more... It's a richer experience. It's a better life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
If I sat before you today and gave you a big red button and said, here, if you press this button, you will get uploaded in this way, the sense of identity that you have lived with for quite a long time is going to be gone. Would you press the button?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But isn't this everything? This love you have for other humans, you can call it responsibility, but that connection, that's the ego death. Isn't that the thing we're really afraid of? It's not to just die, but to let go of the experience of love with other humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But when we look at the set of trajectories, that such an AI would take that supersedes humans. I think Eliezer is worried about ones that not just kill all humans, but also have some kind of maybe objectively undesirable consequence for life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How many trajectories, when you look at the big picture of life on Earth, would you be happy with, and how much worry are you with AGI, whether it kills humans or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
perspective. That said, you tweeted about a cliff. Beautifully written. As a sentient species, humanity is a beautiful child, joyful, explorative, wild, sad, and desperate. But humanity has no concept of submitting to reason and duty to life and future survival. We will run until we step past the cliff. So first of all, do you think that's true?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
I wonder if your life could have been different if you knew that it's okay to be different, to have a different architecture. Whether accepting that the interface is hard to figure out, takes a long time to figure out, and it's okay to be different. In fact, it's beautiful to be different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Catastrophic event of what kind. So can you still man the case that we will continue dancing along and always stop just short of the edge of the cliff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the climate is one thing, but there's a lot of other threats that might have a faster feedback mechanism, less delay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What's the timeline for things to get real weird with AI? And it can get weird in interesting ways before you get to AGI. What about AI girlfriends and boyfriends fundamentally transforming human relationships?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
By which technology?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Yeah. Isn't the fundamentals of the core group of humans that affect your life still the same? Your loved ones? Family?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
That kills the magic somehow. Why is that? Why is the transactional search for optimizing allocation of attention somehow misses the romantic magic of what human relations are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
This is the proliferation of marketing teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And so it's really interesting that Numerai presents to you the real-world data of financial markets and presents you an easy, accessible mechanism by which to test, deploy, and compete with others in this kind of data set. So it's a really great way, if you're interested in data science and machine learning, to learn, to compete, to have fun, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the grounding in physical reality somehow is important too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do you think AI, when it's deployed by companies like Microsoft and Google and Meta, will have the same issue of being weirdly corporate? Like, there'd be some uncanny valley, some weirdness to the whole presentation. So this is, I've gotten a chance to talk to George Hotz. He believes everything should be open sourced and decentralized, and there, then, we shall have the AI of the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
And it'll maintain a grounding to the magic that's humanity, that's the human condition. That corporations will destroy the magic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So there's a visceral, undeniable feeling of being alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So the corporations, the centralized control, the dictatorships of corporations can create beauty. Centralized design is a source of a lot of beauty. And then I guess open source is a source of beauty. a hedge against the corrupting nature of power that comes with centralized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Don't you think everybody's alone, deep down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Oh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So what do you think about Meta in contrast to that open sourcing most of its language models and most of the AI models it's working on and actually suggesting that they will continue to do so in the future for future versions of Lama, for example, their large language model. Is that exciting to you? Is that concerning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Games broadly, like deeply defined the way you did with the games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
But the longest... Yes, that part... the longest possible game while doing interesting stuff and while maintaining at least the same amount of interesting. So complexity, so propagating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Is there some aspect to which we're alone together? You don't see a deep loneliness inside yourself still?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
How do we ride, as individuals and as a society, this wave, this disruptive wave that changes the nature of the game?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do we build the bunker in the woods? Do we meditate more? Drugs, mushrooms, psychedelics? I mean, what? Lots of sex. What are we talking about here? Do you play Diablo 4? I'm hoping that will help me escape for a brief moment. Play video games? What? Do you have ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Okay, so that's the nonlinear progression through the stages, I suppose. You caught up on stage three at some point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
So aesthetically, it captures you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
My heart is slowly breaking by the deep truth you're conveying to me. Why can't you just allow me to enjoy my personal addiction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
Do they return to it then later?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#392 – Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans
What do you think that means that we don't read books anymore? What do you think that means about the collective intelligence of our species? Is it possible it's still progressing and growing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The following is a conversation with Mark Andreessen, co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most outspoken voices on the future of technology, including his most recent article, Why AI Will Save the World.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But the big thing will probably be an app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What advice could you give for a startup founder? Just having seen so many successful companies, so many companies that fail also. What advice could you give to a startup founder, someone who wants to build the next super successful startup in the tech space? The Googles, the Apples, the Twitters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But that's actually just to elaborate on that. If you could also speak to great founders, like what makes a great founder?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It feels like there's quite a few, like a handful of trillion-dollar questions within this space. That's one of them, synthetic data. I think George Haas pointed out to me that you could just have an NLM say, okay, you're a patient, and in another instance of it, say your doctor and have the two talk to each other. Or maybe you could say a communist and a Nazi. Here, go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Intelligence, passion, and courage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But why did they do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So what's a good reference? Do you want the previous boss to actually say that they never did what you told them to do? That might be a good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What advice would you give to those folks in the space of intelligence, passion, and courage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When you say idea, do you mean long-term big vision or do you mean specifics of product?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You never get to big vision. Yeah. So the first, the first part, you have an idea of a set of products or the first product that can actually make some money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I really love that idea of just having a thing, a prototype that actually works before you even begin to remotely scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In that conversation, you do role-playing, and you have – Just like the kind of role-playing you do when you have different policies, RL policies when you play chess, for example, and you do self-play, that kind of self-play, but in the space of conversation, maybe that leads to this whole giant ocean of possible conversations which could not have been explored by looking at just human data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, because maybe in the shower you had the exact product implementation details, but yeah, usually you're going to be for years, if not decades, thinking about everything around that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So how do you know when to take a leap? If you have a cushy job or a happy life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What if it's going to lead to a lot of pain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What if it means losing sort of social relationships and damaging your relationship with loved ones and all that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
of taking a leap into that world of personalized data and personalized data-driven suggestion I'm a huge supporter of. It turns out that luckily I'm pretty healthy, surprisingly so, but then I look at the life and the limb and the health of Sir Winston Churchill. who probably had the unhealthiest sort of diet and lifestyle of any human ever and lived for quite a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Can you be an older founder?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Life is full of difficult choices, Mark Andreessen. You've written a blog post on what you've been up to. You wrote this in October, 2022. Quote, mostly I try to learn a lot. For example, the political events of 2014 to 2016 made clear to me that I didn't understand politics at all. Referencing maybe some of this. this book here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I deliberately withdrew from political engagement and fundraising and instead read my way back into history and as far to the political left and political right as I could. So just high-level question, what's your approach to learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in that blog post, a recommend people go check out. You actually list a bunch of different books that you recommend on different topics on the American left and the American right. It's just a lot of really good stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's a really interesting question. And you're saying, because that could 10x the power of these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics, you give two recommendations, four books on the Spanish Civil War, six books on deep history of the American right, comprehensive biographies of Adolf Hitler, one of which I read and can recommend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Six books on the deep history of the American left, the American right, and American left looking at the history to give you the context. Biography of Vladimir Lenin, two of them on the French Revolution. Actually, I have never read a biography on Lenin. Maybe that will be useful. Everything's been so Marx-focused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Victor Sebastian, okay. It'll blow your mind, yeah. So it's still useful to read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So that, the perspective of Lenin might be the best way to look at the Soviet Union versus Stalin versus Marx. Very interesting. So two books on fascism and anti-fascism by the same author, Paul Gottfried. Brilliant book on the nature of mass movements and collective psychology. The definitive work on intellectual life under totalitarianism, The Captive Mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The definitive work on the practical life under totalitarianism, There's a bunch. There's a bunch. And the single best book, first of all, the list here is just incredible. But you say the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here is The Ancient City by Numa Dennis Fustel de Koulankas. I like it. What did you learn about who we are as a human civilization from that book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So they were serious about their cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But you think that's fundamentally that like pull towards cults is within us?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the question of meaning, the question of purpose was very distinctly, clearly defined for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
As we turn the volume down on the cultism, the search for meaning starts getting harder and harder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But still not full-blown compared to what it was in the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this actually makes me wonder about the power of conversation. So if you have an LLM trained on a bunch of books that cover different economics theories, and then you have those LLMs just talk to each other, like reason, the way we kind of debate each other as humans on Twitter, in formal debates, in podcast conversations, we kind of have little kernels of wisdom here and there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I wonder where it's all headed as we turn the volume down more and more. What advice would you give to young folks today in high school and college, how to be successful in their career, how to be successful in their life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, with the authors, there's a consumption question too. But yeah, well, maybe not, maybe not. You're right. But so the tools are much more powerful. They're getting much more powerful every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what's the explanation? And by way of advice, is motivation starting to be turned down a little bit or what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there's a lot of value to being somebody who finds focus in this life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. The new tools. We have discovered fire. Yeah. And trying to figure out how to use it to cook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, right. You told Tim Ferriss that the perfect day is caffeine for 10 hours and alcohol for four hours. You didn't think I'd be mentioning this, did you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
uh it balances everything out perfectly as you said so perfect uh so let me ask what's what's the secret to balance and maybe to happiness in life um i i don't believe in balance so i i'm the wrong person asking you elaborate why you don't believe in balance
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if you can like a thousand X speed that up, Can you actually arrive somewhere new? Like what's the point of conversation really?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Imbalance. And that applies to work, to life, to everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you're one of the wealthiest people in the world. What's the relationship between wealth and happiness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Money and happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
To strive for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That just sounds like happiness, but turned down a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What's the distinction between happiness and satisfaction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So just something that permeates all your days, just this general contentment of being useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Does money have anything to do with that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Pursuit of satisfaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you know, they could have elaborated on a lot of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think they were smarter than they realized. They said, you know what, we're going to make it ambiguous and let these humans figure out the rest. These tribal cult-like humans figure out the rest. But money empowers that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. Uh, well, let me actually ask you about Elon. What, what are your, um, You've interacted with quite a lot of successful engineers and business people. What do you think is special about Elon? We talked about Steve Jobs. What do you think is special about him as a leader, as an innovator?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He's done a lot of things that seem crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in general, I wish more people would lean on celebrating and supporting versus deriding and destroying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, he fuels the fire of that by being an asshole on Twitter at times, which is fascinating to watch the drama of human civilization given our cult roots just fully on fire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I wonder how consistently and strongly can an LLM hold on to a worldview? You tell it to hold on to that and defend it for like for your life, because I feel like they'll just keep converging towards each other. They'll keep convincing each other as opposed to being stubborn assholes the way humans can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
could say that. Very successfully. So now that our cults have gone and we search for meaning, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life, Mark Andreessen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So love is a big part of that satisfaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, creating products that are used by millions of people and bring them joy in small or big ways. And then capitalism kind of enables that, encourages that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
love and money are better yeah that's a good ordering i think we should we should bet on those try love first if that doesn't work the money yes and then force well don't even try that one uh mark you're an incredible person i've been a huge fan i'm glad to finally got a chance to talk i'm a fan of everything you do everything you do including on twitter it's a huge honor to meet you to talk with you uh thanks again for doing this awesome thank you lex
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Marc Andreessen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Marc Andreessen himself. The world is a very malleable place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it's going to start rendering misinformation about the other. Well, you can steer it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
how do you know what is true? So this is a very difficult thing on the internet, but it's also a difficult thing. Maybe it's a little bit easier, but I think it's still difficult. Maybe it's more difficult, I don't know, with an LLM to know, did it just make some shit up as I'm talking to it? How do we get that right? Like as you're investigating a difficult topic,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because I find that alums are quite nuanced in a very refreshing way. Like it doesn't feel biased. Like when you read news articles and tweets and just content produced by people, they usually have this... You can tell they have a very strong perspective where they're hiding. They're not stealing and manning the other side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They're hiding important information or they're fabricating information in order to make their argument stronger. It's just that feeling. Maybe it's a suspicion. Maybe it's mistrust. With LLMs, it feels like none of that is there. It's just kind of like, here's what we know. But you don't know if some of those things are kind of just straight up made up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And as far as I can tell, was quite nimble and agile into his old age. Anyway, get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Hallucination is coming up with things that are totally not true, but sound true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or, you know, bullshitters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the good sense of that word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's the first layer of protection in this dangerous cyber world of ours that soon will be populated by human-like or superhuman intelligent AI systems that will trick you and try to get you to do all kinds of stuff. It's going to be a wild, wild world in the 21st century. Cyber security, the attackers, the defenders, it's going to be a tricky world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. If you were to tell me about Wikipedia before Wikipedia was created, I would have laughed at the possibility of something like that being possible. Just a handful of folks. can organize, write, and moderate with a mostly unbiased way the entirety of human knowledge. So if there's something like the approach that Wikipedia took possible for MLMs, that's really exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you think that's possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Are we getting closer? If we look at the entirety of the arc of human history, are we getting closer to the truth? I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, is it possible, is it possible that we're getting very far away from the truth because of the internet, because of how rapidly you can create narratives and just as the entirety of a society just move like crowds in a hysterical way along those narratives that don't have a necessary grounding in whatever the truth is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the way it was implemented, it had issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but those folks sure were very confident it was the right way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so yeah, why are we so obsessed with there being one truth? Is it possible there's just going to be multiple truths, like little communities that believe certain things? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, but the internet and technology has enabled us to generate a large number of content that data, that the process, the scientific process allows us, sort of damages the hope laden within the scientific process. Because if you just have a bunch of people saying facts on the internet, and some of them are going to be LLMs,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Anyway, a VPN is a basic shield you should always have with you in this battle for privacy, for security, all that kind of stuff. What I like about it also is that it's just a well-implemented piece of software that's constantly updated. It works well across a large number of operating systems. It does one thing and it does it really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the actual mechanism of doing the human RL with human feedback is It seems like such a fundamental and fascinating question. How do you select the humans? Exactly. How do you select the human?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Are we experiencing a temporary problem in terms of the incentives, in terms of the business model, all that kind of stuff, or is this like a decline of traditional journalism as we know it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like, I think- You just introduced like five thought experiments at once and broke my head. But yes, there's a lot of interesting years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I've used it for many, many years before I had a podcast, before they were a sponsor. I have always loved ExpressVPN with a big sexy button that just has a power symbol. You press it and it turns on. It's beautifully simple. Go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 drink.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I wonder where Twitter would think about Churchill and Hitler and Stalin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And also why we don't have better institutions and better leaders then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Don't you think that our perception and understanding of reality would be more and more mediated through large language models now? Yeah. So you said media before. Isn't the LLM going to be the new, what is it, mainstream media, MSM? It'll be LLM. Yeah. That would be the source of, I'm sure there's a way to kind of rapidly fine tune, like making LLMs real time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm sure there's probably a research problem that you can do just rapid fine tuning to the new events. So something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it at least twice a day now. In the crazy Austin heat, it's over 100 degrees for many days in a row. There's few things that feel as good as coming home from a long run and making an age one drink, putting it in the fridge. So it's nice and cold. I jump in the shower, come back, drink it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Also really more deeply integrated into your life. Not just like, Oh, uh, like intellectual philosophical thoughts, but like literally, uh, like how to make a coffee, where to go for lunch, just, uh, whether, you know, dating, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What to say. What to say. Next sentence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Boy, I would kill for a pop-up. A pop-up right now. The estimated engagement using is decreasing. For market reasons, there's a controversy section for a Wikipedia page. In 1993, something happened or something like this. Bring it up. That will drive engagement up. Anyway. Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. But it feels like there's going to be a killer app that, there's probably a mad scramble right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's all open AI and Microsoft and Google and Meta and then startups and smaller companies figuring out what is the killer app, because it feels like it's possible, like a chat GPT type of thing, it's possible to build that, but that's 10x more compelling using already the LLMs we have, using even the open source LLMs, Lama and the different variants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you're investing in a lot of companies and you're paying attention. Who do you think is gonna win this? Who's going to be the next PageRank inventor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Another one. We have a few of those today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Insight Tracker for tracking your health, ExpressVPN for keeping your privacy and security on the internet, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin drink. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm ready to take on the rest of the day. I'm kicking ass, empowered by the knowledge that I got all my vitamins and minerals covered. It's the foundation for all the wild things I'm doing, mentally and physically, with the rest of the day. Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. That's drinkag1.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, but you painted these two worlds, but there's also variations of those worlds, because you said regulatory capture is possible to have these tech giants that don't have regulatory capture, which is something you're also calling for, saying it's okay to have big companies working on this stuff. as long as they don't achieve regulatory capture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But I have the sense that there's just going to be a new startup that's going to basically be the PageRank inventor, which has become the new tech giant. I don't know, I would love to hear your kind of opinion if Google, Meta, and Microsoft, they're as gigantic companies able to pivot so hard to create new products.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like some of it is just even hiring people or having a corporate structure that allows for the crazy young kids to come in and just create something totally new. Do you think it's possible or do you think it'll come from a startup?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I had a chance to hang out with Sundar Pichai a couple of days ago and we took this walk and there's this giant new building where there's going to be a lot of AI work being done. And it's kind of this ominous feeling of... like the fight is on. There's this beautiful Silicon Valley nature, like birds are chirping, and this giant building, and it's like the beast has been awakened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then all the big companies are waking up to this. They have the compute, but also the little guys have... it feels like they have all the tools to create the killer product that, and then there's also tools to scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you have a good idea, if you have the page rank idea, so there's several things that is page rank, there's page rank, the algorithm and the idea, and there's like the implementation of it. And I feel like killer product is not just the idea, like the transformer, it's the implementation, something, something really compelling about it. Like you just can't look away. Something like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The algorithm behind TikTok versus TikTok itself, like the actual experience of TikTok, you can't look away. It feels like somebody's going to come up with that. And it could be Google, but it feels like it's just easier and faster to do for a startup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Andreessen. I think you're the right person to talk about the future of the internet and technology in general. Do you think we'll still have Google search in five in 10 years or search in general?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, they got the cloud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We'll talk about that a little bit, but I'd love to linger on some of the ways this is going to change the internet. So I don't know if you remember, but there's a thing called Mosaic and there's a thing called Netscape Navigator. So you were there in the beginning. What about the interface to the internet? How do you think the browser changes? And who gets to own the browser?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We got to see some very interesting browsers. Firefox, I mean, all the variants of Microsoft, Internet Explorer, Edge, and now Chrome. The actual, I mean, it seems like a dumb question to ask, but do you think we'll still have the web browser?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And also, there's apps that you can use. You don't really use them, being a Linux guy and Windows guy. There's one window, the browser, with which you can interact with the internet. But on the phone, you can also have apps. So I can interact with Twitter through the app or through the web browser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that seems like an obvious distinction, but why have the web browser in that case if one of the apps starts becoming the everything app?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What Elon's trying to do with Twitter, but there could be others. There could be like a Bing app, there could be a Google app that just doesn't really do search, but just like do what I guess AOL did back in the day or something, where it's all right there and it changes everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It changes the nature of the internet because where the content is hosted, who owns the data, who owns the content, what is the kind of content you create, how do you make money by creating content, who are the content creators, all of that. Or it could just keep being the same, which is like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
with just the nature of web page changes and the nature of content but there will still be a web browser because a web browser is a pretty sexy product it just seems to work because it like you have an interface a window into the world and then the world can be anything you want and as the world will evolve there could be different programming languages it can be animated maybe it's three-dimensional and so on yeah it's interesting do you think we'll still have the web browser
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The web browser is the F you to the man. That's the free internet. Yeah. Back the way it was in the 90s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, now with AI and AI assistance being able to interact and expose the entirety of human wisdom and knowledge and information and facts and truth to us via the natural language interface, it seems like that's what search is designed to do. And if AI assistance can do that better, doesn't the nature of search change?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You and I are both fans of history, so let's step back. We've been talking about the future. Let's step back for a bit and look at the 90s. You created Mosaic Web Browser, the first widely used web browser. Tell the story of that. And how did it evolve into Netscape Navigator? This is the early days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
A small child. Actually, yeah, let's go there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When did you first fall in love with computers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Did you make it on the website?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, so you were living in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Did you have that sense as well? Like what, what you said, the back of your head was tickled. Like what, what was your, what was exciting to you about this possible world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When's the last time you rode a horse? It's been a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what's involved in creating Mosaic, like in creating a graphical interface to the Internet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
All right. But what I mean is, will we still have Google search as the primary way that human civilization uses to interact with knowledge?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What did it look like? What was the web? I mean, and the key figures? Like, what was it like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The 12 by 12 by 12, they just so beautifully encapsulate Steve Jobs' idea of design. Can you just comment on what you find interesting about Steve Jobs, about that view of the world, that dogmatic pursuit of perfection in how he saw perfection in design?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he would trust that judgment that he had deep down. Even if the engineering teams are saying this is too difficult, even if the finance folks are saying this is ridiculous, the supply chain, all that kind of stuff, this makes this impossible, we can't do this kind of material, this has never been done before, and so on and so forth, he just sticks by it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons, right? And then there's like folding phones, which I would love to know what he thinks about them. But is there something you could also just link on? Because he's one of the interesting figures in the history of technology. What makes him as successful as he was? What makes him as interesting as he was?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What made him so productive and important in the development of technology?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Even if it, in retrospect, or during it felt like suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the standard Google search result is just 10 blue links to random websites. And they turn purple when you visit them. That's HTML.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What does that teach you about the human condition, huh?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the jury's still out on that one. So back to Mosaic. So what, it was text-based. Tim Berners-Lee
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there were 6,000 bucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
How old did Windows 3 sell? So was that the really big, the big operating, graphical operating system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And Windows 95, I think was a pretty big leap also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then we were off to the races. Because nobody could have known what would be created from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Did you have a sense of what the internet will be as you're looking through the window of mosaic? Like there's just a few web pages for now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So, um, the, uh, good, good call. Yeah. Early days. Yes. It's so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So that blog was kind of doing the directory thing. So what was the homepage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
How does that have to do with the blue and the purple?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But were you able to kind of infer, you know, if that Indian restaurant could go online, then you're like... They all will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They all will. Yeah, exactly. So you felt that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it can generate the old InfoSeek or AltaVista. What else was there in the 90s?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Some people say that the anticipation makes the destination that much more exciting. Do you remember progressive JPEGs? Yeah, do I? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, and there's applications in various domains for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, was there any Doomer-type arguments about the internet destroying all of human civilization or destroying some fundamental fabric of human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So can you say something about some of the details of the software engineering challenges required to build these browsers? I mean, the engineering challenges of creating a product that hasn't really existed before that can have such almost like limitless impact on the world with the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's so interesting because the stuff we take for granted now, Man, that was fundamental to the development of the web, to be able to have HTML just right there. All the ghetto mess that is HTML, all the sort of almost biological messiness of HTML, and then having the browser try to interpret that mess to show something reasonable. Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's also, like, I don't often think about this, but, you know, programming, you know, C++, C, C++, all those languages, Lisp, the compiled languages, the interpreted languages, Python, Perl, all that, they brace that to be all correct. It's like everything has to be perfect. And then... Autistic. You forget... All right. It's systematic and rigorous. Let's go there. But you forget that the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if we ask that question quite seriously, it's a pretty big question. Will we still have search as we know it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track whatever the heck is going on inside my body using data, blood test data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the web with JavaScript eventually and HTML is allowed to be messy in the way, for the first time, messy in the way biological systems can be messy. It's like the only thing computers were allowed to be messy on for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, so they wanted the browser to give you a segfault error any time there was a... Yeah, yeah, they wanted it to be a copy, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's such a bold move to say, no, it doesn't have to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you had to figure out how to display this text, HTML text. So the blue links and the purple links. And there's no standards. Is there standards at that time? There really still isn't. Well, there's implied standards, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's all these kinds of new features that are being added, like CSS, what kind of stuff a browser should be able to support, features within languages, within JavaScript, and so on. But you're setting standards on the fly yourself. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The AI would provide to you the 10 blue links so that you can investigate the sources yourself. It wouldn't be the same kind of interface, the crude kind of interface. I mean, isn't that fundamentally different
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I still like the, like a really basic websites, but that could be just old school kids these days with their fancy responsive websites that don't actually have much content, but have a lot of visual elements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like back to the basics, back to just text. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Is there some other stuff you remember, like the purple links? There were some interesting design decisions to kind of come up that we have today or we don't have today that were temporary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you regret this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it wasn't about gray. It was just you didn't want a white background.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Interesting. And then there's a bunch of other decisions. I'm sure there's an interesting history of the development of HTML and CSS and how those interface in JavaScript. And there's this whole Java applet thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you're interested to learn more about Brendan Eich, he's done this podcast previously. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the software world, there's quite a few stories of somebody over a weekend or over a week or over a summer writing some of the most impactful, revolutionary pieces of software ever. That should be inspiring, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I guess that is the kind of search. You talking to an AI is a kind of, conversation is the kind of search. Like you said, every single aspect of our conversation right now, there'd be like temple links popping up that I could just like pause reality. Then you just go silent and then just click and read and then return back to this conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you see that with certain open source projects. So much is done by one or two people. It's so incredible. And that's why you see, that gives me so much hope about the open source movement in this new age of AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
where just recently having had a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, who's all in on open source, which is so interesting to see and so inspiring to see, because releasing these models, it is scary. It is potentially very dangerous, and we'll talk about that. But it's also...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you believe in the goodness of most people and in the skill set of most people and the desire to do good in the world, that's really exciting. Because it's not putting these models into the centralized control of big corporations, the government, and so on. It's putting it in the hands of a teenage kid with a dream in his eyes. I don't know. That's... That's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's going to be interesting. We'll talk about it, but let's just linger a little bit on Netscape. Netscape was acquired in 1999 for $4.3 billion by AOL. What was that like? What were some memorable aspects of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Would you recommend Succession, by the way? I'm more of a Yellowstone guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I just talked to Matthew McConaughey and I'm full on Texan at this point. Good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he will be doing the sequel to Yellowstone. Yeah. Very exciting. Anyway. I can't wait. So that's a rude interruption by me by way of succession.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What did you learn from just the acquisition? I mean, this is so much money. What's interesting, because it must have been very new to you that the software stuff, you can make so much money. There's so much money swimming around. I mean, I'm sure the ideas of investment were starting to get born there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Counter-argument. Right. Oh, like on Twitter, like community notes, but like in real time. In real time. It'll just pop up. Yeah. So anytime you see my ass go to the right, you start getting nervous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like, oh, that's not right. This guy's going to call me out on my bullshit right now. Okay. Well, I mean, isn't that exciting to you? Is that terrifying that... I mean, search has dominated the way we interact with the internet for, I don't know how long, for 30 years, since one of the earliest directories of website, and then Google's for 20 years. And also,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It must have been surreal back then, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, let's now turn back into the future. You wrote the essay, Why AI Will Save the World. Let's start at the very high level. What's the main thesis of the essay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others' perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction. One of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
more depressing conversations I've had. And I don't know why it's depressing. I have to really think through why it's depressing. But on IQ and the G factor. And that that's something in large part is genetic. And it correlates so much with all of these things and success in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like all the inspirational stuff we read about, like if you work hard and so on, damn, it sucks that you're born with a hand that you can't change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You're saying basically a really important point, and I think it's in your articles, It really helped me, it's a nice added perspective to think about, listen, human intelligence, the science of intelligence has shown scientifically that it just makes life easier and better the smarter you are. And now, let's look at artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And if that's a way to increase some human intelligence, then it's only going to make a better life. That's the argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It drove how we create content, you know, search engine optimization, that entirety thing. It also drove the fact that we have web pages and what those web pages are. So, I mean, is that scary to you? Or are you nervous about the shape and the content of the internet evolving?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So people below this hypothetical 140 IQ, it'll pull them off towards 140 IQ? Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Can you still man the case that human plus AI is not always better than human for the individual?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Although, to push back on that, it might be interesting because when the intelligence is not all coming from you, but from another system, that might actually increase the amount of humility even in the assholes. One would hope. Or it could make assholes more assholes. I mean, that's for psychology to study.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We're all sheep, but different colored sheep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there'll be assistance at all stages of life. So when you're younger, there's for education, all that kind of stuff, for mentorship, all of this. And later on, as you're doing work and you've developed a skill and you're having a profession, you'll have an assistant that helps you excel at that profession. So at all stages of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, there's two categories of folks that you outline that worry about or highlight the risks of AI, and you highlight a bunch of different risks. I would love to go through those risks and just discuss them, brainstorm which ones are serious and which ones are less serious. But first, the Baptists and the bootleggers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What are these two interesting groups of folks who worry about the effect of AI on human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a true believer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you write that it isn't sufficient to simply identify the actors and impugn their motives. We should consider the arguments of both the Baptists and the bootleggers on their merits. So let's do just that. Risk number one. Will AI kill us all? Yes. So... What do you think about this one? What do you think is the core argument here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That the development of AGI, perhaps better said, will destroy human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Is there a fundamental difference there? I don't know. What's AGI? What's AI? What's intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think we don't know what the bottom of the well of machine learning is or what the ceiling is. Because just to call something machine learning or just to call something statistics or just to call it math or computation doesn't mean nuclear weapons are just physics. To me, it's very interesting and surprising how far machine learning has taken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Where does machine learning lead? Do we know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, then maybe you could also, as part of that, define the Western tradition of millennialism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Why is that so compelling, do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but why does the transcendence involve the destruction of human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We want more than that. But that's the deep question I'm asking. Why is it not exciting to live in a world where everything's just all right? I think most of the animal kingdom would be so happy with just all right. Because that means survival. Maybe that's what it is. Why are we conjuring up things to worry about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you remember the semantic web? That was an idea. Yeah. How to convert the content of the internet into something that's interpretable by and usable by machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you construct a kind of devil, a kind of source of evil, and we're going to transcend beyond it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, that's a really compelling, exciting idea to have a club over, to have a little bit of travel, like a get together on a Saturday night and drink some beers and talk about the end of the world and how you are the only ones who have figured it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That said, it doesn't mean they're not sometimes right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, we'll talk about nuclear weapons because you have a really interesting little moment that I learned about in your essay. But, you know, sometimes it could be right. Because we're still developing more and more powerful technologies in this case. And we don't know what the impact it will have on human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That was the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, we can highlight all the different predictions about how it will be positive. But the risks are there. And you discussed some of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
How does it get disproven?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I don't think it's completely missing. It's somewhat missing. So, for example, the people that say AI is going to kill all of us, I mean, they usually have ideas about how to do that, whether it's the paperclip maximizer or it escapes. There's a mechanism by which you can imagine it killing all humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you can disprove it by saying there is a limit to the speed at which intelligence increases. maybe show that the sort of rigorously really described model, like how it could happen and say, no, here's a physics limitation. There's a physical limitation to how these systems would actually do damage to human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it is possible they will kill 10 to 20% of the population, but it seems impossible for them to kill 99%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it turns out you don't need to rewrite the content of the internet to make it interpretable by a machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the moment you say AI is going to kill all of us, therefore we should ban it or that we should regulate all that kind of stuff, that's when it starts getting serious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but violence is so fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But that's kind of the extremes. The extremes of anything are always concerning. It's also possible to kind of believe that AI has a very high likelihood of killing all of us. But there's And therefore we should maybe consider slowing development or regulating. So not violence or any of these kinds of things, but saying like, all right, let's take a pause here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is like serious stuff. We should be careful. So it is possible to kind of have a more rational response, right? If you believe this risk is real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, so is it possible to have a scientific approach to the prediction of the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know if the models were useless or the people interpreting the models and then the centralized institutions that were creating policy rapidly based on the models. and leveraging the models in order to support their narratives versus actually interpreting the error bars and the models and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, to push back, there were certainly Baptists and bootleggers in the context of this pandemic. But there's still a usefulness to models, no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But what do you do with a pandemic? What do you do with any kind of threat? Don't you want to kind of have several models to play with as part of the discussion of like, what the hell do we do here? I mean, do they work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That doesn't mean it's not possible to construct a good model of pandemic with the correct error bars with a high number of parameters that are continuously many times a day updated as we get more data about a pandemic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But in a compressed representation. So you're searching
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I would like to believe when a pandemic hits the world, the best computer scientists in the world, the best software engineers respond aggressively and as input take the data that we know about the virus and as an output say, here's what's happening. in terms of how quickly it's spreading, in terms of hospitalization and deaths and all that kind of stuff. Here's how contagious it likely is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Here's how deadly it likely is based on different conditions, based on different ages and demographics and all that kind of stuff. So here's the best kinds of policy. It feels like... You could have models, machine learning, that kind of, they don't perfectly predict the future, but they help you do something because there's pandemics that are like, Meh, they don't really do much harm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's pandemics, you can imagine them, they could do a huge amount of harm. Like they can kill a lot of people. So you should probably have some kind of data-driven models that keep updating, that allow you to make decisions that basically like where, how bad is this thing? Now you can criticize. how horrible all that went with the response to this pandemic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But I just feel like there might be some value to models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Uh, machine learning says, hold my beer, but well, it's possible. No, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
My main worry with the response to the pandemic is that, same as with aliens, is that even if such a thing existed... And it's possible it existed. The policymakers were not paying attention. There was no mechanism that allowed those kinds of models to percolate out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. But the policymakers also wanted, they had a narrative in mind, and they also wanted to use whatever model that fit that narrative to help them out. So it felt like there was a lot of politics and not enough science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Scientists in quotes. That's not... Quote-unquote scientists. That's not... Okay. Let's give love to science. That is the way out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's really interesting. But what do we do about the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It includes all kinds of information. And that raw signal is processed using machine learning to tell me what I need to do with my life. how I need to change, improve my diet, how I need to change, improve my lifestyle, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In this case, philosophers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The book is One Reason Goes on Holiday, Philosophers and Politics by Nevin Fletcher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I found this book a highly entertaining and eye-opening read filled with amazing anecdotes of irrationality and craziness by famous recent philosophers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, boy. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So just push back on that. I don't think they have good metrics of, yeah, when the fume is happening, but I think it's possible to have that. Like I just, just as you speak now, I mean, it's possible to imagine there could be measures. It's been 20 years. No, for sure, but it's been only weeks since we had a big enough breakthrough in language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We can start to actually have, the thing is, the AI Doomer stuff didn't have any actual systems to really work with, and now there's real systems you can start to analyze, like how does this stuff go wrong? And I think you kind of agree that there is a lot of risks that we can analyze. The benefits outweigh the risks in many cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what's the motivator for creating new content on the internet? Yeah. Well, I mean, actually the motivation is probably still there, but what does that look like? Would we really not have webpages? Would we just have social media and video hosting websites? And what else? Conversations with AIs. Conversations with AIs. So conversations become...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But you can start talking about, as we get more and more actual systems that start to get more and more intelligent, you can start to actually have more scientific arguments here. High level, you can talk about the threat of autonomous weapon systems back before we had any automation in the military. And that would be like very fuzzy kind of logic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But the more and more you have drones, they're becoming more and more autonomous. You can start imagining, okay, what does that actually look like? And what's the actual threat of autonomous weapon systems? How does it go wrong? And still, it's very vague. But you start to get a sense of like, all right, it should probably be illegal or wrong or not allowed to do like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
mass deployment of fully autonomous drones that are doing aerial strikes on large areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, so you want to go the other way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there's ways this can go wrong too, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, well, on average, the worry that AI folks have is the runaway. They're going to come alive, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or not come alive. Hold on a second. You lose control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, more like Chernobyl-style meltdown, like just bugs in the code accidentally force you, results in the bombing of large civilian areas to a degree that's not possible in the current military strategies controlled by humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. And a lot of civilians died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So one of the things that the modern US military can do with technology, with automation, but technology more broadly, is higher and higher precision strikes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. Okay. Please. I'm a magician, you could say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So one-on-one conversations, like private conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the hope is that AGI or like various super intelligent systems have some of the nuance that LLMs have. And the intuition is they most likely will because even these LLMs have the nuance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. And let's remember, we're not really having a conversation with a machine. We're having a conversation with the entirety of the collective intelligence of the human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, correct. But it's possible to imagine autonomous weapon systems that are not using LLMs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Is it possible to be super intelligent without being super wise?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Unlikely, but not impossible, I think. But again, here you get to like, okay, like... No, I'm not saying... When it's unlikely, but not impossible, if it's unlikely, that means the fear should be correctly calibrated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, okay. So one interesting sort of tangent I would love to take on this, because you mentioned this in the essay about nuclear, which was also... I mean, you don't shy away from a little bit of a spicy take. So Robert Oppenheimer famously said, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, as he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16th, 1945.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you write an interesting historical perspective quote, recall that John von Neumann responded to Robert Oppenheimer's famous hand-wringing about the role of creating nuclear weapons, which, you note, helped end World War II and prevent World War III, with some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin. And you also mentioned that Truman was harsher after meeting Oppenheimer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He said that, don't let that crybaby in here again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So he's widely considered, perhaps because of the hang-wringing, as the father of the atomic bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, for people who don't know, yeah, that's right. It makes the LLMs, it removes the censorship, quote unquote, that's put on it by the tech companies that create them. And so this is... LLMs uncensored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Well, Von Neumann is widely credited as being one of the smartest humans of the 20th century. Certain people, everybody says, like, this is the smartest person I've ever met when they've met him. Anyway, that doesn't mean smart, doesn't mean wise. I would love to sort of... Can you make the case both for and against the critique of Oppenheimer here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because we're talking about nuclear weapons. Boy, do they seem dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But is there a case to be made that you really need to wake the public up to the dangers of nuclear weapons when they were first dropped? Like, really, like, educate them on, like, this is an extremely dangerous and destructive weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so 80,000 people dead. But the reporting of that, you can report that in all kinds of ways. You can do all kinds of slants, like war is horrible, war is terrible. You can make it seem like the use of nuclear weapons is just a part of war and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Something about the reporting and the discussion of nuclear weapons resulted in us being terrified in awe of the power of nuclear weapons. And that potentially fed in a positive way towards the game theory of mutually shared destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Some of this is me playing devil's advocate here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Actually, just on that point, you say a lot of really brilliant things. It hit me just as you were saying it. I don't know why it hit me for the first time, but we got two wars in a span of 20 years. We could have kept getting more and more world wars and more and more ruthless. Actually, you could have had a US versus Russia war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but so me as an American, me as a person that loves America, I also wonder if US was the only ones with the nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I would probably not hand it over to, I would be careful about the regimes you hand it over to. Maybe give it to like the British or something. Or like a democratically elected government?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It has such a sexy ring to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Strike Russia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Now, again, like... Is this an example of philosophers and politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, but is it... Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, stick to computing, John.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this actually brings up the point of, in AI, who are the good people to reason about the morality, the ethics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Outside of these risks, outside of, like, the more complicated stuff that you agree on is, you know, this will go into the hands of bad guys and all the kinds of ways they'll do is interesting and dangerous, is dangerous in interesting, unpredictable ways, and who is the right person, who are the right kinds of people to make decisions how to respond to it? Is it tech people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The people that develop that technology are usually not going to be the right people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, let me sort of, as the devil's advocate takes a sip of whiskey, say that I agree with that, but also it seems like the people who are doing kind of the ethics departments in these tech companies go sometimes the other way. Yes. They're not nuanced on history or theology or this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I wonder if there's a way to forget.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It almost becomes a kind of outraged activism towards directions that don't seem to be grounded in history and humility and nuance. It's, again, drenched with arrogance. So I'm not sure which is worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm a big fan of using as much raw data that comes from my own body, processed through generalized machine learning models to give a prediction, to give a suggestion. This is obviously the future, and the more data, the better. And so companies like InsideTracker, they're just doing an amazing job
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But I guess...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, celebrate humility in our public leaders. So getting to risk number two, will AI ruin our society? Short version, as you write, if the murder robots don't get us, the hate speech and misinformation will. And the action you recommend, in short, don't let the thought police suppress AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do you think some of that is good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There could be a middle ground somewhere like Wikipedia type of moderation. There's moderation on Wikipedia. Yeah. that is somehow crowdsourced where you don't have centralized elites, but it's also not completely just a free-for-all because if you have the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips, you can do a lot of harm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you have a good assistant that's completely uncensored, they can help you build a bomb. They can help you mess with people's physical wellbeing, right? If they, because that information is out there on the internet. And so presumably there's, it would be, you could see the positives in censoring some aspects of an AI model when it's helping you commit literal violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, that's what I'm trying to get at is there could be Wikipedia-like models or community type of models where allows you to essentially either provide context or sensor in a way that's not resist the slippery slope nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's AI risk number five, will AI lead to bad people doing bad things? I can just imagine language models used to do so many bad things, but the hope is there that you can have large language models used to then defend against it by more people, by smarter people, by more effective people, skilled people, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So just to highlight the points you're making, you think, and it's an interesting thought, that the majority of content that LLMs of the future will be trained on is actually human conversations with the LLM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you have to understand my brain has gone a full, a full steam ahead here. Cause I agree with basically everything you're saying, but I'm trying to play devil's advocate here there because, okay, you highlighted the fact that there is a slippery slope to human nature. The moment you censor something, you start to censor everything. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That alignment starts out sounding nice, but then you start to align to the beliefs of some select group of people, and then it's just your beliefs. The number of people you're aligning to is smaller and smaller as that group becomes more and more powerful. Okay, but that just speaks to the people that censor are usually the assholes, and the assholes get richer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I wonder if it's possible to do without that for AI. One way to ask this question is, do you think the baseline foundation models should be open sourced? Like what Mark Zuckerberg is saying they want to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it's possible it's the majority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So loss has to get updated really quick here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You're saying slippery slope always leads there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, you could add friction to it. Like, harder to get the models. Because people will always be able to get the models. But it'll be more in the shadows, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like... Oh, I see. You're like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It seems like in terms of size of models and effectiveness of models, the big tech companies will probably lead the way for quite a few years. And the question is of what policies they should use. The kid in Indonesia should not be regulated, but should Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI be regulated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that's going to change everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Mark's just like walked away at this point. He's just, screw it. I don't know what to do with this. You guys created this whole internet thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge believer in open source here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And what the interesting thing is, because it's software, a kid in his basement, a teenager, could build a system that defends against the worst. And to me, defense is super exciting. If you believe in the good of human nature, that most people want to do good, to be the savior of humanity is really exciting. Yes. Okay, that's a dramatic statement, but to help people. Of course, to help people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, okay, what about, just to jump around, what about the risk of, will AI lead to crippling inequality? You know, because we're kind of saying everybody's life will become better. Is it possible that the rich get richer here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So yes, they'll get rich, but they'll get rich having a huge positive impact on... Yeah, making the technology available to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What about AI taking our jobs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So new wants and needs. The worry is that the creation of new wants and needs at a rapid rate Well, I mean, there's a lot of turnover in jobs, so people will lose jobs. Just the actual experience of losing a job and having to learn new things and new skills is painful for the individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, visual data is a little weird because creating reality, visual reality seems to be still a little bit out of reach for us, except in the autonomous vehicle space where you can really constrain things and you can really-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's actually, perhaps partially because of that reason, there's a shortage of people who want to be truck drivers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's still going to be painful, but that's the process of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you write that the single greatest risk, this is the risk you're most convinced by, the single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we, the United States and the West, do not. Can you elaborate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So their plan is what? Surveillance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you're worried that the... Regulating in the United States will haul progress enough to where the Chinese government would win that race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What's your sense of where they stand in terms of the race towards superintelligence as compared to the United States?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, as we've been talking about, my hope is not just with the United States, but with just the kid in his basement, the open-source LLM. because I don't know if I trust large centralized institutions with super powerful AI, no matter what their ideology, because power corrupts. You've been investing in tech companies for about, let's say 20 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And about 15 of which was with Andreessen Horowitz. What interesting trends in tech have you seen over that time? Let's just talk about companies and just the evolution of the tech industry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The following is a debate on the topic of Israel and Palestine with Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny. Norm and Benny are historians, Muin is a Middle East analyst, and Steven is a political commentator and streamer. All four have spoken and debated extensively on this topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So first of all, you have complete freedom to backtrack, and we'll go there with you. Obviously, we can't cover every single year, every single event, but there's probably critical moments in time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I will do more debates and conversations on these difficult topics, and I will continue to search for hope in the midst of death and destruction, to search for our common humanity in the midst of division and hate. This thing we have going on, human civilization, the whole of it, is beautiful. And it's worth figuring out how we can help it flourish together. I love you all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If it's true. Just quick pause. I think everything was fascinating to listen to except the mention of hilarious. Nobody finds any of this hilarious. And if any of us are laughing, it's not at the suffering of civilians or suffering of anyone. It's at the obvious joyful camaraderie in the room. So I'm enjoying it and also the joy of learning. So thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Benny Moore's books for the listeners.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If you like, if you like. Hold on a second. Norm, Norm. Norm, Norm. Stop, please. Norm, just for me, please, just give me a second. You said that there's no genocide going on in Gaza. Let me ask that clear question. The same question I asked on Hamas attacks. Is there, from a legal, philosophical, moral perspective, is there genocide going on in Gaza today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
from 90... I assume they'll take two or three years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
on that moment, brief moment of agreement. Let's just take a quick pause. We need a smoke break. We need a water break. We need a bathroom break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yeah, there you go. How are you guys doing? Okay, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's possible to be productive over the next two hours and talk about solutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
One of the things that would be good to talk about solutions with the future is going back in all the times it has failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Lay it all up. Lay it up. You do talk quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So first of all, thank you for that heated discussion about the present. I would love to go back into history in a way that informs what we can look for by way of hope for the future. So when has, in Israel and Palestine, have we been closest to something like a peace settlement, to something where both sides would be happy and enable the flourishing of both peoples?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got ExpressVPN for privacy, Babbel for learning new languages, Policy Genius for insurance, and 8sleep for, you guessed it, sleep. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So if you look back into history, when were we closest to peace? And do you draw any hope from any of them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Thank you, Norm. Norm asked that we make a lengthy statement in the beginning. Benny, I hope it's okay to call everybody by their first name in the name of camaraderie. Norm has quoted several things you said. Perhaps you can comment broader than the question of 1948 and maybe respond to the things that Norm said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Please, Norm, tell me you have something optimistic to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. I've used them for many years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Can we just pretend like we didn't all lay out the exceptionally pessimistic view of a two-state, hold on a second, two-state solution. Let's pretend that in five years, in 10 years, a two-state peace settlement is reached. And as historians, you'll still be here writing about it 20 years from now. How would it have happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
If you paint a picture of the future, now is a good moment for both Palestine and Israel to get new leadership. Netanyahu is on the way out. Hamas possibly is on the way out. Who should rise to the top such that a peaceful settlement can be reached?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
when you say hostility, in case people are not familiar, there was a full-on war where Arab states invaded, and Israel won that war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
All right. Well, let me try once again for the region and for just entirety of humanity. What gives you hope? We just heard a lot of pessimistic, cynical takes. What gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
When you look at people in Gaza and people in the West Bank, people in Israel, fundamentally they hate war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
What gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And so after that, the transfer, the expulsion, the thing that people call the Nakba happened. William, could you speak to 1948 and the historical significance of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Maureen, I'm holding out for you here. You still didn't answer the hope question. What gives you a source of hope about the region?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I've had great conversations with several people on the podcast about the NSA and the overreach and power that's there. And it's really interesting to think about the value of privacy, the value of digital privacy in our lives, how much we take for granted How much we look the other way when the product or whatever we're using is good enough and we become the product. Our data becomes the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
To disagree with Stephen, I thought this was extremely valuable. At times, really, the view of history, the passion. I'm really grateful that you would spend your really valuable time. Just one more question since we have two historians here. Just briefly, from a history perspective, What do you hope your legacy as historians, Benny and Norm, will be of the work that you've put out there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Maybe Norm, you can go first and try to just say briefly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Thank you, Norm. Thank you, Benny. Thank you, Steven. Thank you, Muin. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Norman Ficklenstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabbani, and Steven Bunnell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Lyndon B. Johnson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles, and it must be taken one step at a time. Thank you for listening, and I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It's really interesting. I think transparency there is required because While it is true all of us value privacy, we're very hypocritical on that point in many cases. We distrust certain things that don't violate privacy that much, and we trust blindly other things that violate a huge number of privacy, or at least have the capacity to. A lot of us use a smartphone with a camera looking at us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We may talk about Zionism, Britain, UN Assemblies, and all the things you mentioned, there's a lot to dig into. So, again, if we can keep it to just one statement moving forward after Stephen, if you want to go a little longer. Also, we should acknowledge the fact that the speaking speeds of people here are different. Stephen speaks about 10 times faster than me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Stephen, do you want to comment on 1948?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The goal for this debate was not for anyone to win or to score points. It wasn't to get views or likes. I never care about those. And I think there are probably much easier ways to get those things if I did care. The goal was to explore together the history, present, and future of Israel and Palestine in a free-flowing conversation, no time limits, no rules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Always. We trust that device. Human psychology is fascinating. It worries me how easily we could be convinced at a mass scale by narratives. Distributed propaganda or centralized propaganda, it all works. And it all is terrifyingly effective. Something to think about. And you should have several layers of protection in your digital and your physical space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
ExpressVPN, a good VPN, and that's the one I use, is something you should definitely be using. Go to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free. This episode is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. They got Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and more. I'm doing more and more translation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
In fact, if you are somebody that speaks fluently in Russian and professionally does translation, I just did a very lengthy podcast where both me and the guest speak Russian. And I'm looking for translation from Russian to English. professionally done, like really, really well done. This is actually a very difficult task.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So just to clarify, what you're saying is that 47 was an offensive war, not a defensive war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
By the Arabs. And you're also saying that there was never a top-down policy of expulsion. Yes. Just to clarify the point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And then also for hopefully the same person, but not necessarily to do the voiceovers in English. Given how fast the other person speaks that I interviewed, it's actually a pretty tricky thing. But all that is to say that I deeply care about breaking down the barriers that language creates. I think a lot of those barriers are artificial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
They hide from ourselves the common humanity that's obviously there. There's differences, of course, in culture, in the music of a people, in the music of a language, but underneath it all, it's all the same fears, the same hopes, the same excitements, the same dynamics, the same things we care about, family and food and simple joy, big joy, chasing dreams, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
By the way, it's okay to respond back and forth. This is great. And also just a quick question, if I may. Mm-hmm. you're using quotes from, from Benny, from professor Morris.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Uh, it's also okay to say those quotes do not reflect the full context of the, so like, if we go back, if you know, to quotes we've said in the past and you've both here have written the three, you have written on this topic a lot is we should be careful and just admit like, well, yeah, well, that's just real quick, just to be clear that the contention is that Norm is quoting a part and saying that this was the entire reason for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Anyway, I use Babbel more to learn languages I don't know that well. Sometimes I'll use it for Russian, just for fun practice, getting the rust off. But I'm learning Spanish now. Also, I took French in high school, and I'm very rusty, so I'm using Babbel to, again, get some of the rust off. And one day, I hope to get better at German and Italian. I've traveled to Italy a couple times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
We keep bringing up this line in the 25 pages and the 4 pages. We're lucky to have Benny in front of us right now. We don't need to go to the quotes. We can legitimately ask how central is expulsion to Zionism in its early version of Zionism and whatever Zionism is today
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
and how much power, influence the Zionism and ideology have in Israel, and the influence, the philosophy, the ideology Zionism have on Israel today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It would be very helpful. to be able to speak the language, so that I could navigate the streets with grace and skill. Anyway, for a limited time, you can get 50% off a one-time payment for a lifetime Babbel subscription at babbel.com slash lexpod. That's 50% off at babbel.com slash lexpod, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash lexpod. Rules and restrictions apply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Just a quick pause to mention that for people who are not familiar, Theodor Herzl we're talking about over a century ago. And everything we've been talking about has been mostly 1948 and before. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, all kinds, life insurance, auto, home, disability, and I apologize for the heaviness of my tone in this few minutes that we get to spend together here. This episode was a difficult one, and perhaps this is a good moment to mention why. Because it's human beings talking about other human beings who are suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Human beings sitting in the comfort of a room that's not getting bombed, that's not getting shot at, a room that's surrounded by other rooms and other buildings that are safe in the way that Most places in America are safe, meaning even when there's a crime, the rule of law applies. But the raw aspects of human nature, of the destruction and death involved in wars, seems out of this world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
There was a lot of tension in the room from the very beginning, and it only got more intense as we went along. And I quickly realized that this very conversation, in a very real human way, was a microcosm of the tensions and distance and perspectives on the topic of Israel and Palestine. For some debates, I will step in and moderate strictly to prevent emotion from boiling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
It is difficult to really hold inside your mind. the things I've seen in Ukraine, the hate I've seen in people's eyes when I traveled to the West Bank. There was a lot of love there, but there was also a lot of hate. And there's a heaviness that comes with conversations like this. Of course, I really, really tried to bring out the humanity. Even moments of joy, the camaraderie, I tried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Norm, I'm officially forbidding you referencing that again. Hold on a second, wait. We responded to it. So the main point you're making, we have to take Baniyat's word, is like there was a war and that's the reason why he made that statement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I'll continue to try. Anyway, this is about Policy Genius. You can find life insurance policies there that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Head to policygenius.com slash lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you can save. That's policygenius.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and Spot 3 Cover. Another thing that I get to enjoy in life And others don't. I've always been able to find joy in the simplest of things. In the absence of material possessions, I always saw beauty. Every moment has the capacity to create contentment, to create real happiness. Just this feeling of gratitude to be alive. It's a real feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Again, when I was in Ukraine, people that lost their home, that lost their family, there was still a kind of joy there, a humor there. Again, a camaraderie there. That's hard to explain. I think because when everything is stripped away, You're still grateful to be alive and the people that you love that are still there, you're grateful for them and for those moments that you share.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
That's the foundation of all of it. That's the only thing that matters. All this bullshit that we buy and own. All that is just a beautiful icing on the cake. Where the cake is just the very essence of existence. The very fact that we're alive. Alive and are able to love each other and hold on to each other. And to experience moments together when we just look and see. You know, see each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And on the point of agreement, on this one brief light of agreement, let us wrap up with this topic of history and move on to modern day. But before that, I'm wondering if we could just say a couple of last words on this topic. Stephen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Like we're on this earth for a short time and we're in this together. And we'll lose each other one day. But today we're together. It's, I don't know. That's the most important thing. Everything else is just icing. But, you know, it's nice to have things. It's nice to have things you can enjoy together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I do want to, it definitely is nice to have a bed to sleep on and to have modern technology and to have a bed that cools itself is like ridiculous. I love it. It's like, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. But it's one of the things that just brings me happiness. You can check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
You're really tempting a response from the other side on the last few sentences. We'll talk about the claims of apartheid and so on. It's a fascinating discussion. We need to have it. Norm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Norman Fickenstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabani, and Stephen Bunnell. First question is about 1948. For Israelis, 1948 is the establishment of the State of Israel and the War of Independence. For Palestinians, 1948 is the Nakba, which means catastrophe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
For this, I saw the value in not interfering with the passion of the exchanges, because that emotion in itself spoke volumes. We did talk about the history and the future, but the anger, the frustration, the biting wit, and at times, respect and camaraderie were all there. Like I said, we did it in an perhaps all too human way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
or the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes as a consequence of the war. What to you is important to understand about the events of 1948 and the period around there, 47, 49, that helps us understand what's going on today and maybe helps us understand the roots of all of this that started even before 1948.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
I was hoping that Norm could speak first, then Benny, then Muin, and then Norm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Let's move to the modern day, and we'll return to history, maybe 67 and other important moments, but let's look to today, in the recent months. October 7th. Let me ask sort of a pointed question. Was October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel genocidal? Was it an act of ethnic cleansing? Just so we lay out the moral calculus that we are engaged in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
So the numbers here and the details are interesting and important almost from a legal perspective. But if we zoom out, the moral perspective, are Palestinians from Gaza justified in violent resistance? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
The attacks of October 7th, where did they land for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Open challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
And if I may ask, it's good to discuss ideas that are in the air now as opposed to citing literature that was written in the past as much as possible because listeners were not familiar with the literature. So, like, whatever was written, just express it, condense the key idea, and then we can debate the ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
Yes, I'm just telling you that you as an academic historian put a lot of value in the written word, and I think it is valuable, but in this context... He's incidentally not the only historian who puts value to words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#418 – Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris
More than just one or two sentences at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length. And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked for many more hours, and I'm sure we will. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
To me, obviously, the note-taking, the putting words onto paper as part of the process of figuring out intellectual puzzles, of thinking through things, designing things, summarizing things, interpreting things, all of that, that's the writing process. And integrating AI into that to help you, almost like a buddy, is obviously empowering. But there's an interface question, how to do that well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Does he say, P.S., don't mess this up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Make me look good. He doesn't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Good. So back to maybe the big picture of space. When you look up at the stars and think big, what do you hope is the future of humanity hundreds, thousands of years from now out in space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
One of the interesting ideas you had is to move the heavy industry away from Earth. So people sometimes have this idea that somehow space exploration is in conflict with the celebration of the planet Earth, that we should focus on preserving Earth. And basically your idea is that space travel and space exploration is a way to preserve Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And to me, Notion does that better than any tool I've used so far. Notion AI can now give you instant answers to your questions using information from across your wiki, projects, docs, and meeting notes. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com. That's all lowercase, notion.com. To try the power of Notion AI today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Eventually, we have to do that. Exactly. You don't often talk about it, but let me ask you on that topic about the Blue Ring and the Orbital Reef space infrastructure projects. What's your vision for these? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
A-W-S-S. Okay, so compute in space. So you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to orbit, and then you have these admins that show up, this blue ring thing that manages various things like compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I wanna ask you about that, but let me actually just step back to the old days. You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist. What attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become, why are you not Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
This show is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying life insurance. Almost every single conversation I have in different ways, I ponder, I explore, I deliberate the simple fact of our mortality, the finiteness of every experience, the human experience, but every experience that makes up the human experience. the good and the bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, there's a particular kind of intuition you need to be a great physicist applied to physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And visualization skill, you have to be able to really kind of do these kinds of thought experiments. And if you want a truly great creativity, actually, Walter Isaacson writes about you. It puts you on the same level as Einstein.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I think bringing that up as a topic is important because it is one of the big questions for the introspecting animal that is a human being, for somebody who's trying to figure out the puzzle of the human condition. Why does it have to end? Is it good that it has to end? How does the fact of it ending play a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, and he describes in all kinds of different ways, Walter Isaacson does, that creativity combined with childlike wonder that you've maintained still to this day, all of that combined together. Is there, like if you were to study your own brain introspect, How do you think? What's your thinking process like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
We'll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper, which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon. But how do you, when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and thinking through this high-dimensional space and looking for creative solutions, creative paths forward, is there something you could say about that process?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea. And maybe to notice the kernel of a good idea, maybe pull at that string. Because I don't think good ideas come fully formed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So you've got that ability to say cosine in you somewhere, after all. Maybe not on math.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
with the richness of the experience of every moment that we feel when we open our eyes to the beauty of that experience? Those are good questions, but they also put you in the right mindset to explore the other questions. The details of engineering, the details of business and science, all of that are somehow made more
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, you just gave me a good response to when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Okay. All right. You gave me an amazing tour of Blue Origin Rocket Factory and Launch Complex in the historic Cape Canaveral. That's where New Glenn, the big rocket we talked about, is being built and will launch. Can you explain what the New Glenn rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
visceral, more intensely salient when grounded in the context of pondering one's own mortality. That's why I tried to do it. And I guess Policy Genius wants you to ponder your mortality and do something about it. A pragmatic angle. With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 a year for $1 million of coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And even the foundation of the launch pad. I mean, this is Florida. Isn't it like swampland? How deep do you have to go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I just have to say, everything about that factory is pretty badass. The bigger it gets, the more epic it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
It's humbling, also, because humans are so small compared to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
But then there's all the different components and the materials involved. Is there something interesting that you can describe about the materials? uh that comprise the rocket so it has to be as light as possible i guess whilst withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
We got Notion for team collaboration, Policy Genius for insurance, Masterclass for learning, 8sleep for naps, and Insight Tracker for biological data. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team we're always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Relatively low temperature, and I guess high temperature is what makes them, that makes it a weak point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Head to PolicyGenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass. Ten bucks a month gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world and their particular thing. That's how you should learn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I mean, even just looking at the fairings, the result of that, the complex shape that it takes and what it's supposed to do is kind of incredible. Because people don't know it's on top of the rocket, it's going to fall apart. That's its task. But it has to stay strong sometimes and then disappear when it needs to. That's right. Which is a very difficult task.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So if you want to go from 100% structural integrity to zero as fast as possible, use explosives. Use explosives. The entirety of this thing is so badass. Okay, so we're back to the two stages. So the first stage is reusable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I mean, there's a million questions, but also, is there a path towards reusability for the second stage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I like how you said getting to orbit is a solved problem. It's just the only interesting thing is reducing the cloud. You know you can describe every single problem facing human civilization that way? The physicists would say, everything is a solved problem. We've solved everything. The rest is just, what Rutherford said, that it's just stamp collecting. It's just the details.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
You should try to find a way to listen to, to get close to the people that are the best at a thing that you're interested in. That's not the only way to learn. Textbooks, tutorials, lectures, books about a thing are good. But the doers of the thing...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Some of the greatest innovations and inventions and brilliance is in that cost reduction stage, right? And you've had a long career of cost reduction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So what are some of the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side, on the engineering side that you're facing in working to get to the first launch of New Glenn?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So the first one is produced in a way that enables the production of the second, the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and sixth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
reveal something not just in their explanations, but in how they construct the explanations, how they think about the words that lead to the formation of the explanations, and all of that becomes salient when you just listen to these master classes. It's the doers that now have become teachers, but they were doers first. Anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, there's something fundamentally different about the quote-unquote business of space exploration. Yeah, for sure. It's a grand project of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
They will, of course, as kids do, take all of this hard infrastructure building for granted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
used so beneficially used by so many people that they take it for granted i don't know about nobody every time i use amazon i'm still amazed how does this work that proves you're a very curious explorer all right all right back to rockets timeline you said 2024 uh As it stands now, are both the first test launch and the launch of Escapade Explorers to Mars still possible in 2024?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Chris Hatfield, Will Wright, Carlos Santana, Daniel Negreanu, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese. I would love to talk to Martin Scorsese in this podcast. There's just a lot of classes to choose from. The ones I mentioned are the ones I've personally enjoyed. But maybe there's many others. Maybe you can write to me and recommend ones that were really impactful to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Oh, I got it. But you're optimistic that the launches will still... Oh, the first launch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Well, I got to visit the launch, man. It's pretty, I mean, it's epic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
When the thing is fully assembled and comes up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Speaking of which, if that makes you nervous, I don't know if you remember, but you were aboard New Shepard on its first crewed flight. How was that experience? Were you terrified then?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at Masterclass.com slash LexPod. That's Masterclass.com slash LexPod. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep. I don't know why I'm speaking like this, quietly. Because when I mention Eight Sleep, I think about myself napping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, and I mean, there's just a... epic nature to it, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
It is a gem. You've talked a lot about decision-making throughout your time with Amazon. What was that decision like to be the first to ride New Shepard? Just before you talked to your mom. Yeah. The pros and cons. Actually, as one human being, as a leader of a company, on all fronts, what was that decision-making like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Can you actually describe what do you mean by escape system, what's involved?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And the calm peace that overtakes my surrounding environment when I'm napping. On a cold bed with a warm blanket, it's a little sampling of heaven. No matter how I'm feeling. I could be feeling totally shitty about whatever thing. I could be angry. I could be sad. I could be lonely. All of these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Who was in charge of engaging the escape system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So, yeah, for tourism, rockets, safety is a huge, huge, huge priority. For space exploration also, but a delta less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Is there a part of you that's frustrated by the rate of progress in Blue Origin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
What are the ways to speed it up? So I mean, there's... You've talked a lot of different ways to sort of, at Amazon, you know, removing barriers for progress, sort of distributing, making everybody autonomous and self-reliant, all those kinds of things. Does that apply at Blue Origin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
All of the different emotional trajectories that the human mind can take you on somehow get all resolved. The knots get untied. And everything becomes simple again after a good nap. So take the naps seriously, friends. They are the cure for many of life's ills. And if you want to do your naps the way I do my naps, the right way, you should use Eight Sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, I mean, part of the skill here is to know the difference between one-way and two-way. I think you mentioned- Yes! I mean, I think you mentioned Amazon Prime, the decision to sort of create Amazon Prime as a one-way door. I mean, it's unclear if it is or not, but it probably is and it's a really big risk to go there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, one of the things I really liked, perhaps it's not two-way door decisions, is I disagree and commit phrase. So somebody brings up an idea to you, if it's a two-way door, you state that you don't understand enough to agree, but you still back them. I'd love for you to explain that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And if you want to get in touch with me for other reasons, like guest suggestions, you can go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. Like with aliens. But in this case, it's with me. And now, on to the full ad reads. There's always no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Check it out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my body. This complex, hierarchical, biological machine that provides an infinity of signals, most of which are ignored when we make health, lifestyle, diet, whatever decisions, life decisions. The future...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah. I'm going to use that in my personal life. I disagree, but commit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads to a high velocity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
At every scale in a distributed way. Yes. Try to maximize the velocity of decisions. Exactly. You've mentioned the lunar program. Let me ask you about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
There's a lot going on there, and you haven't really talked about it much. So in addition to the Artemis program with NASA, Blue is doing its own lander program. Can you describe it? There's a sexy picture on Instagram with one of them. Is it the MK1, I guess?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
is designing systems, machine learning systems that don't ignore those signals, that leverage those signals, combine them, integrate them with the best scientific work of the day to give you advice on what to do with your life. And Insight Tracker is taking steps towards that bright, to me, bright future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So the idea with Mark I, both Mark I and Mark II, is the New Glenn can carry it from the surface of Earth to the surface of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And so there's a few questions there, but one is how do you stay on the moon? What ideas do you have about a sustaining life where a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So they're using data from your blood, from DNA data, fitness tracker data, all of that to give you lifestyle recommendations. I'm really glad they are pushing this kind of work forward. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
To fast forward a little bit, is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars? One or the other or both?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, so these are risky, difficult missions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing humanity forward out towards the stars, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Are you competitors, collaborators? Which and to what degree?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
But, you know, I spoke to Elon a few times recently about you, about Blue Origin, and he was very positive about you as a person and very supportive of all the efforts you've been leading at Blue. What's your thoughts? You worked with a lot of leaders at Amazon, at Blue. What's your thoughts about Elon as a human being and a leader?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, I just, I hope you guys hang out sometimes, shake hands and sort of have a kind of friendship that would inspire just the entirety of humanity. Because what you're doing is like one of the big grand challenges ahead for humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
All right, going back to sexy pictures on your Instagram. There's a video of you from the early days of Amazon giving a tour of your, quote, sort of offices. I think your dad is holding the camera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And you're like explaining the genius of the extension cord. Yeah. And how there's a desk and the CRT monitor and sort of that's where all the magic happens. I forget what your dad said, but this is like the center of it all. So what was it like? What was going through your mind at that time? You left... a good job in New York and took this leap. Were you excited? Were you scared?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a ranch here in Texas. And I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch. So what's the coolest job you remember doing there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So in some sense, you don't want a single day of comfort. You've written about this many times. We'll talk about your writing, which I would highly recommend people read, and just the letters to shareholders. So you wrote up explaining the idea of day one thinking. I think you first wrote about it in 97 Letters to Shareholders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Then you also, in a way, wrote about, sad to say, your last Letter to Shareholders as CEO. And you said that day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating painful decline, followed by death. And that is why it's always day one. Can you explain this day one thing? This is a really powerful way to describe the beginning and the journey of Amazon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Most interesting. Most memorable. Most memorable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And to the question of how to fend off day two, you said, such a question can't have a simple answer, as you're saying. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don't know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here's a starter pack of essentials. Maybe others come to mind. For day one, defense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high velocity decision making. So we talked about high velocity decision making. That's more difficult than it sounds. So maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on. Eager adoption of external trends, high velocity decision making, skeptical view of proxies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
That is a nuance, but that's a big problem, right? There's something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
What does it take to be the guy or gal who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated? I guess, what does it take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting? Because that's a very uncomfortable thing to bring up at a meeting. We all showed up here, it's a Friday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
But even in science, there's like the senior scientists and the junior scientists. Correct. And then there's a hierarchy of humans where the somehow seniority matters in the scientific process, which it should not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So you're saying implicitly or explicitly give permission for people to have a strong opinion as long as it's backed by data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So speaking of happiness, bias, data collection, and anecdotes, you have to, how's that for a transition? You have to tell me the story of the call you made, the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So that speaks to the obsession with the customer experience. So one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy. I think companies sometimes say that, but Amazon is really obsessed with that. I think there's something really profound to that, which is seeing the world through the eyes of the customer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
like the customer experience, the human being that's using the product, that's enjoying the product, like the subtle little things that make up their experience. How do you optimize those?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Where would you put on the paper cut spectrum the buy now with one click button, which is, I think, pretty genius. So to me, like, okay, my interaction with things I love on the internet. There's things I do a lot. I may be representing a regular human. I would love for those things to be frictionless. For example, booking airline tickets. Just saying. Buying a thing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
with one click, making that experience frictionless, intuitive, all aspects of that. That just fundamentally makes my life better. Not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of- Cognitive load. Yeah, cognitive load and inner peace and happiness. First of all, buying stuff, isn't it a pleasant experience? Having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it is a pleasant experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And like having pain around that is somehow just, you're ruining a beautiful experience. And I guess all I'm saying as a person who loves good ideas. Is that a paper cut, a solution to a paper cut?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
But to keep coming up with that idea, with those kinds of ideas, I guess is the day one thinking effort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
There's a lot of books written about you. There's a book, Invent and Wander, where Walter Isaacson does an intro, and it's mostly collective writings of yours. I've read that. I also recommend people check out the Founders podcast. That covers you a lot, and it does different analysis of different business advice you've given over the years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I bring all that up because I saw that there, I mentioned that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans. And I forget how it was phrased, but that when you were thinking about the Kindle, that you're thinking about how technology changes us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And there's some aspect, you know, even just inside business where you don't just make the customer happy, but you also have to think about, like, where is this going to take humanity if you zoom out a bit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
This show is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking app that I've been using forever, but it's not just for note-taking. It's also for team collaboration, and it's been doing that forever. But recently, it also has the... extra added AI capabilities with the Notion AI tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, I think you've spoken about the value in your own life of focus. of singular focus on a thing for prolonged periods of time. And that's certainly what books do. And that's certainly what that piece of technology does. But I bring all that up to ask you about another piece of technology, AI, that has the potential to have various trajectories to have an impact on human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
First of all, really interesting to say that it's discoveries that it's true that we don't know the limits of what's possible with the current language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And it could be a few tricks and hacks here and there that open doors to whole entire new possibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, and there's some more nuanced aspects about human beings that's interesting to be able to accomplish, like being truly original and novel. Large language models being able to come up with some truly new ideas. That's one. And the other one is truth. It seems that large language models are very good at sounding...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
like they're saying a true thing, but they don't require or often have a grounding in sort of a mathematical truth. Basically, he's a very good bullshitter. So if there's not enough sort of data in the training data about a particular topic, he's just going to concoct accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
How do you get language models to infer what is true or not, to sort of introspect?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
But just the image of the two of you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in for a little break at 1 p.m. to watch soap opera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And then the other stuff, because you're still a bit involved in the Amazon side with the AI things, the other open question is what kind of products are created from this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Yeah, the security, the privacy, all those things are fascinating. Because so much value can be gained by training on private data, but you want to keep this secure. It's a fascinating technical problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Do you think there will be a day when humans and robots, maybe Alexa, have a romantic relationship like in the movie Herb?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
I was just asking when for a friend, but it's all right. Moving on. Next question. What's a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos? You're one of the most productive humans in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also. In all those westerns. When he's not doing what he's doing, he's just watching soap operas. All right. I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five, watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. So let me ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
What's your source of motivation in those moments?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
What's your exercise routine, just to linger on that? How much you curl? I mean, what are we talking about here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Work. What's work look like? What are the productive hours look like for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was in many ways epic. It was... a rapid sequence of dramatic events. First satellite to space, first human to space, first spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon, then some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides, actually, and then the first human walking on the moon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
How do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Can you actually describe the crisp document? Like this is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon of the way you approach meetings. Is this the six page memo? Maybe first describe the process of running a meeting with memos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
What are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time, those few years, just 12 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
What's that feel like when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there and everybody's reading your thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Is there art, science to the writing of the six-page memo? Or just writing in general to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So that part is crisp and then the rest is messy. Crisp document.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
So we're about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask about the 10,000-year clock. That's what I'm known for is the humor. Okay. Can you explain what the 10,000-year clock is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out here on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And the increasing rate of progress makes that even- Even less likely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
On that grand scale, a human life feels tiny. Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Well, Jeff, thank you for creating Amazon, one of the most incredible companies in history. And thank you for trying your best to make humans a multi-planetary species, expanding out into our solar system, maybe beyond, to meet the aliens out there. And thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Bezos. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Bezos himself. Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Obviously, everybody's trying to figure out how to integrate the progress with LLMs, the continued progress, the accelerating progress, the boundless progress with LLMs into our productive lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
And, of course, you named the projects, the rockets that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved. I don't understand why you didn't say New Gagarin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
It's very strange. Just asking for a friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin, for Glenn, for everybody involved, like how big of a risk they were all taking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
It's kind of interesting that Alan Shepard is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people who don't know, Alan Shepard is the first astronaut. The first American in space. American in suborbital flight. Correct. And then the first orbital flight is John Glenn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker, her third time on this podcast. She is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and in discovering alien life on other worlds. She has written an amazing new upcoming book titled Life As No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence. This book is coming out on August 6th, so please go pre-order it now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, the fact that the size of the book is growing is one of the chapters in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I think you have to, you can't, you can't have an ever growing book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I mean, you just, I mean, I don't even, because then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But I think that question will still stand a thousand years from now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, and maybe we'll develop the kinds of languages. that we'll be able to ask much better questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, but it's not, I still think those are chapters in a book. Like, I don't get a sense from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I think the number of words required to describe how the universe works has an end, yes. Meaning, like, I don't care if it's infinite or not. Right. As long as the explanation is simple and it exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And I think there is a finite explanation for each aspect of it. The consciousness, the life. I mean, very probably there's like some The black hole thing is like, what's going on there? Where's that going? Like, where did they, what? And then, you know, why the Big Bang? Like, what? Right. It's probably there's just a huge number of universes and it's like universes inside universes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I just think it's, every time we assume this is all there is, it turns out there's much more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And we mostly talked about the past and the richness of the past, but the future, I mean, with many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
depending on the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
At the moment you asked the question, there was one. At the moment I'm answering it, there's now near infinity, apparently. I mean, the future is... The future is bigger than the past, yes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Okay. Well, there you go. In the past, according to you, it's already gigantic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You write about the paradox of defining life. Why does it seem to be so easy and so complicated at the same time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Wait, so to you at the bottom, it's deterministic. I thought you said the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So where's the source of the free will for the macro object?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
All the selection bundled in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I don't know what I think about that. That's complicated to imagine. Just that little bit of randomness is enough. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But what about like the instantaneous decisions you're making? Like to, I don't know, to put your hand on the table.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But on a longer time horizon, there's some kind of steering going on. Who's doing the steering?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And you being this macro object that encompasses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
There you are, saying words to things once again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Why does anything exist at all? You've kind of taken that as a starting point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Isn't it just hard questions stack on top of each other? It is. Wouldn't it be the same kind of question of what is life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You think actually answering what is life will help us understand existence? Maybe it's turtles all the way down. Understanding the nature of turtles will help us kind of march down, even if we don't have the experimental methodology of reaching before the Big Bang.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What's outside the universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It all originates here. It all exists here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
There could be things you can't possibly understand outside of all of this that we call the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Just because it's more constructive doesn't mean it's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And in the end, that's a good way to get to the truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Even if you realize you were wrong in the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What to you is most beautiful about this kind of exploration of the physics of life that you've been doing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And then you have to try to convert the feelings into visuals and the visuals into words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And you get to see the humans transformed by a new idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, I would say understanding life at a deep level is probably one of the most exciting problems, one of the most exciting questions. So I'm glad you're trying to answer just that and doing it in style.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Thank you so much for this amazing conversation. Thank you for being you, Sarah. This was awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. In the long history of humankind, and animalkind too, those who learn to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, you actually bring up the zombie ant fungus. I enjoyed looking at this thing as an example of one of the challenges. You mentioned viruses, but this is a parasite. Look at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Infects ants. Actually, one of the interesting things about the jungle, everything is ephemeral. Everything eats everything really quickly. So if an organism dies, that organism disappears. Yeah. It's a machine that doesn't have, I wanted to say it doesn't have a memory or a history, which is interesting given your work on history in defining a living being. The jungle forgets very quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It wants to erase the fact that you existed very quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So on, so forth. It's just a really nice integration of LLMs. This is the fundamental question with LLMs. How do you leverage the obvious power that they possess to be useful? to whatever tasks that we do. Like what is the actual product here? And so Notion leverages them extremely well where the product is team collaboration on notes, wikis, and project management. So really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So does this thing, this is a parasite that needs the ant. So is this a living thing or is this not a living thing? So this is... Yeah, so... It just pierces the ant. I mean, it... Right. And I've seen a lot of this, by the way. Organisms working together in the jungle, like ants protecting a delicious piece of fruit. So they need the fruit, but if you touch that fruit, they're going to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Like, the forces emerge. They're fighting you. They're defending that food to the death. It's just nature seems to find mutual benefits, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So what do you do with that in terms of when you try to define life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Why is that? That seems like a pretty good definition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So self-sustaining, uh, chemical system, Darwinian evolution. What is self-sustaining? What's, what, what's so frustrating? I mean, which aspect is frustrating to you, but it's also those are very interesting words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, but is it possible to have a life that is not a chemical system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
There's a guy I know named Lee Cronin who's been on a podcast a couple of times who just got really pissed off listening to this. He probably just got really pissed off hearing that. For people who somehow don't know he's a chemist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Would he? I don't think he would. I don't think he would. He would broaden the definition of chemistry until it would include everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Love to support people that do a great job of building a great software product. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Motific.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But wait, but you said that universe, that's the first thing it creates is chemistry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What kind of things can you create that's outside the combinatorial space of chemistry? That's what I'm trying to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yes. Language is alive. Oh boy, I'm gonna have to explore that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and, in general, generative AI that are customized with RAG, retrieval augmented generation, on organizational data sources. Obviously, these kinds of data sources are often super sensitive, and that's where Motific comes in. They help companies with security and compliance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What do you think a living organism in math is? Is it one axiomatic system or is it individual theorems?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So it seems like you're sneaking up on a different kind of definition of life, open-ended, large combinatorial space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Room for creativity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Restricted to chemical. Yeah. Chemical. Okay, what about the third thing, which I think will be the hardest because you probably like it the most, is evolution or selection?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Darwinian, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So then an individual organism can evolve under assembly theory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What if you were to formulate everything like a population is a living organism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Because we're focused on that little ephemeral thing that we call human life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What exactly are we missing by focusing on such a short span of time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
A little background here, since I had to do the deep dive myself a while back. Motific is created by Cisco, specifically Cisco's OutShift group. And OutShift is doing cutting-edge R&D stuff in Cisco. So, Cisco has... very, very, very long track record and reputation of working with giant businesses and helping them out and not messing stuff up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Do you think it's possible if you're a theoretical physicist that it's easy to fall off the cliff and go descend into madness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So we were talking about what we're missing when we look at a small stretch of time and a small stretch of space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So you have a tweet for everything. You tweeted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You have a lot of poetic, profound tweets. Sometimes they're puzzles that take a long time to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, it's a very interesting kind of compression algorithm, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, I wonder if AI can decompress it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, your tweets would be a good Turing test for super intelligence. Anyway, you tweeted that things only look emergent because we can't see time. So if we could see time, what would the world look like? You're saying you'll be able to see everything that an object has been every step of the way that led to this current moment. And all the interactions that require to make that evolution happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
When you're dealing with sensitive data and when you're dealing with businesses that make a lot of money and already have products that bring in a lot of money and a lot of people rely on, you don't want to mess stuff up. I think specifically this task of taking organizational data
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You would see this gigantic tail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Oh, so the more complexity, the bigger. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And when you say technosphere, what do you mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So all the things, all the technological things we've created?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, it's again, some kind of compressed feeling that you can query to get a sense of the bigger visualization that you have in mind. It's just a really nice compression. But I think the idea of this object that in it contains all the information about the history of an entity that you see now, just trying to visualize that is pretty cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I mean, obviously the mind breaks down quickly as you step seconds and minutes back in time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I guess it's just a gigantic thing. Yeah. We're supposed to be thinking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
that's private to the company, that has to remain very secure, it's very sensitive data, using the power of LLMs and search via the RAG framework on that data is super, super powerful. I think companies that do this well and quickly, which is what Modific helps with, will win because the productivity gains, nobody knows, but I don't think there's a ceiling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But in that sense, aren't we fundamentally all connected?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, so maybe there's certain aspects of those lineages that can be lifelike. They can be characteristics. They can be measured like with the assembly theory that have more or less life. But they're all just fingertips of a much bigger object.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's funny we're talking about this now and I'm slowly starting to realize one of the things I saw when I took ayahuasca afterwards actually so the actual ceremony is four or five hours but afterwards you're still riding whatever the thing that you're riding and I I got a chance to afterwards hang out with some friends and just shoot the shit in the forest. And I get to see their faces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And what was happening with their faces and their hair is I would get this interesting effect. First of all, everything was beautiful and I just had so much love for everybody. I could see their past selves like behind them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It was this effect where I guess it's a blurring effect of where like if I move like this, the faces that were just there are still there and it would just float like this, these behind them, which will create this incredible effect. But it's also another way to think about that is I'm visualizing a little bit of that object, of the thing they wore just a few seconds ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's a cool little effect. And now it's like giving it a bit more profundity to the effect that was just beautiful aesthetically, but it's also beautiful from a physics perspective because that is a past self. I get a little glimpse at the past selves that they were, but then you take that, to its natural conclusion, not just a few seconds ago, but just to the beginning of the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And you could probably get to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Get down that lineage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
All of us. Yeah. And then we connect, obviously. Yeah. Not too long ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You mentioned just the technosphere, and you also wrote that the most alive thing on this planet is our technosphere. Why is the technology we create a kind of life form? Why are you seeing it as life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
All of them. So you have to simultaneously think about life at every single scale. The planetary and the bacteria level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So it pays us off to play with LLMs, but do so in a secure way. Visit Motific AI to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C dot A-I. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I have a site set up, blackstreamer.com. It has a few shirts on it. It took a few minutes to set up. Super easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, Schrodinger wrote that living matter, while not alluding to laws of physics as established up to date, is likely to involve other laws of physics hitherto unknown. So to him... I love that quote. There was a sense that at the bottom of this are new laws of physics that could explain this thing that we call life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, because you have to explain how interesting or how complex it emerges from the soup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
From randomness. Physics currently can't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
When you say theory of everything, you mean like everything, everything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Oh, you mean removing the observer from the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, but it's very difficult to integrate the observer into a theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It will blow your mind. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for notes, Motific for LLM deployment, Shopify for e-commerce, BetterHelp for mental health, and AG1 for delicious, delicious multivitamin drink. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But doesn't it become recursive in that way? And that's, you're saying it's possible to make a theory that's okay with that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
They integrate third-party apps. I did that for the on-demand printing, so I don't have to think about any of that. All you do is upload the design. The shirts are sold and shipped. It's kind of an interesting experiment for me. to understand how people look at you when you have a t-shirt with nothing on it and a t-shirt with something on it, especially if that something is recognizable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So we should focus on the construction methodology as the fundamental thing. Do you think there's a bottom to the smallest possible thing that makes up the universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And it'll take way too long. It'll take longer to find that than it will to understand the mechanism that created life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So if I have a Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd shirt or Johnny Cash or Metallica shirt, there's going to be certain people that look at me with recognition and respect and almost like they want to start a conversation with me. When I have a t-shirt, like a black t-shirt with nothing on it, That kind of look doesn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The existential trauma and the terror we feel that that technology might somehow destroy us, us meaning living, intelligent living organisms, yet we don't understand what that even means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I think also in part humans kind of love being afraid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But you're also working on... a topic where it's fundamentally ego destroying because you're talking about like life. It's humbling to think that we're not the individual human is not special.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And you're like very viscerally exploring that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That's what I was saying about you're always walking along the cliff. If you fall off, you're falling into madness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The fascinating thing about physicists and madness is that you don't know if you've fallen off the cliff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That's the cool thing about madness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Going crazy or waking up. I don't know which one it is. Yeah. So what do you think is the origin of life on Earth? And how can we talk about it in a productive way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
If I went out more, I would take a notebook and actually make this a little bit more rigorous. But anyway, there's definitely a noticeable social effect that happens when you have a t-shirt with a cool thing on it. So I'm really happy with all the creators that are using Shopify to sell cool t-shirts. I wish there was a better discovery process, though. I'm always in search of buying...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Got to convert it to language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I have to convert it from language to a visual, to a feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I think it's working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I really like the self-reinforcing objects. I mean, just so I understand, one way to create a lot of the same kind of object is make them self-reinforcing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So that's a way to sort of emerge out of a random soup, out of the randomness of soup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Cool t-shirts. I just, on Instagram, I think, there was an advertisement for a set of t-shirts for classic movies. And that was really badass, but I scrolled past it. And I regret it. See, that's like a piece of advertisement that actually works. but I wish there was a way to not take me from the scrolling experience or maybe a way to bookmark it really naturally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Right, so the one object A reinforces the existence of object B, but object A can die. Yeah. So you have to close that loop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's just all very unlikely statistically, but that's sufficiently... So you're saying there's a chance. There is a chance. But once you solve that, once you close the loop, you can create a lot of those objects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
How did Lee find this molybdenum?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
This is not an algorithmic discovery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The molybdenum might be able to be the thing that makes a ring work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
There's already a natural sort of skepticism about advertisement, but here it worked. So like when advertisement is done well, it works. I just wish I saved it. But anyway, hopefully they use Shopify to sell shirts. If they don't, they should. And if you're thinking of selling shirts, use Shopify also. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lux. That's all lowercase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
There's some set of structures that result in this autocatalytic feedback.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And what is it? Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percent?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And one of them is the thing that probably started life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Or many, many starts. Yes. And it keeps starting, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So is chirality in itself an interesting feature or just an accident?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Go to shopify.com slash lux to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. Individuals, couples, the whole thing. What are my favorite couples therapies in film? I feel like Breaking Bad had good ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So would that be the greatest invention ever made on Earth in its evolutionary history? So I really like that formulation of it. Nick Lane has a book called Life Ascending, where he lists the 10 great inventions of evolution. The origin of life being first. Then DNA, the hereditary material that encodes the genetic instructions for all living organisms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Then photosynthesis, the process that allows organisms to convert sunlight into chemical energy, producing oxygen as a byproduct. The complex cell, eukaryotic cells, which contain a nucleus and organelles that rose from simple bacterial cells. Sex, sexual reproduction. Movement, so just the ability to move under which you have the predation, the predators and ability of living orders to find food.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, but a movement includes a lot of interesting stuff in there, like predator-prey dynamic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Which, not to romanticize a nature as metal, that seems like an important one. I don't know. It's such a computationally powerful thing to have a predator and prey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, that, but maybe I just like deadlines, but it creates an urgency. You're going to get eaten.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah. Like survival, it's not just the static environment you're battling against. You're like, the dangers against which you're trying to survive are also evolving. This is just a much faster way to explore the space of possibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yes. Sight, the ability to see. So the increasing complexifying of sensory organisms. Consciousness and death. The concept of programmed cell death. These are all... inventions along the line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Which are the more interesting inventions to you? The origin of life? Because you kind of are not glorifying the origin of life itself. There's a process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
When you look back at the history of Earth, what are you impressed happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That's a series, but I'm trying to think of a movie. That's a cool setting because I've been thinking about interviewing directors and actors more and more. And the setting of a couple's therapy is really interesting. It's a really interesting dynamic between a man, a woman, and a therapist. And them trying to sort of make explicit the implicit drama that's been boiling over in their relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
There's a lot of alien like organisms. That's another thing I saw in the jungle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Just things that are like, oh, okay. They make one of those, huh? Do you have any examples? There's a frog that's as thin as a sheet of paper. And I was like, what? And it gives birth through like pores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Oh, no, no. I saw the, without the- Have you seen videos of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, gross is just the other side of beautiful. It's like, oh wow, that's possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, it's all a matter of perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I mean, the world is a violent place. Yeah. So again, it's just another side of the coin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, because you start from just one cell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah. The computation, the intelligence of that process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Might be like the most important thing to understand. And we just kind of don't really think about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
We think about the final product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Maybe the key to understanding the organism is understanding that process, not the final product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, of course you would say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It always has been. Always was, like the meme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Obviously, the therapist one-on-one relationship is really interesting on film. Good Will Hunting with Robin Williams. Man, what a great, great performance. I miss that guy so much. What a truly special human being. Anyway, back in the real world, therapy, even when there's no camera, is really important for shining the light on the Jungian shadow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, that's, before we talk about the future, let's talk about the past, the assembly theory. Can you explain assembly theory to me? I listened to Lee talk about it for many hours and I understood nothing. No, I'm just kidding. I just wanted to take another, you've been already talking about it, but just what, from a big picture view,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
is the assembly theory way of thinking about our world, about our universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So literally 15, like the assembly index is 15?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So that's when you start getting the self-reinforcing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
350 million plus messages, 34,000 licensed therapists, 4.4 million people who have gotten help through BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it every day, multiple times a day, sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So the copy number is the number of exact copies. That's what you mean by high abundance. And assembly index or the complexity of the object is how many steps it took to create it. Recursive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What if you took the long way home?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's a good song though. What do you mean the long way doesn't exist? If I do a random walk from A to B, I'll eventually, if I start at A, I'll eventually end up at B. And that random walk would be much shorter, longer than the short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, the almost shortest path is the most likely and like by a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Okay, so if you see a high copy number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But there is a phase transition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
There is a place where you would say, oh, that's life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Poetically, chemically, literally. What snaps? Okay, that's very beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, you tweeted, the most significant struggle for existence in the evolutionary process is not among the objects that do exist, but between the ones that do and those that never have the chance to. This is where selection does most of its causal work. The objects that never get a chance to exist. The struggle between the ones that never get a chance to exist and the ones that, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What's that line exactly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What are the objects that never get a chance to exist? What does that mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, but there's the real struggle there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Usually after a run, like I'm going to go for a run in a little bit. It's already that Texas heat. It's warming up. It's warming up. It's creeping up in the 100 degree weather. And I love it. I don't care. The hotter it is, the tougher the run, the more of a mental test it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Just because of the accident of history, how it ended up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So how many instantiations of life is out there, do you think? So how often does this happen? What we see happen here on Earth, how often is this process repeated throughout our galaxy, throughout the universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Also, if you want to get in touch with me or to work with our amazing team, go to lexfreeman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please do check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And what I do is I speed up, take that feeling of discomfort, and allow myself to sit in it and visualize that feeling of discomfort fading. So from a third person perspective, it's just a feeling. And a feeling can be controlled. A feeling can be ignored. A feeling can be morphed from the negative to the positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Meaning is the emergent property. Okay, got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, but from where does the... But you don't have a lot of room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So you have to wiggle within the constraints.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The great orators are just good at wiggling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I'm not a very good wiggler, no. This is the problem. This is part of the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Boy, can I relate. It's like... What is truth? Is truth the thing you meant when you wrote the words or is truth the thing that people understood when they read the words?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I think that compression mechanism into language is a really interesting one and that's why Twitter is a nice exercise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You get to write a thing and you think a certain thing when you write it and then you get to see all these other people interpret it in all kinds of different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I wish there was a higher diversity of interpretation mechanisms applied to tweets, meaning like all kinds of different people would come to it. Like some people that see the good in everything and some people that are ultra cynical, a bunch of haters and a bunch of lovers and a bunch of- Maybe they could do better jobs with presenting material to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I also would love to filter just like been the response to tweets by like the people that hate on everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The people that are like super positive about everything. And they'll just kind of, I guess, normalize their response. Because then it'd be cool to see if the people that are usually positive about everything are hating on you or like totally don't understand or completely misunderstood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The more clicking you do. the more damaging it is to the soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So for me, it's not just a meditative practice of letting go of all feelings and focusing on the breath. For me, it is also being able to control that discomfort and letting go of that discomfort, the feeling and the notion of discomfort, even when on the surface there should be a lot of physical discomfort because physical discomfort is first and foremost a construction of the mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What's your whole rainbow of checks. And then you realize there's more categories than we can possibly express in colors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That's our best feature. I don't know how we got to the wiggling required, given the constraints of language, because I think we started about me asking about alien life, which is how many different times did the face transition happen elsewhere? Do you think there's other alien civilizations out there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Why not? I don't know. It could be... Just because this one is gigantic doesn't mean there's other gigantic ones. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What do you mean by virtualized in that context?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's not real. It's not real. As long as you believe it's not real, it's not real. And that's what I do. But when I get back home extremely exhausted and uncomfortable, having overcome that challenge, I put an AG1 in the freezer for like 30 minutes. It has this great consistency. And then after a shower, I just take the drink and celebrate having overcome something difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Just because I have a four billion year old history, why does that mean I can't hang out with aliens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I just don't know if a deep temporal structure necessarily means that you're closed off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That would be just completely imperceptible to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Black holes in every way. So like untouchable to us or unlikely to be detectable by us. Right. With whatever sensory mechanisms we have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sarah Walker. You open the book, Life as No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence, with a distinction between the materialists and the vitalists. So what's the difference?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Right. Understanding the origin of life here on Earth is a way to understand ourselves. Understanding ourselves is a prerequisite for being able to detect other intelligent beings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
civilizations I for one take it for what it's worth on ayahuasca one of the things I did is zoom out like aggressively like a spaceship and it would always go quickly to the galaxy and from the galaxy to this representation of the universe and at least for me from that perspective it seemed like it was full of alien life not just alien life but intelligent life I like that. And conscious life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So I don't know how to convert it into words. It's more like a feeling, like you were saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
A feeling converted to a visual to convert to words. So I had a visual with it, but really it was a feeling that it was just full of this vibe. vibrant energy that I was feeling when I'm looking at the people in my life and full of gratitude, but that same exact thing is everywhere in the universe. So.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So part of you is drawn to the trauma of being alone in a physics-based sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, one of the things you kind of described that you already spoke to, you call it the great perceptual filter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So there's the famous great filter, which is basically the idea that there's some really powerful moment in every intelligent civilization where they destroy themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That explains why we have not seen aliens. And you're saying that there's something like that in the temporal history of the creation of complex objects that at a certain point, they become an island, an island too far to reach based on the perceptions. I hope not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But that's basically meaning there's something fundamental about the universe where if the more complex you become, the harder it will be to perceive other complex creatures. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Like things that we- And they're close to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But also in the history of the development of complex objects, they're pretty close.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So how many flavors or kinds of life do you think are possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That was kind of cool. I mean, it was awesome to me. It was exactly that. It was like lights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The way you maybe see a city, but a city from up above, you see a city with the flickering lights, but there's a coldness to the city. You know that humans are capable of good and evil, and you could see there's a complex feeling to the city. I had no such complex feeling about seeing the lights of all the galaxies, whatever, the billions of galaxies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The mechanism of the flashing, unfortunately, is like the diversity of that is very high and we might not be able to see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Can you maybe define the two?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You tweeted, if one wants to understand how truly combinatorially and compositionally complex our universe is, they only need step into the world of fashion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's bonkers how big the constructable space of human aesthetics is. Can you explain? Can we explore the space of human aesthetics? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
How big is your closet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Do you get rid of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Or do you have trouble getting rid of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So your closet is one of those temporal time crystals that you get to visualize the entire history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Right. So why is that a good visualization of the combinatorial universe? and compositionally complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That's true. I mean, it is one of the loudest, clearest, most consistent ways we signal to each other is the clothing we wear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But there's also commitment. You have to wear that outfit all day. I know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It's a big commitment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I wear, that's why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
All I have is suits and a black shirt and jeans. Those are the two outfits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Did you deliberately think about the outfit you're wearing today? Yep. Was there backup options? Were you going back and forth between some?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But I really liked the left. Were they drastically different? Yes. Okay. It's okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, I think your current off is like a lot of shades of yellow. There's like a theme. Yeah. It's nice. It's really, I'm grateful that you did that. Thanks. It's like, it's all an art form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I guess you can pick a color and just make that the constraint and just go with it. I understand the beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Wow. What do you think beauty is? We seem to, so underlying this idea of playing with aesthetics is we find certain things beautiful. What is it that humans find beautiful? And why do we need to find things beautiful?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That said, there's some kinds of fashions, like a dude in a black suit, the black tie seems to, um, be less dynamic. It seems to persist through time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, I think so. I'd like to see you wearing yellow, Lex. I wouldn't even know what to do with myself. I would freak out. I wouldn't know how to act in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
We're just looking at some pictures here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
That's a good outfit to show up to a party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So, I mean, great fashion certainly has that kind of depth to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It seems like beauty doesn't have much function, right? But it seems to also have a lot of influence on the way we collaborate with each other. It has tons of function.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I guess sexual selection incorporates beauty somehow. But why? Because beauty is a sign of health or something? I don't even...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Is there a gray area between the two? Maybe all there is is matter, but there's so much we don't know that it might as well be magic, whatever that magic that the vitalists see. Meaning there's just so much mystery that it's really unfair to say that it's boring and understood and as simple as, quote unquote, physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But you're saying there's some function to beauty in that way, in the way you're describing, in the dynamic it creates in the social interaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So it has the same richness as does language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Let's jump from beauty to language. There's so many ways to explore the topic of language. You called it, you said that language is- parts of language or language in itself and the mechanism of language is a kind of living life form. You've tweeted a lot about this in all kinds of poetic ways. Let's talk about the computation aspect of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You tweeted, the world is not a computation, but computation is our best current language for understanding the world. It is important we recognize this so we can start to see the structure of our future languages that will allow us to see deeper than computation allows us. So what's the use of language in helping us understand and make sense of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, but also the life of the mind is in some ways richer than the physical reality. Sure. What's going on in your mind. it might be a projection actually here, but there's also all kinds of other stuff going on there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Can you just speak to the feeling you have when you think about words? What's the magic of words to you? It almost sometimes feels like you're playing with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But you're almost like, I think one of the things you enjoy, maybe I'm projecting, is deviating, like using words in ways that not everyone uses them. Like slightly sort of deviating from the norm a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But not so far that it doesn't make sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So you're always tethered to reality, to the norm, but are playing with it, basically fucking with people's minds a little bit. And in so doing, creating a different perspective on the thing that's been previously explored in a different way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah. Use words as one way to make people think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Is there words or terms you remember that disturbed people the most? Maybe the positive sense of disturbed is assembly theory, I suppose, is one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What was that? Let me look it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You're right. Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with immutable laws of the universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life's origin, evolution, and the development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Of human culture. Well, he was... I think your love for words runs deeper than Lee's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What do you think about computation as a language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, for me, one of the people who kind of revealed... the expressive power of computation, aside from Alan Turing, is Stephen Wolfram, through all the explorations of cellular automata type of objects that he did in A New Kind of Science and afterwards. So what do you get from that? the kind of computational worlds that are revealed through even something as simple as cellular automata.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It seems like that's a really nice way to explore languages that are far outside our human languages and do so rigorously and understand how those kinds of complex systems can interact with each other, can emerge, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I've been using it recently for note-taking on academic papers, specifically machine learning papers, and there's a lot of machine learning papers. And it's straight up just a great note-taking tool. But beyond that, it's a great collaboration tool for the note-taking process and the whole project management life cycle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But it gives you an intuition. If you look at a 1D or 2D cellular automata, it gives you, it allows you to build an intuition of how you can have complexity emerge from very simple beginnings, very simple initial conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So do you think the vitalists have a point that they're more eager and able to notice the magic of life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Can we just linger on that Rulliad? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah. So this is part of Wolfram's physics project. It's what he calls the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible. So what's your problem with the Rulliad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I need to go to this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
This is great. Does reality have a bottom?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
First of all, isn't it okay to have a turtle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And the question you're trying to answer is... What life is. What life is, which another simpler way of phrasing that is how did life originate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Doesn't he want to understand how does the basic quantum mechanics and general relativity emerge? Yeah, but that's- And how does time- Right, so I think- But then that doesn't really answer an important question for us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
NTU languages can't be fundamental.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So one of the possible titles you were thinking about originally for the book is the hard problem of life. Sort of reminiscent of the hard problem of consciousness. So you're saying that assembly theory is supposed to be answering the question about what is life. So let's go to the other hard problems. You also say that's the easiest of the hard problems is the hard problem of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So what do you think is the nature of intelligence and consciousness. We think something like assembly theory can help us understand that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It does seem like they're all flavors of the same thing, but it's interesting to wonder like at which stage does something that we would recognize as life in a sort of canonical silly human way and something that we would recognize as intelligence, at which stage does that emerge? Like at which assembly index does that emerge and at which assembly index is it consciousness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Something that we would canonically recognize as consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, it's the same as the flavors of ice cream and the flavors of fashion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It'd be nice if there was a formal way of expressing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Quantifying flavors. Yeah. It seems like... I would order it life, consciousness, intelligence, probably, as like the order in which things emerge, and they're all just the same. We're using the word life differently here. I mean, life sort of, when I'm talking about what is a living versus non-living thing at a bar with a person, I'm already like... four or five drinks in, that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Like we're not being too philosophical. Like here's the thing that moves and here's the thing that doesn't move. But maybe consciousness precedes that. It's a weird dance there. Is life precede consciousness or consciousness precede life? And I think that understanding of what life is in the way you're doing will help us disentangle that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
the difference between life and consciousness, which comes first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, then if consciousness is merely temporal separateness, then that comes before life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
But it feels like that's possible. Yeah. to do before you get anything like bacteria?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Is there shortcuts we can take to artificially engineering living organisms, artificial life, artificial consciousness, artificial intelligence? So maybe just looking pragmatically at the LLMs we have now, do you think those can exhibit Qualities of life, qualities of consciousness, qualities of intelligence in the way we think of intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I think crystallization kind of implies a limit on its capabilities, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So we may still expand our understanding what is incorporated in the category of matter that will eventually incorporate such magical things that the vitalists have noticed like life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I guess the question is, when you crystallize it, when you compress it, when you archive it, you're archiving some slice of the collective intelligence of the human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And the question is, like, how powerful is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Yeah. I mean, how much smarter is the collective intelligence of humans versus a single human? And that's... That's the question of AGI versus human level intelligence. Superhuman level intelligence versus human level intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Like how much smarter can this thing, when done well, when we solve a lot of the complexity, computation complexities, maybe there's some data complexities and how to really archive this thing, crystallize this thing really well. How powerful is this thing going to be?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So the benevolence story is, there's a benevolence system that's able to transform our economy, our way of life. by just 10Xing the GDP of countries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It could also be how rapid the rate... The rapid rate is scary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, creating existential trauma is one of the things that makes life fun, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
It gives us really exciting big problems to solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Do you think we will see these AI systems become conscious or convince us that they're conscious? And then maybe we'll have relationships with them, romantic relationships?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So do you think it's possible to get out of the gray area and really have a formal test for consciousness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And for life as you were- For sure. As we've been talking about for some of the- Yeah. Consciousness is a tricky one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, I think that's actually where the... the hard problem of consciousness, a different hard problem of consciousness, is that I fear that humans will resist. That's the last thing they will resist, is calling something else conscious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
I don't think those cultures have nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
The cultures that are primed for destroying the other, constructing a very effective propaganda machines of what the other is. the group to hate are the cultures that I worry would... Yeah, I know. Would be very resistant to label something, to sort of acknowledge the consciousness laden in a thing that was created by us humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
No, that we would torture and kill conscious beings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So maybe part of the story of Earth will involve a predator-prey dynamic between humans That's struggle for existence. And human creations. Yeah. And all of that is part of the technical sphere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So in some fundamental way, you always want to be thinking about the planet as one organism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What happens when it becomes multi-planetary?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Same causal chain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You think this technosphere that we've created, this increasingly complex technosphere will spread to other planets?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Do you think we'll become a type two Kardashev civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
What's the alternative to that exactly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So it combines note-taking, wikis, project management, and then there's an AI assistant that can summarize everything and anything, and you can ask it questions across all of those things. So it's not just for a single document across all the documents. And obviously people are collaborating on those documents so you can ask questions. What did this person do? What is the status of this project?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
See, but past a certain level of complexity, unfortunately, maybe you can correct me, but we're built, all complex life on earth is built on a foundation of that predator-prey dynamic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
And so, like, I don't know if we can escape that. No, we can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So there for sure is a bunch of those kinds of things throughout the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
This is like early on in the conversation where you mentioned that we really don't understand much... like there's mystery all around us. If you had to like bet money on it, like what percent? So like say a million years from now, the story of science, and human understanding, understanding that started on earth is written. Like what chapter are we on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Are we like, is this like 1%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 90%? How much do we understand? Like the big stuff, not like the details of like big important questions and ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So when talking about motion, the laws of physics appear to be the same everywhere in the universe. Do you think the same is true for other kinds of matter that we might eventually include life in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
You can't do that. I can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
Well, I think it's about 1.7%. 1.7%, where does that come from? And it's a finite, I don't know, I just made it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
So I wanted to say 1%, but I thought it would be funnier. Yeah, I see. To add a point, you know, so humor, inject a little humor in there. So the seven is for the humor, one is for how much mystery I think there is out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens
In terms of like really big, important questions. Yeah. It's like the list, say there's going to be like 200 chapters, like the stuff that's going to remain true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We got Element for electrolytes, Shopify for selling stuff online, AG1 for a super awesome daily multivitamin,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And it's not only that they lasted, but they were beautiful, or at least in our current conception of beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Yeah, they pulled that off pretty well. If we could talk about the long line of emperors that made up the Roman Empire, how were they selected?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And some people place the sort of the collapse of the Roman Empire there at the end of Marcus Aurelius' rule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
At the very least, this period is when the Roman Empire is at its height on all different kinds of perspectives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Let me ask the ridiculously oversimplified question, but who do you think is the greatest Roman emperor? Or maybe your top three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I wonder how many people in history there are that are like the drivers, the COO of the whole operation that we don't really think about or don't talk about enough. Yeah. To where sort of they're really the mastermind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Whether he's good or bad, he was extremely influential on defining just the entirety of human history that followed. Probably one of the most influential humans ever. Nevertheless, if you ask in public who the most famous Roman emperor is, would that be Marcus Aurelius potentially? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
don't know um but he's a question right he's real famous because he was a stoic philosopher and he wrote this book the meditations i mean it's interesting stoicism had uh as a philosophical ideology had had a role to play in during that time i mean there's the the tragic fact that we did did uh did nero murder seneca Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
But one is like the role, especially when it's hereditary, the role of the mentor, like who advises who with Aristotle and – Alexander the Great, like that dance of who influences and guides the person as they become and gain power is really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Yeah. Fame, power, and even money. Yeah. if you get way too much of it at a young age, I think we're egotistical, narcissistic, all that kind of stuff as babies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And then when we clash with the world and we figure out the morality of the world, how to interact with others, that other people suffer in all kinds of ways, understand like the cruelty, the beauty of the world, the fact that other people suffer in different ways, the fact that other people are also human and have different perspectives, all of that,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
In order to develop that, you shouldn't be blocked off from the world, which power and money and fame can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
What does it take to be a successful emperor, would you say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Even in the realm of ideas, they can't get on TV and on the radio.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors, even the ones we can name, is not as intense as it was at the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's a really important idea to remember. Same with the U.S. president, frankly. uh in terms of the grand art of history like what is the actual impact uh but i would say the big one is probably starting wars Yeah. Major global wars or ending them in both directions. And then taxation too, as you said. What was the taxation? What was the economic system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Do you think, not to speak sort of philosophically, but do you think it was limiting to the way the society develops to be deeply constrained by the limiting in a good way or a bad way, you think? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
But nevertheless, they had many of the elements of the modern economic system with taxation, the record-keeping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And obviously the laws around everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Can we talk about the crisis of the third century and the aforementioned Western and Eastern Roman empires, how it split?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Oh, that's interesting. I mean, in that system, there's probably a huge amount of lawyers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So the most common date that people say, maybe you can correct me on this, that the Roman Empire fell is 476 AD. They're referring to the fall, quote unquote, of the Western Roman Empire. So why? Did the Roman Empire fall?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
There's so many interesting things there. So, of course, you described really eloquently the decline that started after Marcus Aurelius. And there's a lot of competing ideas there and the tensions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And of course, the barbarians make everything complicated because they seem to be willing to fight on every side, and they're like fluid. Yes. Which they integrate fast, and it just makes the whole thing –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
From a military perspective, perhaps, what are some things that stand out to you on the pressure from the barbarians, the conflicts, whether it's the Hans or the Visigoths?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And then barbarians were very much making that boundary even more difficult to kind of define it even if you wanted to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So is it correct that the Visigoths fought on the side of the Romans against Attila the Hun?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So if you're actually living in that century, the 5th century, it's kind of like the Western Roman Empire dies with a whimper. It's not like a bunch of strikes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
But often we kind of agree that's something that you've talked about quite a bit is the military perspective is the one that defines the the rise and fall of empires. You have a really great lecture series called The Decisive Battles of World History, which is another fascinating perspective to look at world history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
It's also an opportunity to demonstrate a new technology. And if that technology is effective, it changes history because that was either tactical or literally the technology used. So how important is technology and that technological advantage in war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
It's also interesting how much geography that you mentioned a few times affects wars. The result of wars, the rise and fall of empires, all of it. As silly as it is, it's not the people or the technology. It's like sometimes literally that there's rivers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Yeah, I mean, you so beautifully put that the perspective can change dramatically how you see history. I mean, you could probably tell – World history through what? Through olives, cinnamon, and gold?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Maxima, whatever. Anyway, as I sip Element in speaking these very words, I recommend that you get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify. or how everybody on X seems to call Spotify. It's kind of hilarious to watch people confuse Shopify and Spotify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's another way to draw the boundary between olive oil, wine, wheat, and meat, dairy, and beer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And many of the barbarians were nomadic tribes. Some of them were, yeah, definitely. Fascinating. I mean, this is just yet another fascinating way to- Dietary determinism, geographic determinism. Yeah, these things are big. On the topic of war, it may be a ridiculous span of time and scale, but-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
How do you think the world wars of the 20th century compare to the wars that we've been talking about of the Roman Empire, of Greece, and so on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So this is an interesting point and an interesting perspective to remember about the way the Romans thought, especially in the context of how power is transferred, whether it's hereditary or not, which changes throughout Roman history. So it's interesting. It's interesting to remember that, the value of the ancestors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
In some sense, World War II was quite contained.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
How do you think the atomic bomb nuclear weapons change war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And it's a terrifying experiment to find out if nuclear weapons, when a lot of nations have nuclear weapons, is that going to enforce civility and peace? Yeah. Or is it actually going to be destabilizing and ultimately civilization destroying?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
For leaders not to be learning lessons of history, you co-wrote a book precisely on this topic. The Long Shadow of Antiquity. What have the Greeks and Romans done for us? What are some key elements of antiquity that are reflected in the modern world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Does that mean that class mobility was difficult? So if your ancestors were farmers, there was a major constraint on remaining a farmer, essentially. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
What are some of the problems when we try to gain lessons from history and look back? We've spoken about them a bit, the bias of the historian. Maybe what are the problems in studying history and how do we avoid them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So we have to have intellectual humility when we look back into the past. But hopefully, if you have that without coming up with really strong narratives, if you look at a large variety of evidence, you can start to construct a picture that somewhat rhymes with the truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
To ask a ridiculous question, when our time, you and I, we together, become ancient history, when historians, let's say, two, three, four thousand years from now look back at our time, and like you, try to look at the details and reconstruct from that the big picture of what was going on, What do you think they'll say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So if we may, let us zoom out. It would help me, maybe it'll help the audience to look at the different periods that we've been talking about. So you mentioned the Republic, you mentioned maybe when it took a form of empire, and maybe there's the Age of Kings. What are the different periods of this Roman, let's call it, what, the big- Roman history. Roman history. Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I agree. And for that, I thank you for being one of the most wonderful examples of that, of you yourself being a curious being and emanating that throughout and inspiring a lot of other people to be curious by being out there in the world and teaching. So thank you for that. And thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gregory Aldrete. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Julius Caesar. I came, I saw, I conquered. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And a lot of people just call that whole period Roman Empire loosely, right? So maybe can you speak to the different periods?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And in some fundamental way, it still persists today given how much of its ideas define our modern life, especially in the Western world. Yeah. Can you speak to the relationship between ancient Greece and Roman Empire, both in the chronological sense and in the influence sense?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And they give props to the CEOs of both companies for creating and running the other company. The mistake often becomes viral and making fun of the mistake often becomes viral and it's fun to watch. Anyway, both companies are amazing. Really, really revolutionized a specific thing that humans do on the internet. But this particular ad read is about Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I mean, that's a really powerful... as a powerful aspect of a civilization to be able to, we can call it stealing, which is a negative connotation, but you can also see it as integration, basically. Yes, steal the best stuff from the peoples you conquer or the peoples that you interact with. Not every empire does that. There's a lot of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
and empires that when they conquer, they annihilate versus integrate. And so it's an interesting thing to be able to culturally, like the form that the competitiveness takes is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas and culture versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
which is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I always seem to want to mention capitalism when I'm talking about Shopify, and this is an opportunity to plug a conversation coming up on communism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I'm doing a very, very long conversation on communism, the history specifically of communism, of Marxism, of its various implementations throughout the 20th century. Oftentimes when people talk about the Roman Empire or communism, a bit of their modern day political ideology seeps in. I really try not to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
It's not the military strategy. It's not some technological asymmetry of power. It's literally just manpower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Yeah, taking the sons is a brilliant idea and bringing them to Rome. Because it's a kind of generational integration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I try to understand these movements, these civilizations, these empires, these societies in their own context objectively. without a kind of over-emotional judgment, but nevertheless, with empathy, where you are actually feeling, truly feeling the experience of the people at that time. That's the challenge with history podcasts, with history conversations, with history books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's just brilliant. Brilliant process of integration. Is that what explains the rapid expansion during the late republic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Can you speak to the Punic Wars? Why was – there's so many levels on which we can talk about this, but why was Rome victorious?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Probably a lot more to say about that, but I should say you need to sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Speaking of peak performance, we talked about Gladiators and the battle to the death of two human beings and sometimes with animals. I felt that we shouldn't spend too much time on that, because actually in the case of Gregory, his specialization and interests are not on the games, but on actual military conquest and military battles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Could you maybe speak to any interesting details of the military genius of Hannibal or Scipio? At that time, what are some interesting aspects of this double envelopment idea?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Better help for mental health and ExpressVPN for protecting yourself on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, submit questions for an AMA, all that kind of stuff, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
tactics and technology, and the asymmetry of power, all of these kinds of things throughout the Roman monarchy, Roman Republic, and Roman Empire, and ancient Greece as well. So I feel like in terms of gladiators, there could be a person that I would specifically talk to primarily about gladiator fights because it's such an epic slice of human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Can you speak to maybe the difference between heavy infantry and cavalry, the usefulness of it in the ancient world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
A fascinating, brutal testing ground of tactics. and technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's, I think, the key thing. One of the fascinating things about your work, you study Roman life, life in the ancient world, but also the details, like we mentioned. You are an expert in armor. So what kind of, maybe you could speak to weapons and, most importantly, armor that were used by the Romans or by people in the ancient world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Anyway, AG1 will give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It is interesting to think about how ancient Romans saw death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
given how many of their children at birth and shortly after died, given how many brutal battles they saw all around them to the death, where it's not some drone overhead dropping a bomb, but face-to-face, hand-to-hand, sword-to-sword combat, and lots of blood and slaughter, direct slaughter,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So there's a million questions to ask here, but in general, how well in terms of ballistics does it work? Can it withstand arrows or direct strikes from like swords and axes and stuff like that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And it's amazing that you used all the materials they had at the time and none of the modern techniques. But I should probably say, maybe you can speak to that, they were probably much better at doing that than you are, right? Because like, you know, again, generational, it's a skill. And it's a skill that probably is practiced across decades, across centuries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
But actually – this is a materials thing, but I think glue, uh, aside from helping glue things together, it can also be a thing that serves as armor. So if you glue things correctly, the way it permeates the material that it's gluing can strengthen the material, the integrity of the material. That's an art and a science probably that they understood deeply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
They obviously, in many cases, glorified combat and glorified death, as did the Vikings, as did many societies throughout history. And I'll probably do a podcast on the Vikings as well. Many podcasts. The barbarians, the Vikings. Truly, truly fascinating peoples. Anyway, it feels like that relationship with death makes for harder humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I love it. Sort of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
answering really important questions about, in this case, armor, about military equipment and technology that archaeologists can't answer by using all the sources you can to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time, and actually doing ballistic testing. It's really cool. It's really cool that it's... You see that there's a hole in the literature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Nobody studied it. And going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncover this, I don't know, I think it's an amazing mystery about the ancient world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Well, like you said, I think the details help you understand deeply the big picture of history. I mean, Alexander the Great wore this thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
To honor the aforementioned undergraduate student who loves Alexander the Great, we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for a little bit. Why was he successful, do you think, as a conqueror? Probably one of the greatest conquerors in the history of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And finding that balance between hard and soft, in terms of the human mind, It's an interesting one. We live in a softer society now, which is why there is a company like BetterHelp that can help you with the softness of your mind, where the cracks reveal the Jungian shadow. I would say it's the easiest way to try talk therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Why do you think the Roman Empire lasted while the Greek Empire, as the Alexander expanded, did not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So you should at least try at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. Obviously, as you see some of the stuff going on in Brazil and some other nations with government restrictions,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
One of the most influential developments from the Roman Republic was their legal system. And as you mentioned, it's one of the things that still lasted to this day in many of its elements. So it started with the 12 tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this legal system and the 12 tables?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
censorship of platforms, of people, VPN is a really powerful way to get around that. VPN is both a technology and a symbol of freedom in oppressive regimes. And it's pretty dark, scary, disgusting, really, that the use of VPN is punished in those countries. But it is also hopeful and inspiring to see masses of people using VPN in those countries nevertheless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Well, do they resolve the complexity of that with a right answer? We don't have the answer. We don't have the answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Did kind of corrupt, unfair things seep into the law?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
law, the sort of untangling really complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws that help you tangle and untangle the situations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So we're talking a bit about the details of the laws. Is there some big picture laws that are new innovations or like profound things like all Roman citizens are equal before the law kind of – founding fathers type of in the United States and the Western world is big legal ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Anyway, go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Freedom Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Gregory Aldrete. What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So you mentioned slaves, slavery. That's something that is common throughout human history. What do we know about their relationship with slavery?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. There's nice links in the description. Just click them. First up, this episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar, delicious electrolyte mix that I mix into cold water and it's delicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Oh, so there's probably a process like an economic transaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And that could be one of the things that would be surprising to us coming from the modern day to the ancient world is just the number of slaves. So you mentioned one of the things we don't think about is that most of the people are farmers. Yeah. And then the other thing is just the number of slaves. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And just a reminder to people in America thinking about this, we have a certain view and picture to what slavery is. A reminder that all of human history, most of human history has had slaves of all colors, of all religions. That's within us to select a group of people, call them the other, use them as objects, abuse them,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And I would say, as a person who believes the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, all of us, every person listening to this is capable of being of a slave if they're put in the position of capable of hating the other, of forming the other, of othering other people. And we should be very careful not to look ourselves in the mirror and remind ourselves that we're human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
It's easy to kind of think, okay, well, there's these slaves and slave owners through history, and I would have never been one of those. But just like as we would be farmers, We could be both, if we went back into history, we could be both slaves and slave owners, and all of those are humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Yeah. So this fascinating transition between the Republic to the Empire, can we talk about that? How does the Republic fall?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So the resentment boils and boils and boils, and there's this person that puts themselves in focus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
They exploit it. But Caesar puts himself above the state. And that, I guess, the Roman people also hate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So a dictator in populist clothing. Yes. When convenient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And when he gets assassinated – Another civil war explodes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think the same elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism and the cynicism, the underlying forces that result in war, all of that permeates human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So now looking back at all that history, it just feels like history turns on so many interesting accidents because Octavian, later renamed Augustus, turned out to be actually depends how you define good, but a good king slash emperor, different than Caesar in terms of humility, at least being able to play, not to piss off everybody, but like it could have been so many other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That could have been the fall of Rome. So it's a fascinating little turn of history. Maybe Caesar saw something in this individual. It's not an accident that he was in the will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Isn't this a fascinating story? Like, what do you think is the psychology of Augustus of Octavian?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
It's just fascinating that he figured out a way through public image, through branding, to gain power, maintain power, and still pacify the boiling...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's another just fascinating accident of history. Because as we talked about with Alexander the Great, who knows if he lived for another 40 years, if over time the people that hate the new thing die off and then their sons come into power. that could be a very different story. Maybe we'll be talking about the Greek Empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
You mentioned Cleopatra. If we go back to that, what role did she play? Another fascinating human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I mean, she's probably one of the most influential women in human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Is it the bias of society, or is it the bias of the historian? The bias of the society the historian is writing about, or the bias of the actual historian?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details, from the little pieces, because that is the thing that makes up life. The big picture is nothing without the details.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So Augustus marks the start of the Roman Empire. You've written that Octavian Augustus would become Rome's first emperor, and the political system that he created would endure for the next half a millennium. This system would become the template for countless later empires up through the present day, and he would become the model emperor against whom all subsequent ones would be measured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
The culture and history of the Mediterranean basin, the Western world, and even global history itself were all profoundly shaped and influenced by the actions and legacy of Octavian. He was the founder of the Roman Empire, and we still live today in the world that he created. So what, on the political side of things, and maybe beyond, what is the political system that he created?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Can you speak to the kind of political system he created? So how did he consolidate power, as you spoke to a bit already? And what role did the Senate now play? How were the laws? Who was the executive? How was power allocated and so on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I'm no longer even paying attention to what they're telling me I should be advertising. I should mention that sponsors have zero influence on what I say in podcasts. And in this ad read, in fact, the only thing they ask me very politely is that I give out a call to action at the end, like a link. All right. I technically can talk about whatever the hell I want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
but is there a degree to which he also lived it? That kind of humility, establishing that humility is a standard of the way government operates. So it's not like a literal direct balance of power, but it's sort of a cultural balance of power where the emperor is not supposed to be a bully and a dictator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Maybe I'm buying his propaganda and maybe I'm a sucker for humility, but I suspect that the Romans bought it. And I also suspect he himself believed it. I mean, there is such thing as good kings, right? There's kings that understand the downside, the dark side of absolute power and can wield that power properly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And by the way, as long as we're talking about brutality, I think you mentioned in a few places that there's a lot of brutality going on at the time. Caesar just killing very large numbers of people brutally. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Do we know – what did Hitler or Stalin think about the Roman Empire?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history. And it is the important stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
You mentioned Cicero. He's a fascinating figure. On the topic of Roman oratory, who is Cicero?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's a good reminder, though, if we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like, we have to represent it fully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And you've written, which is fascinating. It's fascinating when the echoes of people from a distant past – are seen today, the same stuff is seen today. Not just like some of the beautiful legal stuff that we've been talking about, but the tricks, let's say the shitty stuff we see in politics. So many of the rhetorical tricks you wrote
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
such as mudslinging, exaggeration, guilt by association, ad hominem attacks, name-calling, fear-mongering, us versus them, rhyme, and so on and so forth. So I'm guessing it worked, given that we still have those today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So the Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful, influential, and impactful empire in human history. What are some reasons for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
They used – this is one of those on the theme of extremely interesting details of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
That's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And it's actually interesting that we don't use gestures as much in modern day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Speaking of modern day and gestures, what do you think of Donald Trump, who has these very unique kind of gestures? I think there's – I don't know to a degree if it's true, but he kind of uses these handshakes when he pulls people in, that kind of stuff. What do you make of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I encourage people to watch the speeches of Hitler, the oratory skill there, to be able to channel the resentment and the frustration of a people. And control it and direct it to any direction he wants through speaking alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I remember Noam Chomsky once was asked, why do you speak in such a monotone way? And he said, well, I want the truth out. The contents of my statements to speak that I don't want you to get deluded by me because I'm such a charismatic and eloquent speaker. The more monotone I speak, the more you will listen to the content of the words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Yeah, natural to your, like authentic to who you are, which is when people try to copy the gestures of another person, it usually doesn't go well. Right. You have to kind of, yeah, you have to interpret, integrate into your own personality and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And in that way, the people from that time come to life in your mind, in your work, which is fascinating. It's this pragmatic thing. I want to know, okay, how does this work? Could we talk about the role of religion in the Roman Empire? What's the story there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So Jesus was born during the rule of Emperor Augustus. Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I mean, yeah, there's certain moments in history where just a lot of interesting, powerful people come together and make history. And he was crucified under Emperor Tiberius' rule. Why were the ideas of Jesus seen as a threat by the emperor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
At this time, it was a fringe movement that really did –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Do you think that, or is there other factors that explain why Christianity was able to spread?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
They're the good kind of populist and populist messages spread. Let me ask you about gladiators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
What role did they play in Roman society?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
I think Dan Carlin has a really great episode called Painful Tainment. And I think in that episode, he suggests the hypothetical that if we did something like a gladiator games today to the death –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
that like the whole world would tune in yeah if as especially if it was anonymous right we have a kind of like thin veil of civility underneath which we probably would still be something deep within us would be attracted to that violence yeah i mean yeah there always is it human nature um you know why do people slow down when there's a car wreck and try and see what's happening
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So who usually were the gladiators? Was it slaves?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And they also had interest in animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So humans fought animals, exotic animals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
And what about the different venues? I mean, there's the legendary Colosseum. What is the importance of this place?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
which is great, and I'm drinking an element now, and I'm not paying attention about any of the new flavors. There might be new flavors. I've just fallen in love with watermelon salt, and I am that kind of guy. I just find a thing that I like, and I stick to it. In theoretical computer science, let's say that's called greedy search. You find a thing you like, and you stick it that local minima.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
But it's interesting to think about that place, to think about their relationship with violence across centuries for spectacle, watching people fight. And like you said, only like 10% of the time it led to the death. But I read that still a lot of... A lot of people died. A lot of gladiators were killed. There's numbers that are just crazy. I read 400,000 dead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
So this includes gladiators, slaves, convicts, prisoners, and so on. That's a lot of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
The following is a conversation with Yann LeCun, his third time on this podcast. He is the chief AI scientist at Meta, professor at NYU, Turing Award winner, and one of the seminal figures in the history of artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Can a large language model construct a world model that does know how to drive and does know how to fill a dishwasher, but just doesn't know how to deal with visual data at this time? So it can operate in a space of concepts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And now onto the full ad reads, never any ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting. I don't know why I'm talking like this, but I am. There's a staccato nature to it. Speaking of staccato, I've been playing a bit of piano. Anyway, if you skip these ads, please still check out the sponsors. We love them. I love them. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Most of the jobs of the future might be in the metaverse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But the point is you can't possibly predict, but you're right. I mean, you made a lot of strong points and yeah, I believe that people are fundamentally good. And so if AI, especially open source AI, can make them smarter, it just empowers the goodness in humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Well, I think both you and I believe in humanity, and I think I speak for a lot of people in saying thank you for pushing the open source movement, pushing to making both research and AI open source, making it available to people, and also the models themselves, making it open source. So thank you for that. And thank you for speaking your mind in such colorful and beautiful ways on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I hope you never stop. You're one of the most fun people I know and get to be a fan of. So Jan, thank you for speaking to me once again. And thank you for being you. Thank you, Rex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jan LeCun. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So you don't think there's something special to you about intuitive physics, about sort of common sense reasoning about the physical space, about physical reality. That to you is a giant leap that LLMs are just not able to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
This episode is brought to you by a on-theme, in-context, see what I did there, sponsor. Since this is Yann LeCun, artificial intelligence, machine learning, one of the seminal figures in the field. So of course you're going to have a sponsor that's related to artificial intelligence. Hidden Layer, they provide a platform that keeps your machine learning models secure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Chomsky just rolled his eyes, but I understand. So you're saying that there's a bigger abstraction that goes before language and maps onto language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Is that obvious that we don't? Like you're saying your thinking is same in French as it is in English.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
pretty much, or is this like, how flexible are you? Like if there's a probability distribution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
No, but is there an abstract representation of puns? Like is your humor an abstract, like when you tweet and your tweets are sometimes a little bit spicy, is there an abstract representation in your brain of a tweet before it maps onto English?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Or you start with laughter and then figure out how to make that happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But you're making it sound just one token after the other, one token at a time generation is bound to be simplistic. But if the world model is sufficiently sophisticated, that one token at a time the most likely thing it generates as a sequence of tokens is going to be a deeply profound thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So it really goes to the, I think the fundamental question is can you build a really, complete world model, not complete, but one that has a deep understanding of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
He and Meta AI have been big proponents of open sourcing AI development and have been walking the walk by open sourcing many of their biggest models, including Llama 2 and eventually Llama 3. Also, Jan has been an outspoken critic of those people in the AI community who warn about the looming danger and existential threat of AGI. He believes the AGI will be created one day, but it will be good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
The ways to attack machine learning models, large language models, all the stuff we talk about with Jan, there's a lot of really fascinating work, not just large language models, but the same for video, video prediction, tokenization, where the tokens are in the space of concept versus the space of literally letters, symbols.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
One frame at a time. Do the same thing as sort of the auto-aggressive LLMs do, but for video. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
japa v japa all of that stuff that they're open sourcing all the stuff they're publishing on just really incredible but that said all of those models have security holes in ways that we can't even anticipate or imagine at this time and so you want good people to be trying to find those security holes trying to be one step ahead of uh the people that trying to attack so if you're especially a company that's relying on these models you need to uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So where is the failure exactly? Is it that it's very difficult to form a good representation of an image, like a good embedding of all the important information in the image? Is it in terms of the consistency of image to image to image to image that forms the video? Like what are the, if we do a highlight reel of all the ways you failed, what's that look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
When you train in a self-supervised way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
What are these architectures that you're so excited about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
have a person who's in charge of saying, yeah, this model that you got from this place has been tested, has been secured. Whether that place is Hugging Face or any other kind of stuff, or any other kind of repository or model zoo kind of place. I think the more and more we rely on large language models or just AI systems in general, the more the security threats that are always going to be there
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So what is the fundamental difference between joint embedding architectures and LLMs? So can JAPA take us to AGI? Whether we should say that you don't like the term AGI, and we'll probably argue. I think every single time I've talked to you, we've argued about the G in AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I get it. I get it. I get it. Well, we'll probably continue to argue about it. It's great. You like Ami, because you like French, and Ami is, I guess, friend in French.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And AMI stands for Advanced Machine Intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But either way, can JAPA take us to that, towards that Advanced Machine Intelligence? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So joint embedding, it's still generative, but it's generative in this abstract representation space. Yeah. And you're saying language, we were lazy with language because we already got the abstract representation for free. And now we have to zoom out, actually think about generally intelligent systems. We have to deal with a full mess of physical reality, of reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
become dangerous and impactful. So protect your models. Visit hiddenlayer.com slash Lex to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by Element. A thing I drink throughout the day. I'm drinking now. When I'm on a podcast, you'll sometimes see me with a mug and clear liquid in there that looks like water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And you do have to do this step of jumping from Uh... the full, rich, detailed reality to a abstract representation of that reality based on which you can then reason and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Is it possible to join the self-supervised training on visual data and self-supervised training on language data? There is a huge amount of knowledge, even though you talk down about those 10 to the 13 tokens. Those 10 to the 13 tokens represent the entirety, a large fraction of what us humans have figured out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Both the shit talk on Reddit and the contents of all the books and the articles and the full spectrum of human intellectual creation. So is it possible to join those two together?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So this kind of joint embedding, predictive architecture, for you, that's going to be able to learn something like common sense, something like what a cat uses to predict how to mess with its owner most optimally by knocking over a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
In fact, it is not simply water. It is water mixed with element. Watermelon salt. Cold. What I do is I take one of them Powerade 28 fluid ounces bottles. fill it up with water, one packet of watermelon salt, shake it up, put it in the fridge, that's it. I reuse the bottles and drink from a mug. Or sometimes from the bottle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So what kind of data are we talking about here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But basic horrible things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And that tube was statically positioned throughout the frames?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
That's a good test that a good representation is formed. That means there's something to this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So it's able to capture some physics-based constraints about the reality represented in the video? Yeah. About the appearance and the disappearance of objects? Yeah. That's really new. Okay. But can this actually... get us to this kind of world model that understands enough about the world to be able to drive a car?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Either way, delicious, good for you, especially if you're doing fasting, especially if you're doing low-carb kinds of diets, which I do. You can get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, as I take a drink of Element. It is a platform designed for anyone, even me, to sell stuff anywhere on a great looking store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So yes, for model predictive control, but you also often talk about hierarchical planning. Can hierarchical planning emerge from this somehow?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Does something like that already emerge? So like, can you use an LLM? state-of-the-art LLM to get you from New York to Paris by doing exactly the kind of detailed set of questions that you just did, which is, can you give me a list of 10 steps I need to do to get from New York to Paris? And then for each of those steps, can you give me a list of 10 steps how I make that step happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I use a basic one, like a really minimalist one. You can check it out if you go to legstreaming.com slash store. There's a few shirts on there. If that's your thing, it was so easy to set up. I imagine there's like a million features they have that can make it look better and all kinds of extra stuff you can do with the store, but I use the basic thing, and the basic thing is pretty damn good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And for each of those steps, can you give me a list of 10 steps to make each one of those until you're moving your individual muscles? Maybe not. Whatever you can actually act upon using your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
They would be able to answer all of those questions, but some of them may be hallucinated, meaning non-factual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But where, like, just for the example of New York to Paris, is it going to start getting into trouble? Like, at which layer of abstraction do you think you'll start? Because, like, I can imagine almost every single part of that, an alum would be able to answer somewhat accurately. especially when you're talking about New York and Paris, major cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So everything we've been talking about on the joint embedding space, is it possible that that's what we need for the interaction with physical reality on the robotics front? And then just the LLMs are the thing that sits on top of it for the bigger reasoning about the fact that I need to book a plane ticket and I need to know how to go to the websites and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I would love to sort of linger on your skepticism around auto-aggressive LLMs. So one way I would like to test that skepticism is everything you say makes a lot of sense. But if I apply everything you said today and in general to like, I don't know, 10 years ago, maybe a little bit less, no, let's say three years ago, I wouldn't be able to predict the success of LLMs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I like basic. I like minimalism. And they integrate with a lot of third-party apps, including what I use, which is on-demand printing. So, like you buy the shirt on Shopify, but it gets printed and shipped by another company that I always keep forgetting, but I think it's called Printful. Or Printify. I think it's Printful. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. I think there's several integrations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So does it make sense to you that autoregressive LLMs are able to be so damn good? Yes. Yes. Can you explain your intuition? Because if I were to take your wisdom and intuition at face value, I would say there's no way autoregressive LLMs, one token at a time, would be able to do the kind of things they're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You mean like GPT-2? There's a certain place where you start to realize scaling might actually keep giving us an emergent benefit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Well, I just, because you said it, you're so charismatic, and you said so many words, but self-supervised learning, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But again, the same intuition you're applying to saying that autoregressive LLMs cannot have a deep understanding of the world, if we just apply that same intuition, does it make sense to you that they're able to form enough of a representation of the world to be damn convincing? Essentially, passing the original Turing test with flying colors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
What do you think Alan Turing would say? Without understanding anything, just hanging out with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
What would Hans Moravec say about the large language models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You don't think you would be really impressed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You can check it out yourself. For me, it works. I'm using the most popular one. Printful, I think it's called. Anyway. I look forward to your letters correcting me on my pronunciation. Shopify is great. I'm a big fan of the good side of the machinery of capitalism. Selling stuff on the internet, connecting people to the thing that they want, or rather the thing that would make their life better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Speech-to-speech. Speech-to-speech, even including just fascinating languages that don't have written forms. That's right. They're spoken only.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Okay, but you really think it's possible to get far with a joint embedding representation? So there's common sense reasoning, and then there's high-level reasoning. I feel like those are two...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
The kind of reasoning that LLMs are able to do, okay, let me not use the word reasoning, but the kind of stuff that LLMs are able to do seems fundamentally different than the common sense reasoning we use to navigate the world. It seems like we're going to need both. You're not? Would you be able to get, with the joint embedding, would you jump a type of approach looking at video?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
both in advertisement and e-commerce, shopping in general, I'm a big believer when that's done well, your life legitimately in the long term becomes better. And so whatever system can connect one human to the thing that makes their life better is great. And I believe that Shopify is sort of a platform that enables that kind of system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Would you be able to learn, let's see, well, how to get from New York to Paris? Or... how to understand the state of politics in the world today. Right? These are things where various humans generate a lot of language and opinions on in the space of language, but don't visually represent that in any clearly compressible way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And LLMs don't have that. But see, it's present. You and I have a common experience of the world in terms of the physics of how gravity works and stuff like this. And that... common knowledge of the world, I feel like is there in the language. We don't explicitly express it, but if you have a huge amount of text, you're going to get this stuff that's between the lines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
In order to form a consistent world of morality, you're going to have to understand how gravity works, even if you don't have an explicit explanation of gravity. So even though in the case of gravity, there is explicit explanations of gravity in Wikipedia. But the stuff that we think of as common sense reasoning, I feel like to generate language correctly, you're going to have to figure that out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Now you could say, as you have, there's not enough text. Sorry, okay. You don't think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But that's not there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Is that obvious to you? Yeah, totally. So like all the conversations we had, okay, there's the dark web, meaning whatever, the private conversations like DMs and stuff like this, which is much, much larger probably than what's available, what LLMs are trained on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
but the humor, all of it. No, you do. You don't need to, but it comes through. If I accidentally knock this over, you'll probably make fun of me. In the content of the you making fun of me will be explanation of the fact that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
cups fall and then, you know, gravity works in this way and then you'll have some very vague information about what kind of things explode when they hit the ground and then maybe you'll make a joke about entropy or something like this and we'll never be able to reconstruct this again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Like, okay, you'll make a little joke like this and there'll be a trillion of other jokes and from the jokes you can piece together the fact that gravity works and mugs can break and all this kind of stuff. You don't need to see it'll be very inefficient. It's easier for like to knock the thing over. But I feel like it would be there if you have enough of that data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It is delicious. It is nutritious. And I ran out of words that rhyme. with those two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And the sensory data is a much richer source for getting that kind of understanding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I think in one of your slides you have this nice plot that is one of the ways you show that LLMs are limited. I wonder if you could talk about hallucinations from your perspectives. The why hallucinations happen from large language models and why and to what degree is that a fundamental flaw of large language models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So there's a strong, like you said, assumption there that if there's a non-zero probability of making a mistake, which there appears to be, then there's going to be a kind of drift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Is that obvious to you, by the way? Well, mathematically speaking, maybe, but isn't there a kind of gravitational pull towards the truth? Because on average, hopefully, the truth is well represented in the training set.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Actually, let me use a large language model to figure out what rhymes with delicious. Words that rhyme with delicious include ambitious, auspicious, capricious, fictitious, suspicious. So there you have it. Anyway, I drink it twice a day. Also put it in the fridge. And sometimes in the freezer, like it gets a little bit frozen. Just like a little bit, just a little bit frozen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
When you say prompt, do you mean that exact prompt or do you mean a prompt that's like in many parts, very different than like, is it that easy to ask a question or to say a thing that hasn't been said before on the internet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So that's a very clear demonstration of it, but of course... that goes outside of what it's designed to do. If you actually stitch together reasonably grammatical sentences, is it that easy to break it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yes, so I guess what I'm saying is like, which fraction of prompts that humans are likely to generate are going to break the system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
It will not escape human control, nor will it dominate and kill all humans. At this moment of rapid AI development, this happens to be somewhat a controversial position. And so it's been fun seeing Jan get into a lot of intense and fascinating discussions online, as we do in this very conversation. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
There's a prediction element. There's an iterative element where you're like... adjusting your understanding of a thing by going over and over and over. There's a hierarchical element and so on. Does this mean it's a fundamental flaw of LLMs? Or does it mean that... It's more part to that question. Now you're just behaving like an LLM. Immediately answer. No, that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
that it's just a low-level world model on top of which we can then build some of these kinds of mechanisms, like you said, persistent long-term memory or reasoning, so on. But we need that world model that comes from language. Maybe it is not so difficult to build this kind of reasoning system on top of a well-constructed world model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You got that like slushy consistency. I'll do that too sometimes. And it's freaking delicious. It's delicious no matter what. It's delicious warm. It's delicious cold. It's delicious slightly frozen. All of it is just incredible. And of course it covers like the basic multivitamin stuff. foundation of what I think of as a good diet. So it's just a great multivitamin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But that energy-based model would need the model constructed by the LLM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
That's the way I think about it. So all the crazy stuff I do, the physical challenges, the mental challenges, all of that, at least I got AG1. They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jan LeCun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Can you explain exactly what the optimization problem there is? Like what's the objective function? Just link on it. You kind of briefly described it, but over what space are you optimizing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Sure, but suppose such a system could be created, but what's the process, this kind of search-like process?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Right, so you're operating in the subtract representation. I mean, this goes back to the joint embedding. Right. That it's better to work in the space of, I don't know, to romanticize the notion, like space of concepts versus the space of concrete concepts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You're talking about the reasoning, like ability to think deeply or to reason deeply. How do you know what, is an answer that's better or worse based on deep reasoning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You've had some strong statements, technical statements about the future of artificial intelligence recently, throughout your career actually, but recently as well. You've said that auto-aggressive LLMs are not the way we're going to make progress towards superhuman intelligence. These are the large language models like GPT-4, like LAMA-2 and 3 soon and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
we've been talking very generally, but what is a good X and a good Y? What is a good representation of X and Y? Because we've been talking about language, and if you just take language directly, that presumably is not good. So there has to be some kind of abstract representation of ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But you're saying that's not going to take it. I mean, that's going to do what LLMs are doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So this kind of system could be trained in a very similar way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So how do you do this for visual data?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And hopefully that whole process gives you a really nice compressed representation of reality, of visual reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And that classification system works really nicely. Okay. Well, so to summarize, you recommend in a spicy way that only Yann LeCun can, you recommend that we abandon generative models in favor of joint embedding architectures. Yes. Abandon auto-aggressive generation. Yes. Abandon, this feels like court testimony. Abandon probabilistic models in favor of energy-based models, as we talked about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
How do they work and why are they not going to take us all the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Abandon contrastive methods in favor of regularized methods. And let me ask you about this. You've been for a while a critic of reinforcement learning. Yes. So the last recommendation is that we abandon RL in favor of model predictive control, as you were talking about, and only use RL when planning doesn't yield the predicted outcome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And we use RL in that case to adjust the world model or the critic. So you mentioned RLHF, reinforcement learning with human feedback. Why do you still hate reinforcement learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And then steered based on that. If the representation is good, then the adjustments should be minimal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
What do you think RLHF works so well? This reinforcement learning with human feedback. Why did it have such a transformational effect on large language models before?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So it's the HF.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Now, a lot of people have been very critical of the recently released Google's Gemini 1.5 for essentially, in my words, I could say super woke. Woke in the negative connotation of that word. There's some almost hilariously absurd things that it does, like it modifies history, like generating images of a black George Washington or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Perhaps more seriously, something that you commented on Twitter, which is refusing to comment on or generate images or even descriptions of Tiananmen Square or the tank man. One of the most sort of legendary protest images in history. Of course, these images are highly censored by the Chinese government, and therefore, everybody started asking questions of what is the process of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Designing these LLMs, what is the role of censorship in these, all that kind of stuff. So you commented on Twitter saying that open source is the answer. Yeah. Essentially. So can you explain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So that's a beautiful vision. So meaning like a company like Matter or Google or so on should take only minimal fine-tuning steps after building the foundation pre-trained model. As few steps as possible. Basically. Can Meta afford to do that? No. So I don't know if you know this, but companies are supposed to make money somehow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And open source is like giving away, I don't know, Mark made a video, Mark Zuckerberg, very sexy video, talking about 350,000 NVIDIA H100s. The math of that is just for the GPUs, that's 100 billion, plus the infrastructure for training everything. So I'm no business guy, but how do you make money on that? So the vision you paint is a really powerful one, but how is it possible to make money?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Again, I'm no business guy. But if you release the open source model, then other people can do the same kind of task and compete on it. Basically provide fine-tuned models for businesses. Sure. Because the bet that Meta is making, by the way, I'm a huge fan of all this, but it's the bet that Meta is making is like, we'll do a better job of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
The fundamental criticism that Gemini is getting is that, as you pointed out on the West Coast, just to clarify, we're currently in the East Coast, where I would suppose Meta AI headquarters would be. So there are strong words about the West Coast. But I guess the issue that happens is... I think it's fair to say that most tech people have a political affiliation with the left wing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
They lean left. And so the problem that people are criticizing Gemini with is that there's, in that de-biasing process that you mentioned, that their ideological lean becomes obvious. is this something that could be escaped? You're saying open source is the only way. Have you witnessed this kind of ideological lean that makes engineering difficult?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah, so we should mention image generation of... of black Nazi soldiers, which is not factually accurate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And diversity in the full meaning of that word, diversity in every possible way. Yeah. Marc Andreessen just tweeted today, Let me do a TLDR. The conclusion is only startups and open source can avoid the issue that he's highlighting with big tech. He's asking, can big tech actually field generative AI products?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
One, ever escalating demands from internal activists, employee mobs, crazed executives, broken boards, pressure groups, extremist regulators, government agencies, the press, in quotes, experts and everything corrupting the output. Two, constant risk of generating a bad answer or drawing a bad picture or rendering a bad video. who knows what is going to say or do at any moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Three, legal exposure, product liability, slander, election law, many other things, and so on. Anything that makes Congress mad. Four, continuous attempts to tighten grip on acceptable output, degrade the model, like how good it actually is. in terms of usable and pleasant to use and effective and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
essentially the problem there is then trying to minimize the number of people who are going to be unhappy. And you're saying like the only, that almost impossible to do right. And that's the better ways to do open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And so open source is just better. Diversity is better, right? And open source enables diversity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
That's going to be a fascinating world where, if it's true that the open source world, if meta leads the way and creates this kind of open source foundation model world, there's going to be, like governments will have a fine new model. Yeah. And then potentially, people that vote left and right will have their own model and preference to be able to choose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And it will potentially divide us even more, but that's on us humans. We get to figure out. Basically, the technology enables humans to human. more effectively. And all the difficult ethical questions that humans raise will just leave it up to us to figure it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And yeah, the fine-tuning will be more about the gray areas of what is hate speech, what is dangerous, and all that kind of stuff. I mean, you've- Or different value systems. Or value systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I mean, like, but still, even with the objectives of how to build a bioweapon, for example, I think something you've commented on, or at least there's a paper where a collection of researchers is trying to understand the social impacts of these LLMs. And I guess one threshold is nice, is like, does the LLM make it any easier, than a search would, like a Google search would.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And it requires even the common sense expertise that we've been talking about, which is how to take... language-based instructions and materialize them in the physical world requires a lot of knowledge that's not in the instructions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah, and that's Hans Moravec comes to light once again. Just to linger on Lama, Mark announced that Lama 3 is coming out eventually. I don't think there's a release date, but what are you most excited about? First of all, Lama 2 that's already out there, and maybe the future, Lama 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, just the future of the open source under Meta.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Hidden Layer for securing your AI models, Element for electrolytes, Shopify for shopping for stuff online, and AG1 for delicious health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, maybe to work with our amazing team, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So it would be good to maybe push against some of the intuition behind what you're saying. So it is true there's several orders of magnitude more data coming into the human mind much faster, and the human mind is able to learn very quickly from that, filter the data very quickly. Somebody might argue your comparison between sensory data versus language, that language is already very compressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah, yeah. You're also excited by, is it beautiful to you just the amount of GPUs involved? Sort of the whole training process on this much compute? It's just zooming out, just looking at Earth and humans together have built these computing devices and are able to train this one brain with an open source. Like giving birth to this open source brain trained on this gigantic compute system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
there's just the details of how to train on that, how to build the infrastructure and the hardware, the cooling, all of this kind of stuff. Or are you just still, most of your excitement is in the theory aspect of it? Meaning like the software aspect?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Hardware has improved a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Interesting. So you think in order to build AMI, we need, we potentially might need some hardware innovation too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
You often say that AGI is not coming soon, meaning like not this year, not the next few years, potentially farther away. What's your basic intuition behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
It already contains a lot more information than the bytes it takes to store them, if you compare it to visual data. So there's a lot of wisdom in language, there's words, and the way we stitch them together, it already contains a lot of information. So is it possible that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Why do you think people have been calling? First of all, I mean, from the beginning, from the birth of the term artificial intelligence, there has been an eternal optimism that's perhaps unlike other technologies. Is it a Marovac paradox? Is the explanation for why people are so optimistic about AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So IQ is a very limited measure of intelligence. Do you intelligence is bigger than what IQ, for example, measures?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
language alone already has enough wisdom and knowledge in there to be able to, from that language, construct a world model and understanding of the world, an understanding of the physical world that you're saying LLMs lack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So you push back against what are called AI doomers a lot. Can you explain their perspective and why you think they're wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And to you, there's not significant incentive for humans to encode that into the AI systems. And to the degree they do, there'll be other AIs that sort of punish them for it, out-compete them over it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I've heard that before somewhere. I don't remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah. But speaking of that book, could there be unintended consequences also from all of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So let's imagine a system, AI system, that's able to be incredibly convincing and can convince you of anything. I can at least imagine such a system. And I can see such a system be weapon-like because it can control people's minds. We're pretty gullible. We want to believe a thing. You can have an AI system that controls it. And you could see governments using that as a weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So do you think if you imagine such a system, there's any parallel to something like nuclear weapons? So why is that technology different? So you're saying there's going to be gradual development. There's going to be, I mean, it might be rapid, but there'll be iterative. And then we'll be able to kind of respond and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So to you, it's very difficult for any one AI system to take such a big leap ahead to where it can convince even the other AI systems. So there's always going to be this kind of race where nobody's way ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
This is why, mostly, yes, but this is why nuclear weapons are so interesting, because that was such a powerful weapon that it mattered who got it first. That, you know, you could imagine Hitler, Stalin... Mao getting the weapon first and that having a different kind of impact on the world than the United States getting the weapon first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But to you, nuclear weapons, you don't imagine a breakthrough discovery and then Manhattan Project-like effort for AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah, this is an industry that's not good at secrecy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Maybe just to linger on the psychology of AI doomers, you give, in the classic Yann LeCun way, a pretty good example of just when a new technology comes to be. You say, engineer says, I invented this new thing. I call it a ball pen. And then the Twittersphere responds, OMG, people could write horrible things with it like misinformation, propaganda, hate speech, ban it now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Then writing doomers come in, akin to the AI doomers. Imagine if everyone can get a ball pen. This could destroy society. There should be a law against using ball pen to write hate speech. Regulate ball pens now. And then the pencil industry mogul says, yeah, ball pens are very dangerous. Unlike pencil writing, which is erasable, ball pen writing stays forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Government should require a license for a pen manufacturer. I mean, this does seem to be part of human psychology when it comes up against new technology. What deep insights can you speak to about this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So people worry about... I think one thing they worry about with big tech, something we've been talking about over and over, but I think worth... Mentioning again, they worry about how powerful AI will be, and they worry about it being in the hands of one centralized power of just a handful of central control. And so that's the skepticism with big tech you can make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
These companies can make a huge amount of money and control this technology, and by so doing, take advantage, abuse the little guy in society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah, I just wanted to nail the point home more and more. Yes. So let me ask you on your... Like I said, you do get a little bit flavorful on the internet. Yosha Bach tweeted something that you LOL'd at in reference to HAL 9000. Quote, I appreciate your argument and I fully understand your frustration, but whether the pod bay doors should be opened or closed is a complex and nuanced issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So you're the head of Meta AI, right? Oh, you know, this is something that really worries me that AI or AI overlords will speak down to us with corporate speak of this nature. And you sort of resist that with your way of being. Is this something you can just comment on sort of working at a big company, how you can avoid the, over-fearing, I suppose, through caution create harm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
We love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Do you trust humans with this technology to build systems that are, on the whole, good for humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
An AI system with a strong Russian accent will be trying to convince our...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Well, it would be at the very least absurdly comedic. Okay. So since we talked about sort of the physical reality, I'd love to ask your vision of the future with robots in this physical reality. So many of the kinds of intelligence you've been speaking about would empower robots to be more effective collaborators with us humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So since Tesla's Optimus team has been showing off some progress on humanoid robots, I think it really reinvigorated the whole industry that I think Boston Dynamics has been leading for a very, very long time. So now there's all kinds of companies, figure AI, Obviously Boston Dynamics. Unitree. Unitree. But there's like a lot of them. It's great. It's great. I mean, I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So do you think there'll be millions of humanoid robots walking around soon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And they're hoping to discover a product in it too. There's a, yeah. Before you have a really strong world model, there'll be an almost strong world model. And, um, People are trying to find a product in a clumsy robot, I suppose. Like not a perfectly efficient robot. So there's the factory setting where humanoid robots can help automate some aspects of the factory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
I think that's a crazy difficult task because of all the safety required and all this kind of stuff. I think in the home is more interesting, but then you start to think, I think you mentioned loading the dishwasher, right? Yeah. I suppose that's one of the main problems you're working on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
But even just basic navigation around a space full of uncertainty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Well, navigation in a way that's compelling to us humans is a different thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah, to me, that's an exciting future of getting humanoid robots, robots in general on the whole, more and more, because that gets humans to really directly interact with AI systems in the physical space. And in so doing, it allows us to philosophically, psychologically explore our relationships with robots. It can be really, really, really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
So I hope you make progress on the whole Jempa thing soon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
And actually, you've mentioned that there's a lot of interesting breakthroughs that can happen without having access to a lot of compute. So if you're interested in doing a PhD in this kind of stuff, there's a lot of possibilities still to do innovative work. So what advice would you give to a undergrad that's looking to go to grad school and do a PhD?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
For action plans, yeah. So you want basically a robot dog or a humanoid robot that turns on and travels from New York to Paris all by itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
They might have some trouble at the TSA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
Yeah, there's a lot involved. It's a super complex task. And once again, we take it for granted. What hope do you have for the future of humanity? We're talking about so many exciting technologies, so many exciting possibilities. What gives you hope when you look out over the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#416 – Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI
If you look at social media, there's a lot of, there's wars going on, there's division, there's hatred, all this kind of stuff. That's also part of humanity. But amidst all that, what gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., candidate for the President of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer, and author who has challenged some of the world's most powerful corporations, seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
each individual person in that way can rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning to this whole messy thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So you mentioned The Plague by Camus. There's a lot of different ways to read that book, but one of them, especially given how it was written, is that The Plague symbolizes Nazi Germany and the Hitler regime. What do you learn about human nature there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It is disagreement, not conformity, that bends the long arc of humanity toward truth and wisdom. In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you, but we must have the humility to hear it and to learn from it. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
from a figure like Adolf Hitler, that he's able to captivate the minds of millions, rise to power, and take on, pull in the whole world into a global war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
A lot of us would like to believe we would resist in that situation, but the reality is most of us wouldn't. And that's a good thing to think about. That human nature is such that we're selfish, even when there's an atrocity going on all around us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
What have you learned about life from your father, Robert F. Kennedy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
We got House of Macadamias for snacks, Eight Sleep for naps, Insight Tracker for biological data, and AG1 for my go-to daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. This show is brought to you by House of Macadamias, a company that makes delicious, high-quality, healthy macadamia nut-based snacks. Every single person I have shared the snack with have deeply enjoyed it. And it's been quite a few people, including guests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And you think that kind of empathy that you referred to, that requires moral courage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, if we can apply that style of empathy, style of curiosity to the current war in Ukraine, what is your understanding of why Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And they love it. And they love the variety in each individual snack. I don't think there's been a negative response to any of the snacks. Because it's whole nuts with all kinds of additions to them. Bars with all kinds of additions to them. All kinds of flavors. All of it healthy. All of it is perfectly portioned. It's just a perfect snack. Low in carbs, high in omega-7 fats.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
These two pursuits are, to me, the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human beings I've ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
There's all kinds of super healthy aspects to this stuff, but I just enjoy it because it's an escape from the mundane. Actually, the word mundane makes it seem like it's not deeply fulfilling. But most of my diet is mundane. Most of my diet is in this place of simplicity where I enjoy the minimalism of it. But sometimes...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Would you, as president, sit down and have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky separately and together to negotiate peace?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
What about Vladimir Putin? He's been in power since 2000. So as the old adage goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do you think he has been corrupted by being in power for so long? If you think of the man, if you look at his mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
A little detour in a small rural town somewhere on a long road trip from New York to San Francisco. Just take a little detour and you're going to find a gas station with a weird guy who has one hell of an amazing story to tell you. That guy is a macadamia nut snack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So step one is to sit down and empathize with the leaders of both nations to understand their history, their concerns, their hopes, just to open the door for conversation so they're not back to the corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Do you think this war can come to an end purely through military operations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And you can meet that guy, just like as I do, by going to houseofmacadamias.com slash flex to get a free box of their bestseller, Namibian Sea Salted Macadamia Nuts, plus 20% off your entire order. That's houseofmacadamias.com slash flex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress. It is a source of happiness for me. Naps are a source of happiness for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You know, I'm kind of torn on this, but I think I might be even a bigger fan of naps than a full night's sleep. Full night's sleep is like an essential foundation to life. But naps for me, again, speaking of detours in the middle of nowhere, it's sometimes a stressful day feels like a highway to hell. It's a little reference to ACDC. and one of the most badass songs ever written.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So to push back on a small aspect of this that you kind of implied, so I've traveled to Ukraine, and one thing that I should say, similar to the Battle of Stalingrad, It is not only the Russians that fight to the end. I think the Ukrainians are very willing to fight to the end. And the morale there is quite high. I've talked to nobody, this was a year ago in August with her son.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Everybody was proud to fight and die for their country. And there's some aspect where this war unified the people. to give them a reason and an understanding that this is what it means to be Ukrainian and I will fight to the death to defend this land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Do you worry about a nuclear war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It seems like a silly question, but it's not. It's a serious question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Can you actually go through the feelings you've had about the Cuban Missile Crisis? What are your memories of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But anyway, life sometimes feels like a highway to hell, and this is a little detour, again to that gas station, where you meet a person that helps you escape from all the madness of this world, and realize how beautiful human beings are. That's what a nap is. It's a reminder of how beautiful life is. insatiably delicious every single moment is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
How full of vigor and sensory extravagance every single moment is. Anyway, for me, the naps do that. I'm sure there's drugs for this too, but to me, the healthiest drug is a good nap. And Eight Sleep makes that nap extra special. Check it out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
How much of that part of human history turned on the decisions of one person?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Obviously, this episode is very much about your health. There's a lot of controversial aspects to this episode, but I think... what's not discussed in this episode, and what I think is true about the future of medicine, about the future of health and diet and so on, that the decisions you make about your body should be driven by the data that comes from your body. as much raw signal as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And that's what InsideTracker is paving the way on, is getting as much biological data from you as possible to help you make decisions. There's blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, all of that. Shove that into machine learning algorithms to give you recommendations. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsideTracker.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsideTracker.com slash Lex. This show is brought to you by the thing I just drank. Athletic Greens, or what it's now called AG1. The name of the drink and the name of the company, AG1. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it twice a day. I'm traveling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Again, I love science. But signs cannot flourish without epistemic humility, without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square, in good faith, long-form conversations. Agree or disagree, I believe Robert's voice should be part of the debate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And they have travel packs that make me feel like I'm at home for a brief moment. I make myself another set of greens. I put it in the fridge. I let it cool for a while. And then I open it up and I drink it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And some of this requires to have this kind of that connects Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy that cuts through all the bureaucracy to have this communication between heads of state and, in the case of AI, perhaps heads of tech companies where you can just pick up the phone and have a conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Because a lot of it, a lot of the existential threats of artificial intelligence, perhaps even bioweapons, is unintentional. It's not even strategic intentional effects. So you have to be transparent and honest about, especially with AI, that people might not know what's the worst that's going to happen once you release it out into the wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And you have to have an honest communication about how to do it so that companies are not terrified of regulation. overreach regulation and then government is not terrified of tech companies of manipulating them in some direct or indirect ways so like there's a trust that builds versus a distrust that seems to so basically that old phone where Khrushchev can call John F. Kennedy is needed
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It seems like John F. Kennedy is a singular figure in that he was able to have the humility to reach out to Khrushchev and also the strength and integrity to resist the, what did you call him, the salad brass and institutions like the CIA. So that makes it particularly tragic that he was killed. To what degree was the CIA involved or the various bureaucracy involved in his death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And not only do I feel healthier, not only do I feel like I have my life together, even when on the surface it seems like the life is falling apart, physically and emotionally, I know at least I got my nutritional bases covered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I think it's really important when you travel, or at least when I travel, to have little reminders, maybe almost subconscious reminders, that make you feel like this hotel or this shady place you find yourself in somewhere in the world has a piece of home in it. It makes you kind of feel like you are at home until you realize you're not. But that little break is wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So if it's true that CIA had a hand in this assassination, how is it possible for them to amass so much power? How is it possible for them to become corrupt? And is it individuals or is it the entire institution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And for me, AG1 is very much that. Because AG1 makes me think like I'm at home and I have my life together. And so when I travel, it's really nice to have it as well. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
What is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative? Do you think it's indirectly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Indirectly through the press or directly by funding the press?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But I wonder why they would do it. So from my perspective, it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be influenced or bought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It's the 4th of July, Independence Day, so simple question, simple big question. What do you love about this country, the United States of America?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I mean, you can understand the intention And the action, the difference between, as we talked about, you can understand the intention of such a thing being good in a time of a catastrophe, in a time of a pandemic. There's a lot of risk to saying untrue things, but that's a slippery slope that leads into a place where the journalistic integrity that we talked about is completely sacrificed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And then you can deviate from truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You're running for president as a Democrat. What to you are the strongest values that represent the left-wing politics of this country?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So America should be the symbol of peace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So that's a really eloquent and clear and powerful description of the way you see US should be doing geopolitics and the way you see US should be taking care of the poor in this country. Let me ask you a question from Jordan Peterson that he asked when I told him that I'm speaking with you. Given everything you've said, when does the left go too far?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
To call him a conspiracy theorist and arrogantly dismiss everything he says without addressing it diminishes the public's trust in the scientific process. At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on controversial topics like the pandemic is equally, if not more, dishonest and destructive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I suppose he's referring to cultural issues, identity politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, that's music to my ears. But in that spirit, let me ask you a difficult question then. You wrote a book harshly criticizing Anthony Fauci. Let me ask you to steel man the case for the people who support him. What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Do you think he believes he's doing good for the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Let me ask about the difficulty of the job he had. Do you think it's possible to do that kind of job well? Or is it also a fundamental flaw of the job of being the centralized figure that's supposed to have a scientific policy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You are, the bigger picture of this is you're an outspoken critic of pharmaceutical companies, Big Pharma. What is the biggest problem with Big Pharma and how can it be fixed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Was it possible to have within a capitalist system to produce medication, to produce drugs at scale in a way that is not corrupt?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Do you think money can buy integrity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It's slightly controversial to me. I would like to think that scientists that work at FDA... Well, you may not be able to buy urine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But I'd like to believe that scientists... I mean, in general, a career of a scientist is not a very high-paying job. I'd like to believe that people that go into science, that work at FDA, that work at NIH, are doing it for a reason that's not even correlated with money, really. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
You've talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer. And you've said that you're not anti-vaccine, you're pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question. Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Those are big words. What about the polio? Can we talk about the polio? Here's the problem. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But let's talk, well, you know, we kind of have to narrow in on, is it effective against the thing it's supposed to fight?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
But isn't it nearly impossible to prove that link?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So I should say that there's a bunch, on that point, I've heard from a bunch of folks that disagree with you, including polio. I mean, testing is a really important point. Before licensure, placebo-controlled, randomized trials. Polio received just that against the saline placebo control. So it seems unclear to me. I'm confused why you say that they don't go through that process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
It seems like a lot of them do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, let me zoom out because a lot of the details matter here. Pre-licensure, what does placebo-controlled mean? So this probably requires a rigorous analysis. Actually, at this point, it would be nice for me just to give the shout-out to other people much smarter than me. that people should follow, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Use their mind, learn, and think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So one really awesome creator, I really recommend him, is Dr. Dan Wilson. He hosts the Debunk the Funk podcast. Vincent Racaniello, who hosts This Week in Virology, brilliant guy, I've had him on the podcast. Somebody you've been battling with is Paul Offit. Interesting Twitter, interesting books. People should read and understand and read your books as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And Eric Topol has a good Twitter and good books. And even Peter Holtz has. I'll ask you about him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So Joe Rogan proposed just such a debate, which is quite fascinating to see how much attention and how much funding it garnered, the debate between you and Peter Hotez. Why do you think Peter rejected the offer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Well, I immigrated to this country, and one of the things that really embodies America to me is the ideal of freedom. Hunter Thompson said, freedom is something that dies unless it's used. What does freedom mean to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Are there aspects of all the work you've done on vaccines, all the advocacy you've done, that you found out that you were not correct on, that you were wrong on, that you've changed your mind on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So some of the things we've been talking about, you've been an outspoken contrarian on some very controversial topics. This has garnered some fame and recognition, in part for being attacked and standing strong against those attacks, if I may say, for being a martyr. Do you worry about this drug of martyrdom that might cloud your judgment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
All right, I have to ask, you are in great shape. Can you go through your diet and exercise routine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
What are your thoughts on hormone therapy in general?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
About God, you wrote, God talks to human beings through many vectors, wise people, organized religion, the great books of religions, through art, music, and poetry, but nowhere with such detail and grace and joy as through creation. When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine. What is your relationship and what is your understanding of God? Who is God?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So this point that Hunter Estanza has made is dies unless it's used. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I do agree with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
I recommend that people read and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his arguments and his ideas. But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to Vincent Racaniello from This Week in Virology, Dan Wilson from Debunk the Funk, and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol, and others who are outspoken in their disagreement with Robert.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
The blood of each generation. You mentioned your interest, your admiration of Albert Camus, of Stoicism, perhaps your interest in existentialism. Yes. Camus said, I believe in myth of Sisyphus, the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. What do you think he means by that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
So adding that moral dimension to all of your actions is how you were able to win that Camus battle against the absurd. Exactly. Sisyphus with the bull. It's all the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
And now Sisyphus was able to find somehow happiness. Yeah. Well, Bobby, thank you for the stroll through some of the most important moments in recent human history and for running for president. And thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning
Let us accept our own responsibility for the future. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
The following is a conversation with Teddy Atlas, a legendary and at times controversial boxing trainer and commentator. When I was going to this conversation with Teddy, I was ready to talk boxing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You still remember that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You lost them 30 years ago. How did that change you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
The pain in Teddy's voice. The contradictions of love and anger that permeate his stories and his philosophy on life. Like I said, I came to talk about boxing and stayed to talk about life. This conversation will stay with me for a long time. The people close to you, the people you trust, the people you love are everything. And if they betray you and break your heart, forgive them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
I got to ask you, when did you discover boxing? When did you first fall in love with boxing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Styles, matches, techniques, tactics, and his analysis of individual fighters like Mike Tyson, Michael Moore, Klitschko, Usyk, Povetkin, Lomachenko, Triple G, Canelo, Muhammad Ali, Shigure Leonard, Hagler, Duran, Floyd, and on and on and on. Like I said, I came ready to talk boxing. But I stayed for something even bigger. The Shakespearean human story of Teddy Atlas, Gus D'Amato, and Mike Tyson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
How did it save you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Can you tell the story of how you got that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Forgive yourself and try again. Happy holidays, everyone. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for team collaboration, Babbel for learning new languages, ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the internet webs, and Insight Tracker for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You couldn't live with yourself running away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
The memory of you being, let's say, a coward in that moment, that never ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
health based on the data that comes from your body. So choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring or get in touch with me at lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
What did you think? What did you think that happened? It was all slow motion. Did you think he might die?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Did you think about your dad in that moment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. All the coolest kids have used Notion for many years for note-taking. And those cool kids have grown up and started businesses and started teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
And now as part of teams, they have to not just do the wolf pack of one type of note-taking, but an actual wolf pack where collaboration is required. Anyway, one of my favorite use cases of the internet is that you can collaborate with people on written projects. And Notion does this better than anybody else. Listen, they also obviously have LLM's AI integrated into what they're doing and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
In the back of an ambulance, you're free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Did he say something?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Oh, man. They did a good job. You mentioned custom model, legendary trainer, and you also mentioned it turned out he really cared about you. In the book you write about a testimony he gave. I was hoping I could read it, because it speaks to your character, it speaks to his, it's just powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
The testimony goes, Your Honor, I realize you might not know much about me, but I've spent my whole life developing young men. As a boxing manager, I trained two world champions, heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson and light heavyweight champion Jose Torres. I've also helped a lot of other young boys straighten out their lives and build character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
It's not just about the power of the LLM. It's about how the interface looks like, how it's integrated into the whole writing collaboration process. They do this really well with their Notion AI tool. You can do all kinds of cool stuff. Everything you know about large language models, you can do here. But it's just interface-wise so natural and so well integrated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
I know things about Teddy Atlas this court doesn't know. Things you won't find on his arrest record. This boy has character. He has loyalty. He'll hurt himself before he'll let down a friend. These qualities are rare and they shouldn't be lost. He's made mistakes. We've all made mistakes. But I've come to know this boy, and if we lose him, we'll be losing someone who could help a lot of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Please don't take this young boy's future away. He could be someone special. Let's not lose him. Please. Those are powerful words from a powerful man. What have you learned about life from Mr. Customato?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
How does fear connect to greatness? That's a profound statement. Without fear, we wouldn't be able to be great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Notion AI can now give you instant answers to your questions using information from across your WikiProjects docs and meeting notes. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex, that's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex, to try the power of Notion AI today. This show is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that I use for learning new languages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Every business, I think. Yours is just more clear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
In the moment, at least.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
That's a powerful phrase. Regret is a solitary sentence. Oh, boy. You're full of good lines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
It can get you to speaking a new language in just weeks. We're talking about Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, all kinds of languages. One of the things I find fascinating is the power of language to express ideas. And also, on the negative side, the barrier of language can serve as a kind of foundation or maybe a catalyst
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
I agree with you in a deep, fundamental sense, but there's pain that comes with that. I have to ask you to introspect on this part of your life because of your value for loyalty. As people know, you and Custom Auto trained young Mike Tyson. And the interaction there between the three of you led to the three of you parting ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Given your value for loyalty, can you tell the full story of what led up to this? And maybe the pain you felt from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Was part of you proud that you didn't give up your friends?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You're just loyal, and that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
of division between nations or between peoples that speak those languages. And so to break down those barriers, the most powerful ways for people to speak the different languages in all the ways that that means, fundamentally that means speaking with other people in those languages. And you don't have to speak well, you just have to try.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
But also you have to be open, listen, be present, be attentive to the music of a people that is expressed through the language. Anyway, you should take steps on that journey with Babbel. Get 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com slash lexpod spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash lexpod. Rules and restrictions apply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
What did you think when you first saw Mike Tyson?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
This show is also brought to you by an oldie but a goodie, a trusted friend, ExpressVPN. I've been using them for so many years. I wonder if I'll be on my deathbed kind of with a laptop or whatever in a virtual reality thing pressing that big sexy button that says connect that teleports me immediately to a different geographical location.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Well, you're making it sound a little bit negative, but it's also extremely positive. That's a teacher instilling wisdom into you that you carried forward and impacted a lot of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
But... And you do the same. You do things your way and carry some of him in you, some of your father in you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
in the virtual cyberspace, and I can watch programs I couldn't otherwise watch on Netflix and other places. But, you know, it's just a basic layer of protecting your privacy on the internet. Everybody should be using a VPN, and the one I recommend is ExpressVPN. Works on every operating system, including the coolest, the best operating system of them all, Linux.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah. Did you see what Cuss was seeing in terms of the heavyweight champion of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
How do you make it mentally tougher? So that part of the job. You said don't get a bloody nose, but the part of the job where it makes it mentally tougher. How do you do that? Most important part of the job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
What flavor of Linux do you use, friends? If the answer is none, then you should consider, in this new year, exploring the possibilities. It's not just for college. It's a thing you can do at any point in life. Try new things. But no matter the operating system, it's fast. It just works well. What else do you want? Great. Go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months. Three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
It's a story about loyalty, betrayal, fear, and greatness. It's a story where nobody is perfect and everybody is human. To summarize, in the early 80s, young trainer Teddy Atlas worked with his mentor, Customato, in training the young boxing protege, now a boxing legend, Mike Tyson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
For people who don't know, Mike was inappropriate with a young girl and you pulled the gun on him. I don't know if there's deeper things to say about that situation. But why do you think Cus made the decision to cut you off from both Mike Tyson and from Cus D'Amato? Like to break that, When he valued loyalty so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
That's a hell of a statement right there. I don't know what the benefit of that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track the data coming from my body and make lifestyle and diet decisions based on that. All right, you should be collecting data from your body. You should be doing the basic blood tests. That's what they do. And then they use their machine learning algorithms to interpret that data and give you advice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
So it's integrating general population data and the data that comes from you to give advice. That's the future. And in the future, the more and the more data will be coming from your body. And then it will be able to properly locate you in the high dimensional space of what it means to be a human biological system, or just a biological system that we think of as human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
He didn't give up on life. Years later, Mike Tyson apologized to you. What's meaningful to you about that? How does that fit the story?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
And then, based on that data, you can figure out, slowly at first, and faster and faster, what are the optimal trajectories you should take through life in order to improve the performance of that biological system. And then the word improve will actually mean more and more things over time. But at first, you just want basic, basic health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah, so what people don't know, you were in the middle of commentating a fight and he walked up from behind you and He said he was sorry he shook your hand, gave you a hug. I didn't know he said I love you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
One complex guy talking about another complex guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Is there part of you that's sorry to Mike for pulling the gun on him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
If you feel good throughout the day, just physically, and a little bit, a little bit mentally, then all the doors open. The doors of possibilities open. open up. And when you walk in, there's a big Christmas tree with Santa Claus and all the infinite presents that you want. This is holiday spirit since we're releasing this episode on this very special holiday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You don't regret pulling the gun on him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
He crossed the line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Why didn't Custom Auto see it in a deeper way and talk through it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Why do you think that, okay, if you were to try to understand the point he was making, why is that true? Isn't the part of greatness that you said is building the character of knowing what is right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Anyway, you can get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Teddy Atlas. You wrote in the book that your father had a big influence on your life. What lessons have you learned about life from your father?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Do you think if you were to put yourself in the shoes of Custom Auto, Can you see yourself having the big enough wall or you would choose loyalty?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You don't have to answer that. I think loyalty is important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Do you forgive, Chris? Have you found forgiveness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Now you're the scientist with the test tubes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
80, 75?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Somebody up there calling. Hello? Hello? Yes, you're great. Thank you. Just for the record, never had a phone call like this. It's hotel security. The question he asked me is, are you okay, sir? Are you okay? Are we okay? I think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
I don't know where it's going to end, but... So Mike Tyson is considered by many to be one of the great boxers, one of the greatest boxers of all time, heavyweight boxers. What do you think, on the positive side, made him great? I don't know if he was ever great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
What does it take to be a great fighter? Truly great?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You think Mike didn't have that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Mike was a troubled youth, arrested over 40 times, and at age 15, he was sexually inappropriate with Teddy's 11-year-old niece. In response to this, Teddy put a .38 caliber handgun to Tyson's ear and told him to never touch his family again or he would kill him if he did. For this, Custom Auto kicked Teddy out. Why? Well, that's complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Like, just legendary stories. He would do house calls and help people. And like you said, a lot of people have spoken about the impact he's had on their life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Let me ask Teddy Atlas to introspect on the human nature here. It's part of the complexities of your feelings on this whole thing is that you know to some degree that if you were coaching Mike Tyson, he could be truly great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
The humility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Did Cuss know? Did Cuss know this about himself? Did he reflect? Did he introspect?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
It's just you, him, and a homeless guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
So he thought maybe you might betray him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Well, it's like you said, loyalty. requires, you know, he would have had to take a risk on losing immortality that he would achieve by creating a great heavyweight champion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
This is Shakespearean, you know, this story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Your grandfather now. Yeah, for the grandchildren. If you can give them advice on how to live a life they can be proud of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Is loyalty one of the reasons, one of the things to aspire to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
And what do you do when you're betrayed? How do you overcome that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Has it, for you, made you cynical? How do you take the leap of trust towards people again and again after that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You think about your death? Are you afraid of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
You've got it covered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Both neighborhoods. I... I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
I'll figure that out too. It's going to be another test, maybe the last one. Teddy, it's a huge honor to talk to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Thank you for being the human you are, for being honest, honest about the full range of human nature, and thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Teddy Atlas. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Muhammad Ali. I hated every minute of training, but I said, don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
In part, I think, to help minimize the chance of Mike Tyson, who Cuss legally adopted, would be taken away by the state. And with him, the dream of developing one of the greatest boxers of all time. Of course, that summary doesn't capture the full complexity of human nature and human drama involved here. For that, you have to listen to this conversation. The things said and the things left unsaid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#406 – Teddy Atlas: Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato, Boxing, Loyalty, Fear & Greatness
My father, I didn't connect it that way, but he- Looking back now- Looking back, he was my first connection to a hero. Did the two of you ever talk about how much you love each other?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
The following is a conversation with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist interested in the evolution of star systems and the search for alien civilizations in our universe. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So you actually say that that, from a perspective of detrimental society, that there's a crisis of meaning, and that we respond to that in a way that's counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways, the three responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
The postmodernists on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right. And then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses, they kind of feed each other. There's a, just to observe the scientific community, those who sort of gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, there's an arrogance that builds in the human soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, it has to do with PhDs, it has to do with sitting on the academic throne, all of those things, and the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds, and of course that, nobody likes arrogance, and so those that reject science, the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science. It just goes back, and it's this divide that builds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So you're proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is fundamental. Experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is like at the core of reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Panpsychism is like that's literally one of the laws of physics. Right, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Is it something like incorporating in the physics, in the study of nature, the observer, the experiencing observer, or is that still also looking from a third person perspective?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
This episode is brought to you by Encord, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management, and for model evaluation. For example, if you are an independent private or government agency that is running
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So that's not a thing you're trying to get rid of. That's the thing you're trying to integrate at the center of the thing. And in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of uh, thing should be incorporated in, in every, uh, layer of, of study of nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So you think there could be something like cubism, quantum Bayesianism, that creates a theory like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of like... Hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And all of them have different chemical compositions, different temperatures? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So if you pull on this thread and say there's a whole discipline born of this, putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory, in a physics theory, is it possible it just breaks the whole thing open? So there's this whole effort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of coming up with a theory of everything. What if these are like the tip of the iceberg?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
What if the agent thing is like really important?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, time is a really interesting one. Time is really important to us humans. What is time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I just wonder, who is the observer? I mean, define what the agent is in any kind of frame. is difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So do you think it's possible to show that something like free will is quote unquote real if you integrate experience back into the physics model of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
what if the experience is an illusion? How do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So you're pushing it elsewhere. Just like there's a stack of turtles is probably... If this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there's an observer for whom it's not an illusion. So you always have to find an observer somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
there's oceans right that we've got a number of those moons have got more water on them than there's water on earth do you think it's possible to do that kind of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of uh how likely an earth-like planet is can we get the physics simulation done well enough to where we can start estimating like what are the possible earth-like things that could be generated
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But there's also the practical fact that it's difficult to build a logical system on top of experience. It's difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience. And so it's... As science advances, we might get better and better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Like the same as it's very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fe questions. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, it is. I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there's an elephant in the room, like that we're just removing the agent. Like it's... everyone is doing it and it's like, yeah, yeah, there's the experience and then there's the third person perspective on the world. And so to, man, science from a, applying scientific rigor from a first person perspective is very difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, it's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, there's a fascinating degree to which agency is fluid. Like you are an individual, but you and I talking is a kind of individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And then the person listening to this right now is also an individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, that's a weird thing, too. That's a weird thing, right? Because there's a broadcast nature, too. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So going back to organism versus machine. So I showed you a couple of legged robots. Is it possible for machines to have agency?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I wonder how far I can get with imitation. which is essentially what LLMs are doing. So imitating humans. And I wouldn't discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve what you would call consciousness or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most of us humans to think, oh, that's just fake, that's copying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But there's some degree to which we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines. Coming from babies, we were born in this world and we're just learning to imitate each other. And through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations, we gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
The 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended by way of extracranial processes and structures. They're very much in vogue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations, this is a paper, but reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the 4E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses. It's fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far, and it could go real far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
individual observer, you as an individual observer, only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world. Does that make you sad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But still, there's a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it, and it ends, and it's good while it lasts, and it sucks that it ends. You can be like, well, everything comes and goes, but I was eating ice cream yesterday. Found this awesome low-carb ice cream called Delights here in Austin, and it ends. Yeah. And I was staring at the empty container.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
You could say like, yeah, well, that's how it all is, but hey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
the drones that is flying all over New Jersey and the tri-state area, you might be doing the same kind of data annotation and collection, curation and management that Encore excels at. Also, if you're an extraterrestrial species performing the same, I wonder what kind of computation tools alien civilizations have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, maybe it's the genetics, maybe it's the biochemistry of my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience, just amorphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it's my Eastern European roots, but there's always like a melancholy that's also sitting next to the joy. And I think it always feels like they're intricately linked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience and the joy is just about the beauty of experience. And they're just kind of sitting there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Can you speak to just the practical nature of sitting there from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
What's powerful? What's fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
That's pretty cool, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah. Once Jersey, always Jersey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I love that you had Bruce Springsteen just blasting in your head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Why are we here? What do you think is the purpose, the meaning of human existence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And hopefully there's many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey out of suffering towards love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Especially if they're a type three civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, this was a truly mind blowing, fascinating, just awesome conversation. Adam, thank you for everything you do and thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frank. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
There's a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Why do you think polytectonics might be useful for the formation of complex life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
At the physics level, computation is fundamentally a part of the fabric of the universe. So every advanced civilization would or surely would discover how to leverage that computation, how to organize that computation, how to access and communicate with that computation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So it's nice to have turmoil in terms of temperature, in terms of surface geometries, in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I wonder if there's some... extremely elevated levels of chaos, almost like catastrophes behind every leap of evolution. You're not going to have leaps. In human societies, we have an Einstein that comes up with a good idea, but it feels like on an evolutionary time scale, you need
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
some real big drama going on for the evolutionary system to have to come up to a solution to that drama, like an extra complex solution to that drama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Anyway, think of it, if you have a swarm of drones and you are the ruler of an alien civilization and want to collect some data about New Jersey, you are going to have to do some great machine learning. And great machine learning is not just about the algorithms. It is so much more about the data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So really, on a scale of a planet, when there's billions, trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact. So the chemical shenanigans of an individual organism when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So whoever you are running the drone program over New Jersey, go try out Encore to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com. That's Encore.com. By the way, in all seriousness, I will probably talk about drones in New Jersey soon. I think it's a fascinating mystery. Is it China? Is it aliens? Is it the U.S. government? Is it private companies within the U.S. government?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Let me say as a side note that I had to put a bunch of podcast episodes on hold to focus deeply on preparing for conversations with world leaders. So I apologize to include more sponsors on this episode than usual. They really wanted me to mention them this year, and I'm not sure when I'm going to do another episode.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Now, I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback or elements of a Gaian feedback such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis. Open question, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that perturbations, the technosphere should create perturbations as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations. Which sounds like a ridiculous statement, but basically go out and play in the yard and hurt yourself to strengthen the, or like drink water from the pond.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Is it other nation states? Are nuclear weapons involved? And what are the mechanisms that ensure that the U.S. government is transparent about communicating what they discover? These are essential questions. Okay, on to A-Sleep. This episode is brought to you by A-Sleep and it's pod 4 ultra. You know, sleep makes me think about the night. And I've been watching a lot of war movies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
To strengthen the immune system. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Before we forget, I got to ask you about this paper. Right. Pretty interesting. There's an interesting table here about hard steps. Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation to purific acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons, eye precursor, so formation of the eye. Yeah. Complex multicellularity. That's definitely one of the big ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, so interesting. I mean, what can you say about this chart? There are all kinds of papers talking about what the difficulty of these steps are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I've been watching a lot of war reporting. I've been watching a lot of conversations with soldiers and I've been talking to soldiers. And there's something about the night. There's something about the quiet night that serves as the break from the hell of war. That's a song from the Second World War. A song about a soldier writing to a woman he loves. That's just it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Is it mostly about the fact that there's not really discrete big steps? It's a gradual, continual kind of process?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, to be fair to Carter on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co-evolving. Because it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions. And then we can sort of, from an outside perspective, analyze...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
planets based on the initial conditions they create and then there's a binary yes or no will it create life but if they co-evolve it's just a really complex dynamical system where everything is becomes much more difficult from the perspective of SETI of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones are actually producing life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Just like a man's search for meaning in the darkest hours of war. Those are the things that keep the flame of the heart going. Talking about these topics makes it difficult for me to then talk about eight sleep and the technology and the comfort of good night's sleep Somewhere in America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, these are their own fields. Essentially, by creating this equation, he's launching new fields.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
That's one of the things you discover when you travel, especially travel to a country that's participating in war. That the basic comforts, the basic securities, the basic dreams and hopes and the ways of life are taken away. And still, the human spirit persists. Anyway, this is supposed to be an ad read. Go to asleep.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
We could talk about each one of these, but let's just look at exoplanets. Yeah. So that's a really interesting one. I think when you look back, you know, hundreds of years from now, what is it, in the 90s when they first detected the first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I think that's one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. I agree. I agree. Right now, I guess nobody's celebrating it too much because you don't know what it really means. But I think once we almost certainly will find life out there, it will obviously allow us to generalize across... the entire galaxy, the entire universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So if you can find life on a planet, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing across the entire universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You've also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, we should say it's a place to start. I do think it's too strict of a constraint. I would agree. We're talking about temperature where water can be on the surface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
There's so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil where the temperature varies, whether it's volcanic interaction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of plants that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Use code Lex to get up to $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled. That's asleep.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I've been reading a lot about the long history of the Silk Road, especially before and after the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But for me, when I look up at the stars, it's very likely that there's a habitable planet or moon in each of the stars, habitable defined broadly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi Paradox? Why haven't we seen them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I've been reading a lot about Genghis Khan and the influence he had on revolutionizing the trade network. A lot of networks, the trade of not just goods, but information of knowledge, of languages, of ideas, of religions, of peoples. And it's fascinating how roads of that nature, trade, first and foremost, can break down the barriers that divide peoples. I suppose it all starts with incentives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So if there was an alien camp here. Yeah. An alien village, a small civilization. Right. Maybe even a large civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
It's really mind blowing. And it's also a good reminder that we've been intelligent species have been here for a very short amount of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I've actually been reading a lot about ancient civilizations and it just makes me sad how much of the wisdom of that time is lost. Yeah. And how much guessing is going on, whether it's in South America, like what happened in the jungle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And, you know, because of archaeology only looks at cities, they don't really know the origins of humans. And there's a lot of really interesting theories. And they're, of course, controversial. And there's a lot of controversial people in history. in every discipline, but archaeology is a fascinating one because we know so little. They're basically storytellers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
People are people and they have stuff they don't need and they want to sell it and other people have stuff they want and they're willing to buy it. And those incentives at scale overpower any kind of emotional, psychological, historical hatreds and all those kinds of things. It's funny, the little incentives and the mechanisms of capitalism, at its best, can heal the wounds of war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
You're assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces. It's fascinating. It makes me, it's humbling and it's sad that there could be entire civilizations ancient civilizations that are either almost entirely or entirely lost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Everybody seems to be building pyramids, and they're really damn good at it. What does that have to do with a pyramid?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
What archetype in our brain is that? And it is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes, is that independent civilizations formed, and they had a lot of similar kind of dynamics, like human nature, when it builds up hierarchies in a certain way, builds up myths and religions in a certain way, it builds pyramids in a certain way, it goes to war, all this kind of stuff, independently emerges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Complexity in general is really cool. Really cool. What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact. Going back to this paper, a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe, this paper that expands on the Drake equation. What are some interesting things in this paper?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
10 billion trillion experiments. Yeah. That's a lot of experiments. That's a lot, right? A thousand is a lot. Yeah. A hundred is a lot. Yeah. If, uh, we normal humans saw a hundred experiments and, uh, We knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built. I mean, we would say for sure in 100, you'll get another one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Of course, it can also fuel the military-industrial complex, which is the fuel of war. Oh, the double-edged sword. Anyway, take the Silk Road and fast forward to today and we have Shopify that you can sign up to for $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
We were going to do eight episodes this month, but instead I think we're doing two. We'll see. Every single day, every single hour changes the plan, changes the situation, changes my life. So please be patient with me. There are no sponsor reads in the middle, so you can skip this long and beautiful list. But I do try to make them interesting in case you do listen, and I hope you do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So to me, at least, the big question is F-E, which is basically abiogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate on a planet? Because all the other ones seem... Very likely. Everything seems very likely. The only open question to me is, like, how hard is it for life to originate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah. I mean, day by day, this changes, right? for me, but as you see, once you create bacteria, it's off to the races. You're gonna get complex life. As long as you have enough time, I mean, that boring billion, but I just can't imagine a habitable planet not having a couple billion
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
How do you even simulate the trajectories that civilizations can take across that kind of time scale? When all the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so, 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations. And then just, I don't know what you put it at, but maybe 100 years that we've been technological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. When I think about NetSuite and all the different administrative modules and the language, standardized language, that allows them to communicate with each other, I think about all the empires throughout history that were able to create remarkable administrative systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis as you get greater and greater technological innovation? So like if you expand out into the universe and you have up to Kardashev scale, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself? Just achieve stability while still growing. And I mean, that's an interesting question. I think it's probably simulatable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now. That's the thing to load into the agent-based simulation we're talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
on Mars, that's guaranteed. The moment you have two million people, the moment you have one million people, there's gonna be two tribes. And then they're going to start fighting. And the question is, interplanetary fighting, how quickly does that happen, and does it have a different nature to it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, as I mentioned. None of it works without paperwork. You know, bureaucracy, rightfully so, gets a bad rap. But at its best, bureaucracy is necessary to manage the affairs of large organizations. You know, humans aren't very good at working with each other when they scale beyond a thousand people. So you need great administrative systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
You think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars on the planetary surface?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Do you think that's a good backup solution to go out into space sort of to avoid the possibility of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there's an urgency, like a real urgency, like a catastrophe, like maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it's like, holy shit, this is for sure, for sure a bigger one is looming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Maybe if geopolitically the war between China and the United States escalates, where there's this tension that builds and builds and builds and it becomes more obvious that we need to really, really accelerate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
It's an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars or out in space as a space habitat. Like where Earth entirely could be destroyed, you could still survive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And thankfully, today, we have technology. We have tools like NetSuite to do just that. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. One day in the distant future, AI systems will make for great therapists. But I think that's a very dangerous road to walk down in the short term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, there's also the other possibility of like the movie Darren Aronofsky's Postcard from Earth, where we can create this kind of life gun. that just shoots, as opposed to engineering everything. Basically seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing, it seems like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So as opposed to like, with a space habitat, you basically have to build the entire space and technosphere, the whole thing by yourself. You know, if you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you'd be surprised what happens. Like, honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
a giant number of organisms from earth into uh on mars on uh some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system do you think like i feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive you know the moon is hard because the moon is just like there's no you know the moon may be really hard but you know that'd be i mean i wonder somebody must have done these experiments right like how because we know they're extremophiles right we know that they're you can go down you know 10
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
The thing about life, it flourishes in a non-sterile environment where there's a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh. In the lab, I don't know if you can reconstruct...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
harsh conditions plus options for survival you know what i mean like uh yeah like you have to have the the the uh the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow even when it's a super harsh condition so that so that's actually not a trivial experiment and i wouldn't even if somebody did that experiment in the lab i'd be a little bit skeptical
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Because I could see bacteria doesn't survive in this kind of temperature. But then I'm going, I don't know. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I am a person who loves conversation. And not small talk. The fake niceties that alleviate social frictions. I'm not for that. I'm in for diving deep through conversation. And I think that is something that I just can't quite do yet. And I would say not even close. It is an assistant. It is not a therapist. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
That's actually an interesting field of study is how when you arrive from one planet to another, so we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, What is the way to integrate without killing yourself or the other one? Let's stick to biology. That's an interesting question. I don't know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Unfortunately, I think it's the latter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So as we look out there, according to the Drake equations we just discussed, it seems impossible to me that there's not civilizations everywhere. So how do we look at them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
That's from a sort of rigorous scientific perspective. From my bro science perspective, it seems, again, smoking the aforementioned weed. After the bong, yeah. I mean, honestly, it's really just impossible to me that there's not uh, potentially dead, but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, apex predators don't survive. They get better and better and better and they die and kill themselves all somehow. Anyway, so just how do we find them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
The distinction, the difference is quite fascinating to analyze, to watch, to try to sort of elucidate and articulate clearly. Yeah, so I'm a big fan of talking to a human to explore your own mind. And BetterHelp is a very easy, accessible way of doing that. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So you're looking for, in the case of the biosphere, you're looking for anomalies, right? in the spectrograph?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So how do you detect technosignatures?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
City lights. So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking system service app that I use and you should use, especially if you're on a large team, to collaborate on all kinds of stuff, including notes and project management, wikis, all that kind of stuff. Nuclear weapons have been on my mind quite a bit. And I think about the Manhattan Project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close and then you said the Oort cloud, that's not very close. But you mean like from an interstellar...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
What is detectable about Earth with our current technology from our nearest solar system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
If they do direct imaging of Earth,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah. By the way, just to clarify, direct imaging means literally like a picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And I think about the amount of incredible, rapid organization that was involved in that project. Just think about the coordination. The coordination of brilliant people working on separate parts of an incredibly complicated project where all of it has to be secret. So many of the people working on it may not even be aware of the bigger picture of it or the different modules involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I can only imagine having a picture like that. And then there's some mysterious artifacts that you're seeing. Yeah. I mean, it's both inspiring and almost heartbreaking that we can see. I think we'll be able to see a civilization where there's a lot of scientists agree that this is very likely something, and then we can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Since we're talking about the future of telescopes, let's talk about our current super sexy, awesome telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope that I still can't believe actually worked. I can't believe it worked either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold. So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I've been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There's been some direct imaging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
The kinds of exoplanets we're able to direct image, I guess, would have to be hot, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And it's 120 light years away from Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Just imagine the coordination required there. Just truly, truly, truly incredible. And of course, imagine what modern day tools can do for that. Obviously, the Manhattan Project is a top secret project and a controversial one and a complicated one. And one that I've done many episodes on in terms of its implications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
What about detecting maybe through direct imaging or in other ways, Megastructures that the civilizations build.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Can you explain the Dyson sphere?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, so he didn't actually mean a rigid sphere structure. He basically meant a swarm. So that, like you said, and then the limit basically starts to look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But that wouldn't be a Dyson sphere. That would be like one object.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And that usually doesn't happen in a star system because there's only just a handful of planets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But there's a less controversial perspective on the Manhattan Project of just seeing it as a project that the entirety of a nation or maybe the entirety of a civilization Takes on the moonshot project. We're going to go to Mars. We're going to go out there. We're going to build something big together. I love projects like that at any scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
How many people are looking for megastructures now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
There are potential candidates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Love it. We have megastructure candidates. That's inspiring. What other megastructures do you think that could be? I mean, so that's, Dyson Sphere is about capturing the energy of a star.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Or there could be other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
You think it's detectable, Clark belt?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, probably Dyson Sphere is the, that's the more exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of the Dyson Sphere, let's talk through the Kardashev scales. Right. what is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Just the big togetherness where all the bullshit of distraction is thrown away and you just focus. So yeah, Notion helps with that kind of thing. And they integrate AI extremely well. So you should try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
2300.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
0.7 so type 1 is about 10 to the 16th watts type 2 is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that 10 to the 26 watts and i think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude yeah because there's 100 billion star off order 100 billion stars so that's a lot that's a lot do you think humans ever get to type one
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
In either case, please still check out the sponsors. Buy their stuff. It is the best way to support this podcast. The sponsors are Uncord for your ML stack, Eight Sleep for naps, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, Notion for notes, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for nutrition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
My daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Did you know that salt... in ancient Rome was a currency also referred to as white gold. How crazy is that things like salt or cinnamon or frankly gold and silver are things that all of us humans imbue with value for a time and even do horrific things to each other in order to attain more of it. The human greed for salt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
alien type one, two, and three civilizations. So we've been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection. Yeah. Right. Maybe with the Dyson sphere, you start to get like a little bit more type two, but it feels like if you have a type two civilization, it won't be just the Dyson sphere. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
It feels like that just for the same reason you mentioned climate change, but now at the star system level, they're probably expanding. Yeah. Right, so how would you detect a type 2?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So pollution of all different kinds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, the whole task of looking for anomalies, something that looks not like the lunar surface, you make it sound obvious, but it's not exactly obvious. Like anomalies is really not. I mean, detect something that doesn't look right about this room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
It's, it's actually really difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah. Maybe when you're looking at a spectrograph or something like it's still, it's still like it's going to look really weird potentially. Like we're kind of hypothesizing all the things that humans would build and how do we detect that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So dark and so fascinating we humans are. Anyway, on a basic level, just thirst. Something I've experienced in the Amazon jungle. Thirst for water. And for that, you need electrolytes too, not just water. Water and salt, plus magnesium and potassium. That is the basic thing you want the most when it is gone. And I got the chance, the gift, to experience it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, but also it is a great acceleration and we also are not good at predicting what that entails if it does keep accelerating. For example, somebody like Eric Weinstein often talks about we under invest in theoretical physics research. basically like we're trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus like trying to hack physics, sort of warp drives and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Because it's really hard to do space travel. And it seems like in the long arc of human history, if we survive, the way to really travel across long distances is going to be some new, totally new thing. So it's not, going to be an engineering problem. It's going to be a physics problem. A fundamental physics problem. A fundamental physics problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1. A drink I drink every day to feel better about myself. It's basically a great multivitamin. It's delicious. And frankly, I feel quite sad that I'm out of travel packs and I'm going to be gone for a time. And I will not have AG1.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, it's also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations. So you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years and you're not sad about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
that you'll never see the destination because you kind of have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
There's the show Silo, which raises the question of basically if you're putting on a generational ship. what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them. You might want to tell them a story that they believe. Because there is a society, there's human nature, there's like, how do you maintain homeostasis of that little society?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, that's a fascinating technical question, a social question, a psychology question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, I wonder what the state of the art is for a complex organism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
How long can you freeze and then unfreeze? Right. Maybe like with bacteria, you could do freeze and unfreeze.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I mean, it could, you know, which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe for humans, it seems like what makes a personality, it feels like you want to preserve a set of memories, right? Like if I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
as we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine-tuned on you, it raises a question, because to me, they've already passed the Turing test, as we traditionally have defined it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So if there's going to be an LLM that's able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it's gonna raise ethical and, I don't know, philosophical questions about what makes you you. If there's a thing that can talk exactly like you, what is the thing that makes you you? It's going to speak about your memories very effectively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
AG1 and Element are things that make me feel like I'm home. Like everything's going to be okay. I am bringing Element with me because it has these packets. But I went through all the AG1 travel packs. So that silly little thing... is one of the things that will make me feel homesick. Funny how that is. It's the little things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
What do you think aliens look like? So we talked about all the different kinds of biosignatures that might leave or technosignatures, but what would they look like when we show up? Are they going to have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they going to be carbon-based?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So that's about movement? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Anyways, the crazy things I do in terms of physical and mental perturbations to the bodily equilibrium on a daily basis is something that is rescued in part by making sure I get AG1 every single day. What am I going to do without AG1? You know what? I'll probably bring some with me. I changed my mind now and you should do the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system? Where is most of the cognition computation going on? Yeah, yeah. You could see that in organisms. Actually, I don't know how the brain evolved. Why does it have to be in one place?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But I wonder if we stretch out time across 10, 20 billion years, whether there's an Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms, and it switches to ideas, for example. Much more rapidly, you're operating maybe, I guess it's a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
is working hard to get to the first kind of organism that's able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete. And then it kind of stops evolving there. And then it's ideas that take off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. If you're still listening to this, Thank you. I'm deeply grateful for you, for your support, for being there for so many years. I love you all. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Adam Frank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Although you could argue that from a perspective of the entire human civilization, we're also directionless. We have a sense that there's a direction in this cluster of humans. Yeah. And then there's another cluster that has a different sense of direction. There's all kinds of religions that are competing. There's different ideologies that are competing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And when you just zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pinball system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
If there's advanced civilizations out there, what do you think is the proper protocol for interacting with them? Do you think they would be peaceful? Do you think they would be warlike? Like, what do we do next? We detect the civilizations through all the technosignatures we've been talking about. Maybe direct imaging, maybe there's a really strong signal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
We come up with a strategy of how to actually get there. But what's the, then the general says they always do. a military industrial complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Where, what kind of rockets, what kind of, and do we bring rockets? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But that's both sides have an interest in communicating, which you kind of suppose that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity. Because how do you become advanced without a kind of curiosity about the mysterious, about the other?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, yeah. Speaking of biases, do you think aliens have visited Earth? You've mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and we wouldn't even know about it if it was 100 million years ago. How can we even begin to answer this question?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
What about, speaking of biases, what about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room? Meaning like the potential of aliens, say, seeding life on Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Directed panspermia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com contact. Perhaps you could tell from my voice, on top of everything else, I'm also sick. What a wonderful, beautiful, challenging life this is, and I'm grateful for every second of it. All right, and now on to the full arteries. Let's go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So to you, the origin of life Is a pretty simple thing that doesn't require an alien.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
You wrote a book about aliens. So the big question, how many alien civilizations are out there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, so from a different perspective, I'm just saying it seems to me that there's obviously advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy and through the universe from the Drake equation perspective. And then if I was an alien, what would I do? You know, I've gotten a chance to learn about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. I recently went to the Amazon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
You get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon that are in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the uncontacted tribes. First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent towards the outside world, but everybody else try to stay away from them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
They try to kind of protect them, don't talk about them, don't talk about their location and all this kind of stuff. And I've begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you're doing that. And if I was an alien civilization, I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And of course, there's always the teenager or the troll who's going to start messing with the stuff or the scientists, you know? Yeah, right. And so... It's not, from our perspective, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And if you're in the Truman Show, like Occam's Razor, but like also the Occam's Razor from the perspective of the alien civilization, we have to have the humility to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
If we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them, or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization somewhere, on a nearby star system, what would we do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
And also, sorry, from a capitalist perspective,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I think when you say we, let's start with the people in this room, right? But there is, I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world because I think there's a lot of people the military, they will probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America. That's one perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Then there's the capitalists who will see like how the benefits and the costs here and how can I make money off of this? There's opportunity here. There's gold in them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientists is just not going to, unlike the movies, We're not going to get much say. They're going to put them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
They would engage probably. I mean, it's just as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
In our engagement. Yeah, yeah, probably. So using that trivial bias logic, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which brings up that old direct for me, paradox for me. What do you make of all the UFO sightings?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots. not scientific value, but just like, it's always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first step. So I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's something there. But unfortunately with this topic, there's so much excitement around it. There's a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
There's hoaxes, all this kind of stuff. So even if there's some signal, there's just so much noise, it's very difficult to operate with. So how do we get better signal? So you've talked about sort of, if we wanted to really search, for UFOs on Earth. And maybe detect things like weird physics. What kind of instruments would we be using?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I think that's brilliant. I mean, it's simple, not stupid. It's like literally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
But if I asked you, I give you a trillion dollars and ask you to allocate to one place, looking out, SETI or looking at earth, which should you allocate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is... either the sensors are not working correctly or it's secret military technology being tested.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
That said, I'm not saying that that's what this is. If I wasn't, the head of an alien civilization, and I chose to minimize the amount of contact I'm doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see? That's why the big heads in the humanoid form. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of how I would approach communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
If I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough. It's like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with a nail colony, I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication. Yeah, yeah. And maybe I would do a trivial thing like do like a fake ant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
A robot ant. But then it's not enough to just do a robot ant. You have to do a robot ant that like moves in the way they do. And maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants. But no. I do sort of, I just wanted to make the case for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Okay, let me ask the pothead question. Yet another pothead question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
It's science and pothead questions back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that's unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing physical objects? What if they take the form of, say, ideas? What if... real pothead, is that consciousness itself, like the subjective experience, is an alien being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Maybe ideas then is an easier one to visualize because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from human to human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
since you said it's the biggest question, which is an interesting thought experiment. What is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer? Some people might say about what happened before the Big Bang, some big physics questions about the universe. I can see the argument for how many alien civilizations or if there's other life out there. You want to speak to that a little bit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So one of the things you've done is simulated the formation of stars. How difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planets, like simulate your solar system through the entire evolution of the solar system? This is kind of a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Why is it the biggest question in your, why is it number one in your top five?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
So this is something that you write about in The Blind Spot, why science cannot ignore human experience, sort of trying to pull the fire into the process of science. And it's a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
I think you give a bunch of examples of that, like looking at temperature as a number. There's a very sort of objective scientific way of looking at that. And then there's the experience of the temperature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The following is a conversation with Jordan Jonas, winner of Alone Season 6, a show where the task is to survive alone in the Arctic wilderness longer than anyone else. He is widely considered to be one of, if not the greatest competitors on that show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on? The future of human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I think there's something about the sharpness of the knife's edge that gets humanity to really focus and step up and not screw it up. There is, just like you said with the cold, going out into the extreme cold, it wakes you up. I think the same thing with nuclear weapons. It just wakes up humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Exactly. And then we keep building more and more powerful things to make sure we stay awake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I can't wait. And hopefully I'll also get a chance to go out in the wilderness with you at some point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Awesome. Let's go. Thank you for talking today, brother. Thank you for everything you stand for. Thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Jonas. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And now, let me try a new thing, where I try to articulate some things I've been thinking about, whether prompted by one of your questions or just in general. If you'd like to submit a question, including an audio and video form, go to lexfreeman.com slash AMA. Now, allow me to comment on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. I've got a chance to recently visit the GPU cluster that Tesla AI and XAI are building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
First, as I've posted online, wishing Donald Trump good health after an assassination attempt is not a partisan statement. It's a human statement. And I'm sorry if some of you want to categorize me and other people into blue and red bins. Perhaps you do it because it's easier to hate than to understand. In this case, it shouldn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But let me say, once again, that I am not right-wing nor left-wing. I'm not partisan. I make up my mind one issue at a time, and I try to approach everyone and every idea with empathy and with an open mind. I have and will continue to have many long-form conversations with people both on the left and the right. Now, onto the much more important point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump should serve as a reminder that history can turn on a single moment. World War I started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And just like that, one moment in history, on June 18th, 1914, led to the death of 20 million people, half of whom were civilians.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
If one of the bullets on July 13th had a slightly different trajectory, where Donald Trump would end up dying in that small town in Pennsylvania, history would write a new dramatic chapter, the contents of which all the so-called experts and pundits would not be able to predict. It very well could have led to a civil war. Because the true depth of the division in the country is unknown.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
We only see the surface turmoil on social media and so on. And it is events like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand where we, as a human species, get to find out what the truth is. of where people really stand. The task, then, is to try and make our society maximally resilient and robust to such destabilizing events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The way to do that, I think, is to properly identify the threat, the enemy. It's not the left or the right that are the, quote, enemy. Extreme division itself is the enemy. Some division is productive. It's how we develop good ideas and policies. But too much leads to the spread of resentment and hate that can boil over into destruction on a global scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So we must absolutely avoid the slide into extreme division. There are many ways to do this, and perhaps it's a discussion for another time. But at the very basic level, let's continuously try to turn down the temperature of the partisan bickering and more often celebrate our obvious common humanity. Now, let me also comment on conspiracy theories. I've been hearing a lot of those recently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I think they play an important role in society. They ask questions that serve as a check on power and corruption of centralized institutions. The way to answer the questions raised by conspiracy theories is not by dismissing them with arrogance and feigned ignorance, but with transparency and accountability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
In this particular case, the obvious question that needs an honest answer is why did the Secret Service fail so terribly in protecting the former president? The story we're supposed to believe is that a 20-year-old untrained loner was able to outsmart the Secret Service by finding the optimal location on a roof for a shot on Trump from 130 yards away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
even though the Secret Service snipers spotted him on the roof 20 minutes before the shooting and did nothing about it. This looks really shady to everyone. Why does it take so long to get to a full accounting of the truth of what happened? And why is the reporting of the truth concealed by corporate government speak? Cut the bullshit. What happened? Who fucked up and why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That's what we need to know. That's the beginning of transparency. And yes, the director of the US Secret Service should probably step down or be fired by the president. And not as part of some political circus that I'm sure is coming, but as a step towards uniting an increasingly divided and cynical nation. Conspiracy theories are not noise, even when they're false.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
They are a signal that some shady, corrupt, secret bullshit is being done by those trying to hold on to power. Not always, but often. Transparency is the answer here, not secrecy. If we don't do these things, we leave ourselves vulnerable to singular moments that turn the tides of history. Empires do fall. Civil wars do break out and tear apart the fabric of societies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This is a great nation, the most successful collective human experiment in the history of Earth. And letting ourselves become extremely divided risks destroying all of that. So please ignore the political pundits, the political grifters, clickbait media, outrage-fueling politicians on the right and the left who try to divide us. We're not so divided. We're in this together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
As I've said many times before, I love you all. This is a long comment. I'm hoping not to do comments this long in the future and hoping to do many more. So I'll leave it here for today. But I'll try to answer questions and make comments on every episode. If you would like to submit questions, like I mentioned, including audio and video form, go to lexfreeman.com slash AMA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then there's the situation when you left the ladder up. Right. And you needed fat. And what is it? The ovary needs some of the fat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And now, let me leave you with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Well, yeah, they're really, really smart. They figure out a way to get to places really effectively. Wolverines are like fascinating in that way. So let's go to that happy moment. The moose. You are the first and one of the only contestants to have ever killed a moose on the show. A big game animal with a bow and arrow. So this is day 20. So can you take me through the kill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And, well, first of all, I was extremely impressed by the rapid rate of progress, and there's a lot more to be said about that. Maybe I'll have a conversation with Elon soon. But in general, I just want to comment how humbled I was by just the sheer scale of computation that a GPU cluster is carrying, and it's quickly growing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
finally got it can you actually speak to the the kill shot itself just for people who don't hunt yeah that's what it takes to stay calm to to to not freak out too much to like wait but not wait too long yeah yeah i mean another thing about hunting is that for every animal you get you probably don't get you know nine or ten that that this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And just being able to see that in person, it makes it very visceral, very real that these machine learning models have power. And that we as a civilization carry a heavy responsibility to make sure that we use them in a way that doesn't hurt others. And I think security vulnerabilities is the near term way of hurting others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's a muscle memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
With the animal in a situation like that. You said death is a part of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So it's really important to minimize the number of security vulnerabilities. The battle to minimize the number of bugs, the number of attack vectors, the size of the attack vectors on the machine learning models and on software in general is a worthy battle to fight. And so I'm glad Hidden Layer is fighting that battle, especially in the context of machine learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
the natural way of the predator and prey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're one of the predators where you have to be clever, you have to be quiet, you have to be calm, you have to, all of that. Yep. And the full challenge and the luck involved in catching it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
He has a fascinating life story that took him from a farm in Idaho and hoboing on trains across America to traveling with nomadic tribes in Siberia. All that helped make him into a world-class explorer, survivor, hunter, wilderness guide, and most importantly, a great human being with a big heart and a big smile. This was a truly fun and fascinating conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So if we step back, what are the 10 items you brought? And what's actually the challenge of figuring out which items to bring?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then in terms of trapping, you were okay with just the little you brought?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Visit hiddenlayer.com to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. I've used it for a long time for note-taking, and I think the process of note-taking is a science and an art and one I take extremely seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah. So like what, what's in terms of survival, if you were to do it over again, over and over and over and over, like how do you, um, maximize your chance of having enough food to survive for a long time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Writing is a process that's essential for concretizing your thoughts. Without that, thoughts are a kind of amorphous, ephemeral thing that just kind of shows up without a clear structure and leaves before you have a chance to really internalize it. So the process of writing does just that. It makes the thought more permanent, it gives it structure, and so note-taking is a process
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Well, in terms of being active, like, so you have to do stuff all day, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
so you get up so you get up and planning like what am i gonna in the in the midst of the frustration you have to figure out like what's what's the strategy like how do you put up all the traps what is that a decision like you know most people like sit at their desk and have like a calendar are you like figuring out like one thing about wilderness life in general is it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
instinct that's already loaded in. Like you already, just like wisdom from all the times you've had to do it before. You're just actually operating a lot on instinct. Like you said, where to place the shelter. Like how hard is that calculation, where to place the shelter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You said you have to consider where the action will be and you want to be away from the action but close enough to it. To see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
that I think is essential to thinking. And I use bullet points and nested bullet points, and Notion does that extremely well. And so I use Notion to organize my thoughts. But I think they also do an incredible job of collaboration for larger and larger teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So start with something that kind of works and then keep improving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I was wondering, I mean, the log cabin, it feels like that's a thing that takes a huge amount of work before it works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And it is a lot of calories. But that's an interesting sort of metaphor of just like get something that works. You see a lot of this with companies, like successful companies, they get a prototype, get a system that's working and improve fast in response to the conditions, to the environment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And you end up being a lot better if you're able to learn how to respond quickly versus having a big plan that takes a huge amount of time to accomplish. Right, and forcing that through the pipeline, whether or not it fits. Can you just speak to the place you were, the Canadian Arctic? It looked cold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And they integrate an AI assistant into the whole thing that helps you summarize, and doing all the LLM things that you now expect, but they do that in a seamless way. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah. So language travels somehow. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah. Within languages contains a history of a people's and it's interesting how that evolves over time and how wars tell the story. Like language tells the story of conflict and conflict shapes language and we get the result of that. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and the barriers that language creates is also the thing that leads to wars and misunderstandings and all this kind of stuff. It's a fascinating tension. Uh, but it got cold there, right? It got real cold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I've set one up in a few minutes at lexgaming.com slash store to sell a few shirts. There's something about the ease and scale and the efficiency of Shopify that always makes me think about the machinery of capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Well, there's a psychological element to just, I mean, it's unpleasant. If I were to think of what kind of unpleasant would I choose, you know, fasting for long periods of time, going without food in a warm environment is way more pleasant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
then uh being fed in a cold yeah exactly like if you were to choose i choose the opposite oh yeah okay there you go i wonder if that's i wonder if you're born with that or if that's developed maybe your time in siberia like you or or do you gravitate towards i wonder what that is because i really don't like survival in the cold i think a little bit of it is learned he like almost learned not you learn not to fear it you learn to kind of appreciate it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah. I think some of it is just opening yourself up to the possibility that there's something enjoyable about it. Like, Here, I run in Austin all the time in 100-degree heat, and I go out there with a smile on my face and learn to enjoy it. Oh, yeah. I look kind of like you do in the cold. I don't think I enjoy the heat, but you just allow yourself to enjoy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I mean, you're right. It does make you feel alive. Maybe that's the thing that I struggle with is the time passes slower because it does make you feel alive. You get to feel time. but then the flip side of that is you get to feel every moment and you get to feel alive in every moment. So it's, it's both scary when you're inexperienced and, and beautiful when you are experienced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Were there times when you got hungry?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
and also because I've been beginning to read the history of human civilization as covered by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, I suddenly feel humbled by the scale of it all and how capitalism As an idea, the modern version of it, is a relatively recent one, just a handful of centuries, just with the Industrial Revolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Oh, wow. Okay, we'll have to talk about it. So you caught a fish. You caught a couple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You caught 13 fish?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This is like a meme at this point. You're a perfect example of a person who was thriving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This is off mic. We're talking about Gordon Ryan competing in jujitsu. And maybe that's the challenge he also has to face is to make things look hard. Because he's so dominant in the sport that in terms of the drama and the entertainment of the sport, and in this case of survival, it has to be difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And we humans have been battling with this idea, whether the means of production should be owned by the state or by the individual. And now everybody's talking like that's such an obvious thing, but it isn't. Every genius idea is obvious in retrospect, and the entire story of humans on Earth is a long chain of experiments, successful and failed ones, and from each we'll learn, and we always rise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So you're able to, given the boredom, given the loneliness, kind of zoom out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I think there's actual power to doing this kind of documenting, like talking to a camera or an audio recorder. That's an actual tool in survival. I had a little bit of an experience of being out alone in the jungle and just being able to talk to a thing is much less lonely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Hope really does die. You really don't know. You really hope to find. I mean, if an apocalypse happens, I think your whole life will be coming about finding the other person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
No, no. I think if you knew, if some way you knew for sure, I think your mind will start doubting it. That whoever told you you're the last person, whatever was lying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Also, you might, if you are indeed the last person, you might want to be documenting it. for once you die, an alien species comes about. Because whatever happened on Earth is a pretty special thing, and if you're the last one, you might be the last person to tell the story of what happened. And so that's gonna be a way to convince yourself that this is important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And so the days will go by like this, but it will be lonely. Boy, would that be lonely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, I mean, there is going to be existential dread. But also, I don't know, I think hope will burn bright. You'll be looking for other humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That's the fascinating thing about us humans. We always survive. We always find a way. That's actually one of the central kernels behind my optimism about the future of humanity. But anyway, back to a store. If you want to set one up, sign up for a dollar per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah. That'd be a pretty cool survival situation though, if you're the last person on earth. If you could share it. If you could share it. Yeah. Like I said, many people consider you the most successful competitor on a loan. The other successful one is Roland Welker, Rockhouse guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This is just a fun, ridiculous question, but head to head, who do you think survives longer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But Roland's a beast. So for people who don't know, they put a hundred day cap on. So it's whoever can survive a hundred days for that season. It's interesting to hear that for you, the uncertainty, not knowing when it ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's the hardest. That's true. It's like you wake up every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And when you found out that you won and your wife was there, it was funny because you're really happy. There's great sort of moment of you reuniting, but also there's a state of shock of like, you look like you were ready to go much longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So what was your diet like? What was your eating habits like during that time? How many meals a day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. And actually, back to capitalism, because once again, business is at the core of the capitalist machine. I find that there is various communities now that dedicate themselves to rigorously analyzing the failures of capitalism at the edges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
How did you... What's the secret to, like, protecting food? What are the different ways to protect food?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Let's step to the... the early days of jordan so uh your uh instagram handle is hobo jordo so early on in your life you uh hoboed around the u.s on freight trains what's the story behind that my brother when he was 17 or so he just decided to go hitchhiking and he hitchhiked down to reno from idaho everywhere and uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But in those communities and in general, we don't often celebrate the positive impacts, the positive metrics over time that capitalism has resulted in in society. And I think just the number of people living in poverty decreasing drastically under regimes that enable free markets should serve as a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
the people along the way because i took a road trip across the u.s also and there was a there's a romantic element there too of like of the freedom of the Well, maybe for me, not knowing what the hell I'm going to do with my life, but also excited by all the possibilities. And then you meet a lot of different people and a lot of different kinds of stories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And also, like, a lot of people that support you for traveling. Yeah. Because there's a lot of people kind of dream of experiencing that freedom, at least the people I've met. And they usually don't. They usually don't go outside of their little town. They have a thing, and they have a family usually, and they don't explore. They don't take the leap. And you can do that when you're young.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I guess you could do that at any moment. Just say fuck it and leap into the abyss of being on the road. But anyway, what did you learn about this country, about the people in this country?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
inspiring notion for anyone who wants to build a business, for the very fact that humans build businesses, that we together keep trying. It's the craziest thing. To start a business is the craziest idea, because most likely you're going to fail. It really is the stupidest possible thing, except it is not. except that dream is the very engine that enables progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
vital like the vitality of life was in him but it was just so permeated with drugs and alcohol too it's kind of i wonder what because i've met people like that they're like they're just yeah joy permeates the whole way of being and they're like they've been through some shit they have scars they've got rough but they always got a big smile there's a guy i met in the jungle named pico he lost the leg and he uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Drives a boat, and he just always has a big smile, even given the hardship he has to get through. Everything requires a huge amount of work, but he's just a big smile, and there's stories in those eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
appreciate life and look at it and smile any advice for to take a road trip again or if somebody else is thinking of hopping on a freight train it's way easier now because you have a map on your phone you know you're going you're kind of cheating now it's not about the destiny because the map is about the destination right uh but here is like yeah right give a chance where are you going yeah going anywhere exactly i say do it like go out and do things especially when you're young uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So I'm a big fan of startups, of small businesses, and grateful that humans take the risk, and I'm grateful that humans find a way. Anyway, NetSuite is a good tool to manage businesses. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
well that one downside of hitchhiking is people talk a lot oh they do so it's it's both the pro and the con yeah yeah because they'll you know sometimes you just want to be sort of alone with your thoughts or it's there is a kind of lack of freedom and having to listen to a person that's giving you a ride it's so true and then you don't know how to react i mean i was young remember i got picked up i was probably 19 or something and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I'm going to take the freight train next time. So how'd you end up in Siberia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This episode is also brought to you by Element, an electrolyte drink that I love and depend on, especially when I'm taking long distance runs in Austin heat. It's often 95, 100 degree Fahrenheit, and I love it. 10, 12, 15 miles, let's go. But yes, you have to consume a large amount of electrolytes before and after to make sure I'm feeling good. One of these days I should probably run a marathon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Before we talk about Yura and fur trapping, let's actually rewind and would you describe that moment when you were in the darkness as a crisis of faith?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But you were sort of radiating, like you said, leads with love. So you were radiating this kind of camaraderie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Let me also mention that at the end, after the episode, I'll start answering some questions and we'll try to articulate my thinking on some top of mind topics. So if that's of interest to you, keep listening after the episode is over. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But I don't run for time. I don't run to a destination. I don't run because I have to. I don't really run for exercise sake. I run so I can think clearly and contend with the heavier of my thoughts. Because when I'm out there just by myself, whether no sound or brown noise in my ears, I get to really think clearly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What was it like learning the Russian language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
the words can be jumbled in a way and somehow in the process of jumbling some humor some some uh musicality comes out it's interesting like you can be witty in russian much easier than you can in english like witty and funny and and also with poetry you can say profound things by messing with words in the order of words which is hilarious because uh you had a great conversation with Joe Rogan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And on that program, you talked about how to say, I love you in Russian, which is hilarious. And it was, for me, the first, I don't know why, you were a great person to articulate that. the flexibility and the power of the Russian language. That's really interesting. Because you were saying like, .
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You could say every single order, every single combination of ordering of those words has the same meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Oh, yeah, definitely. I've recently become a fan, actually, of Larisa Volkonsky and Richard Previer. They're these world-famous translators of Russian literature. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bulgakov, Pasternak. they've helped me understand just how much of an art form translation really is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Some authors do that art more translatable than others, like Dostoevsky is more translatable, but then you can still spend a week on one sentence. Like just how do I exactly capture this very important sentence
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But I think what's more powerful is not like literature, but conversation, which is one of the reasons I've been carrying and feeling the responsibility of having conversations with Russian speakers, because I can still see the music of it. I can still see the wit of it. And in conversation comes out like really... interesting kinds of wisdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
When I listen to world leaders that speak Russian speak, and I see the translation, and it loses. It loses the irony. In between the words, if you translate them literally, you lose the reference in there to the history of the peoples.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
There's something about sort of physical challenge, especially the higher pace, where I start getting uncomfortable and the uncomfortable thoughts rise up and I get to think. And I get to face those thoughts and either meditate them away or try to figure out what is the kernel of the thing that disturbs me about those thoughts. What is it so uncomfortable? What is the thing that causes anxiety?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I think the thing I see the most lost in translation is the humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
To be honest – This person that came from – descended upon us. Totally. All full of love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Can you talk about their way of life? So like when you're doing fur trapping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
How do you get from one trapping location to the next?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
This could be everything from intellectual, philosophical type thoughts, technical, design, engineering challenges, or just personal life stuff. All of it. So, I love running for that reason. So, if you want to join me in the element deliciousness, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelements.com. This episode is also brought to you by Asleep. It's pod for ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
He chopped a hole in the ice to drink. To get some water. It's got to be one of the worst days of your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, and he probably was through similar kinds of things. Who knows, yeah. What gave you strength in those hours when you're going to waist-high snow, all of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Eyes are afraid, hands do. I'm sure there's a poetic way to translate that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
One of the things I've realized that was helpful in the jungle, that was one of the biggest realizations for me, is it really sucks right now. But when I look back at the end of the day, I won't really remember exactly how much it sucked. I have a vague notion of it sucking and I'll remember the good things. So being dehydrated, I'll remember drinking water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I won't really remember the hours of feeling like shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
If you survive, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So you mentioned you've learned about hunger during these times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
The ultra part is the extra thing, the base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame. It can morph like gravity does to space-time. The surface, the shape, the landscape of your bed, so it can put you in a reading position, for example. Now, it's not just the bass. Without the UltraPod 4, it's still a big upgrade to Pod 3. It doubles the cooling power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So injuries plus very low calorie intake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And exhausted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Wow. So everybody gets, I mean, yeah, first come, first serve, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So you mentioned the axe and you gave me a present. This is probably the most badass present I've ever gotten. So tell me the story of this axe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It just upgrades a bunch of different stuff. I love it. It's a sacred place for me for the nap or the full night's sleep. The older I get, the more I understand the power of a good night's sleep. Now, of course, you also want to be flexible and robust to the craziness, the madness of That life brings your way, but when you can, find those hours of sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I mean, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What kind of stuff are you using the axe for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That little quiet escape from the boiling turmoil of the world. Go to asleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This is the Lex Rubin Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Jonas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I guess that should teach you to not act when you're in a state of frustration or anger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I saw that you mentioned that you look for fat wood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What was that? That was oil?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I don't know how many times I've watched Happy People, A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog. You've talked about this movie. Where is that located relative to where you were?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What would you say about their way of life, maybe in the way you've experienced it and the way you saw in Happy People? There's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You won Alone season six and I think are still considered to be one of, if not the most successful survivor on that show. So let's go back. Let's look at the big picture. Can you tell me about the show Alone? How does it work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's funny that the people that go trapping experience that happiness and still don't have a self-awareness to stop themselves from then drinking and doing all the dark stuff when they go to the village. it's, it's strange that you're not able to, you're in it, you're happy, but you're not able to sort of reflect on that, the nature of that happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
fiddles away and i just but it's funny that that the comfort you find there's a draw to comfort but once you get to the comfort once you find the comfort within that comfort you become the lesser version of yourself yeah for sure it's weird what a lesson for us like we need we need to keep struggling yeah a lot of times you have to force yourself in that so like if we took
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What do you learn from that on the nature of happiness? What does it take to be happy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So you have, just because you mentioned Gulag Archipelago, I got to go there. You have some suffering in your family history. Yeah. whether it's the Armenian-Assyrian genocide or the Nazi occupation of France. Maybe you could tell the story of that. What... This survival thing, it runs in your blood, it seems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You have to figure out the shelter, you have to figure out the source of food, and then it gets colder and colder because I guess they drop you out in a moment where it's going into the winter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
They loved it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I mean, that's a lot to go through. What lessons do you draw from that on perseverance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Like where their ability to escape genocide, to escape,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
uh nazi occupation gave them a gratitude for life oh it's not a trauma in the sense like you're forever bearing it it the flip side of that is just gratitude to be alive when you know so many people did not survive yeah it must be because the only footage i saw my grandma was like they were all the kids and stuff and they were cooking up a rabbit that they were raising or whatever and they uh uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
We got Hidden Layer for securing your AI models, Notion for team collaboration and taking notes, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for managing your business, Element for electrolytes, and 8sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And be the beacon of that, represent that kind of perseverance in the, in the, in the simpler way that something like survival in the wilderness shows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So that's on the survivor side. What about on the people committing the atrocities? What do you make of the Ottomans, what they did to Armenians or the Nazis, what they did to the Jews, the Slavs, and basically everyone? What do you... why do you think people do evil in this world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I think one thing. faith in God can do is humble you before these kinds of complexities of the world. And humility is a way to avoid the slippery slope towards evil, I think. Humility that you don't know who the good guys and the bad guys are. And you defer that to sort of bigger powers to try to understand that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I think there's a kind of, a lot of the atrocities were committed by people who are very sure of themselves being good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It is sad that religion is at times used as a way to kind of just, as yet another tool for justification. Exactly, yeah. Which is a sad application of religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, I've been listening to Jordan Peterson talk about this. He has a way of articulating things, which are sometimes hard to understand in the moment, but when I read it carefully afterwards, it starts to make more sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I've heard him talk about religion and God as a kind of base layer, like a metaphorical substrate from which morality of our sense of what is right and wrong comes from, and just our conceptions of what is beautiful in life. all these kinds of higher things that are like fuzzy, understand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
That their religion helps create the substrate for which we as a species, as a civilization, can come up with these notions, and without it, you are lost at sea. I guess for him, morality requires that substrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But ultimately, God is sort of the thing that's formless, that is unbounded. Right. But we humans need... I mean, that's the purpose of stories. They resonate with something in us. But when you need the sort of the bounded nature, the constraints of those stories, otherwise we wouldn't be able to like. Can't relate to it. Can't relate to it. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And then when you look at the stories literally or you just look at them just as they are, it seems silly. Mm-hmm. It's too simplistic. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And it's interesting that you say that the way to know what's right and wrong is you have to live it. Sometimes it's probably very difficult to articulate, but in the living of it, do you realize it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
In the striving of the ideal, in the striving towards the ideal, you discover how to be a better person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Actually, there's a few moments like when you left the ladder up or with the moose that you kind of screwed up a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
valuable in this and wrestle with it and so i just i chose that path well i do think it's a it's a kind of wrestling match because i'm you mentioned gulag archipelago i'm very much a believer that we all have the capacity for good and evil and striving for the ideal to be a good human being is not a trivial one
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You have to find the right tools for yourself to be able to be the candle, as you mentioned before. And then for that, religion and faith can help. I'm sure there's other ways, but I think it's grounded in understanding that each human is able to be a really bad person and a really good person. And that's like a choice. It's a deliberate choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
How do you go from that moment of like frustration to the moment of acceptance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And it's a choice that's taken every moment and builds up over time. And the hard part about it is you don't know You don't always have the clarity using reason to understand what is good and what is right and what is wrong. You have to kind of live it with humility and constantly struggle. Because then yeah, you might wake up in a society where you're committing genocides.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And you think you're the good guys. And I think you have to have the courage to realize you're not. It's not always obvious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And only history has the clarity to show who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
job is to work on that within ourselves yeah that's the part that's uh what i like sort of the full quote talks about the the fact that it moves it moves from the line moves moment by moment day by day we have the uh the freedom to uh move that line so it's like it's very deliberate thing it's not like you're born this way and that's that's it Yeah, I agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And especially in conditions that are like war and peace, in the case of the camps, absurd levels of injustice. Yeah. In the face of all that, when everything is taken away from you, you still have the choice to be the candle, like the grandmas. By the way, grandmas in like all parts of the world are like the strongest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's like, I don't know what it is. I don't know. They have this, like, wisdom that comes from patience and have seen it all. They've seen all the bullshit of the people that have come and gone, all the abuses of power, all of this. I don't know what it is. And they just keep going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What do you think of... As we've gotten a bit philosophical, what do you think of Werner Herzog's style of narration? I kind of wish he narrated my life. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Because that documentary is actually in Russian. I think he took a longer series, yeah, and then put narration over it. And that narration can transform a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, they always go pretty dark. Do they? He has a very dark sense about nature that is violence and it's murder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, the indifference is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What do you think about the connection to the animals? So in that movie, it's with the dogs, and with you, it's the other domesticated, the reindeer. What do you think about that human-animal connection?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Have you been able to accept your own death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Did you ever confront death while in survival situations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What would you say that's primarily because just the food sources are limited?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, it's fascinating, not just humans, but to watch how animals have figured out how to survive. Watching like a documentary on polar bears, like... they just figure out a way, and they get, and they've been doing it for generations, and they figure out a way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
They travel, like, hundreds of miles to, like, to the water to get fat, and they travel 100 miles to, like, for whatever other purpose, because they want to stay on the ice, I don't know. But it's like, there's a process, and they figure it out against the long odds, and some of them don't make it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What do you think it would take to break you? Let's say mentally. Like if you're in a survival situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
And I mean, in your own family history, there's people who have survived that. Right. Maybe that would give you hope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
But in a survival situation, there's very few things that... I don't know what it would be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Oh, that's interesting. I mean, that is a real difficult battle when there's an exit, when it's easy to quit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, that's a thing that gets louder and louder the harder things get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You don't know what the limit is. I don't know. Injuries, like physical stuff, is annoying though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
It's inspiring that people figure out a way. With migraines, that's a hard one, though. If you have headaches. It's so hard. Oh, man. Because those can be really painful. It's overwhelming. And dizzying and all of this. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You wrote a note on your blog in 2012, you spent five weeks-ish in the forest alone. I just thought it was interesting, because this is in contrast to on the show alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
You were really alone, like you're not talking to anybody, and you realize that, you're right, I remember at one point after several weeks had passed, I wandered into a particularly beautiful part of the woods and exclaimed out loud, wow. It struck me that it was the first time I had heard my own voice in several weeks with no one to talk to. Did your thoughts go into some deep place?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Spend time hanging out with the skeletons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
So you said you guide people. What are your favorite places to go to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
I like how you actually have a... It might be a YouTube video or your Instagram post where you give them a recommendation of the best fishing hole in the world. And you give detailed instructions on how to get there. But it's like a journey of life. It's like a Lord of the Rings type of journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Have you been back there yet? Back to where the Alone show was?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
What advice would you give to people in terms of how to... be in nature, so like hikes to take or journeys to take out in nature where it could take you to that place where the busyness and the madness of the world can dissipate and you can be with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#437 – Jordan Jonas: Survival, Hunting, Siberia, God, and Winning Alone Season 6
Yeah, that's cool you did. Yeah, it's cool. And I recorded stuff, so that helped. Oh, good, yeah. So you sit there and you record the thoughts. Actually, for having to record the thoughts, I had to, like, it forced me to really think through what I was feeling to convert the feelings into words, which is not a trivial thing because... it's mostly just feeling you feel a certain kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
The following is a conversation with Kimball Musk, a longtime entrepreneur and chef and author of a new cookbook called The Kitchen Cookbook, Cooking for Your Community. You should check it out. It is, in fact, the first cookbook I've ever owned. I've already made stuff from it, and it's delicious. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Although at this point, do you honestly disagree that Messi is the greatest of all time? Is there even a competition? I mean, you can appreciate the human, the genius of different players throughout the history of soccer, but Lionel Messi is just on another level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
To disappear to some place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Wherever that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But that path has been paved somewhere in your mind in childhood, so it could be easy to walk down it. You and Elon were close growing up. You're still close. What did you learn from each other? How did you complement each other?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's what it feels like. The only reason I enjoy those places is the full absurdity of exactly that. Right, it's totally absurd. What are we doing? What is this? What is this like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You just came out with a cookbook. By the way, thank you for giving me my first cookbook. I feel legit. I love that it's your first cookbook. I'm going to keep it on the counter and it's going to give me legitimacy when anyone comes over. Hey, listen, I'm basically a chef now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
When did you first fall in love with cooking?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Anyway, at this very moment, I'm drifting downwards in terms of energy, and I just know that after this, I'll take a nap for maybe even 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes, on the said eight-sleeve bed. It'll be cool, the warm blanket, and when I get up, the birds will be chirping, there'll be butterflies, In my mind, it'll just be all perfect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What is that about food that like brings people together and not just together, but like really together where you're like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I'll sit down, maybe a little bit of caffeine, and just get back to work. Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleeve.com. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN, a thing I've used for many years to bring me joy. Speaking of said butterflies, it just brings me joy. What is life about? Really? Really. Surround yourself with cool people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, I think you connect on a different level, not on the level of like... the conspiracy, but on the level of basic humanity. That's what you really connect on. And then it almost becomes interesting and fun that you can exchange ideas, even crazy ideas, out there ideas, and kind of play with them. We humans are good at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And there's something about food that... that completely i don't know it must be uh evolutionary that it it makes us vulnerable in a way that even just standing there for a prolonged period of time doesn't there's something about you know like when the animals gather to the water or whatever yeah right like this kind of experience where you're just like all right let's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
let's just acknowledge together that we need sustenance. And somehow that kind of grounds us to like, we're just a bunch of descendants of apes here, just kind of like grateful to be alive, frankly, and grateful to be consuming this thing, which keeps us alive. And in that context, you can talk about all kinds of stuff. You can discuss flat earth and enjoy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So you get to see this. You get to see this at the kitchen, and you said Boulder, Denver, Chicago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's what I saw. When? In October is the goal. In October is the goal. Well, I mean, speaking of characters and human beings, Austin is fascinating. I've I forget how long ago, a couple months ago, I was just sitting at a bar, and the two people were talking, and they were talking about Marxism, and it turns out that they're anarcho-communists, which is a thing, and I got into this conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Anyway, they were beautiful people. I think they're local from Austin. I don't know the depth of their personal experience of the different kinds of communist-like systems, but it was fascinating to listen to and then get to know them and the humanity, the weirdness, like the characters. It's just, I mean, I love it. One of the reasons I really love Austin, I decided to be here is just the fact
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Surround yourself with products that make your life easier and products that fill your life with joy. It's perhaps ridiculous to say, but ExpressVPN has been with me for so many years that it's just like one of the thing in the cyber world I exist in. I spend so much time behind the computer. a reliable thing I have across all operating systems. I have it on Linux. I have it on Windows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
the cliche thing of keep Austin weird. I mean, there's a lot of weird characters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Which makes the restaurant seem great because you have all these characters come in. It's great. So I look forward to that. But you were saying like, you get to see humans in real life interact. That's one of the beautiful things over food. In the book you write, Picasso once said, the meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Then you wrote that you believe food is a gift we give ourselves three times a day. Can you explain that, the gift nature of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. You're a little bit wondering, like, what does everyone else think about our little cluster? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And also, depending on your personality, if you're an extrovert, maybe you want to show off to the other clusters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Everyone turns. That's right. And then it's back to the watering hole because when you wear a cowboy hat, you just might actually not... Yeah, I'm like, they're going to get me first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So in 2004, you opened The Kitchen. It's an American bistro restaurant. What was it like? What's it like running a restaurant? The good, the bad, and the ugly. What's the easy, what's the fun, and what's the hard?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I have it on Android. And I don't use other operating systems often, but I do have an iPhone and I have it on that as well. Anyway, you can go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free to check them out. to bring a little bit of joy into your life, but actually more importantly, to have that basic layer of protection when you need it on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. And it's so hard to read humans because you have to, if you got it right, that can look a million different ways depending on the emotional rollercoaster that human is living through. Like I've been some very low points and I've gone to like a restaurant alone and just sitting there and be truly happy was just the Zen aspect of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it was just a great, like a great steak or something like this. And maybe to other people around me would look like I'm very unhappy just because I'm,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, within myself. But I'm truly happy within that struggle. So, yeah, it's interesting. But you can kind of tell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. What is that about bars? That's a different experience. You said the table, the communal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But there's also strangers kind of next to you. There's a feeling with a bar that you're kind of alone together. Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And friends, you shall need it. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. The kids these days, the cool ones, call it an ERP system. ERP is the brain at the center of the machine. A company is a machine that runs the machine. And at the meta level, the capitalist system is a machine of machines. So there's a lot of machines in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, I mean, it would be remiss not to mention the other use of the bar, which is like when you're going through some shit in life and you just go. I mean, that's sort of the... It's the cliche thing. I've been... But like the bar makes the melancholy somehow like... rich and beautiful and you feel heard in the silence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You don't know where to go, exactly. The bar, yeah, you're right. For men especially, it's a place to just go and just, I don't know, what is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It is the best way to support this podcast. We got 8sleep for naps, ExpressVPN for security and privacy on the interwebs, NetSuite for business, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me for a bunch of different reasons, please go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. Like the movie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Like of a people's in general. Like it doesn't necessarily mean this part of town, but it could be the entire society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, it could be empty, it could be full. Empty bars, there's a magic to those too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You could still feel that energy. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's just you and the bartender. I mean, some of my greatest experiences is just the quiet bar. Totally. It's just me and the bartender and they're doing their thing. And they've seen so many... I've almost like, through osmosis somehow, feel the stories that that bartender has seen, has felt, has heard. Yeah. And all that kind of stuff. I mean, that... Not to be sort of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
On that day, at that moment, that was the best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
They look really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I love veggies and fruit. What's your favorite fruit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Anytime I say the word machine, I think about Burt Kreischer, but I think... He is probably not the kind of machine that would be efficient at running a large-scale company. So he's a different kind of machine. He is indeed a machine, but a different kind. If you wanted a machine that's running your company and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I love the way you casually said it, like an apple. A good apple is pretty great. For me, it's a problem, I think. Probably cherries, number one. Probably, what are they called? Granny Smith apples, number two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What about veggies? You wrote that Chef Hugo, that you worked with the co-founder of The Kitchen With, taught you the power of a good vegetable. What's the power of a good vegetable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, carrot for me is probably number one. I have rigorous detailed rankings for fruit and veggies. That's amazing. We'll get into it. Well, I am the kind of person that would have like a spreadsheet for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But I'm mostly just making fun of myself. I do love carrots. I wish they weren't. so full of carbs, but,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, I think one of the biggest problems with diets is it adds stress when you do have that perfect bowl of pasta. If you have categorized yourself as a low-carb eating person, You might be very stressed about enjoying this thing when you should just let go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
creating a sort of common language where the different modules of the company can communicate, and just taking care of the messy stuff, the HR stuff, the managing financials, inventory, supply, e-commerce, all that kind of stuff. NetSuite is something you should check out. 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, and they are turning 25 this year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. I mean, I would say, like, for me, there's things that make me feel really good. But they're not rules. They're not rules. They're like go-to favorites in terms of diet and so on. For example, I've mostly been eating once a day for the longest time. But that's not a rule. It's completely flexible. And I've mostly been eating very low carb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, it's not, you know, because it's usually a very sort of meat-heavy. It's not like portions are not that big. But your body needs food. Yeah, body needs food. So you're talking about like 2,000 calories. What you find out is like that dinner... is like the most social time of the day. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. But like you said, I deviate. You know, I'm more afraid of missing the perfect dessert, the perfect breakfast, the perfect bowl of pasta, pizza, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, right. I don't think of it as a cheat day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, I want to make clear that it's not one meal a day always, and I'm like this very strict thing. You always have to be open to the experience, to the new experience. Otherwise, you do miss out. Just like you said, hay fever. I think if you want to be really safe, you should never leave your home
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But it certainly doesn't maximize the joy of whatever makes life worth living. It doesn't maximize that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You wrote in the book that Anthony Bourdain was one of your heroes. Can you speak to what inspired you about him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
He gave the advice of don't be afraid, get excited, and cook with love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Wish them a happy birthday, send them a cake. Download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com for your own KPI checklist. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. You can get therapy for an individual, you can get therapy for couples.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's why you love scrambled eggs. I do that. That's in the book, Kimball's Scrambled Eggs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You promised to make me scrambled eggs and I'm going to hold you to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
A cooking school you mentioned, the French Culinary Institute. I heard it was a... a bit of a rough experience in parts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Are there specific technical lessons you remember you learned from that? Sort of how to cut carrots or... how to approach food, how to prepare food, how to think about food, how to carry yourself in the kitchen. You know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I'm a big fan of using words to delve deep into the human mind. So talk therapy is great, and BetterHelp is just a really easy way to start. It's discreet, affordable, available anywhere. More than 4.4 million people have gotten help. It's wild. They have over 34,000 licensed therapists. 350 million messages, chat, phone calls, video sessions have been had online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I mean, can you speak to that? Because a lot of people hearing this would be like, scrambled eggs. Why do you need to be a master chef to really make scrambled eggs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So it's like Jero dreams of sushi, Kimball dreams of scrambled eggs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I like how usually there's wine connoisseurs. You're saying, going back to sort of farm to table, when you're talking about carrots, in that same rigor and nuance, you have to consider the different farms involved for the carrots. In that same way, you have to consider the different salts involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
In terms of the measurement, the proportion, the amount of salt you put in, are you doing that exactly or are you doing it by feel? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And just imagine the mass of the human exploration that goes on there. I encourage you to join this collective exploration of the Jungian shadow. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Kimball Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I think you talk about roast chickens where your love of food began. What about steak? I love a good steak. It's so great. So in the French school... You add sauces and all this kind of stuff. And in boulders, when you realize, like, there's a beauty to the basic ingredient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What's your favorite kind of meat? It's New York strip, probably New York strip for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But the basic ingredients you're playing with is salt and pepper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Bold move, Kimball. Bold move. What are you, since you're in Austin quite a bit, opening... a restaurant here, what do you think about barbecue? It's kind of the Texas way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, I especially love the communal, like how they structure restaurants usually. Or I don't even want to call it a restaurant because it doesn't feel like a restaurant. It feels like a tavern or some sort. Like Terry Black's is like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
they know what you're getting into yeah and it there's just wood everywhere and it's kind of has this feel like this place has been around forever it's not changing i know it's the 21st century with the internet and all this kind of yeah nonsense that you people are building but really this is all about the same yes it's been the same for generations we're doing it the same that kind of feel like if you want to escape the world in that way and then truly connect with people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
There's also like a legend to certain places. Certain places are more than just the food they create. It's like, that could be a burden. You have to like live up to the legendary nature of the name.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. In 2010, you had a life-threatening accident that changed the way you see life, the world, also the way you see food and cooking. Can you tell me the story of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Growing up in South Africa, you said it was a violent place. What are some formative moments that you remember from that time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Do you remember your thoughts from the moment it happened to, like, the way you got to the hospital?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Did you think you were going to die at that, like in those seconds, minutes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So this kind of intense state of confusion, I wonder if it's like a weird psychological defense mechanism of like taking you away from the obvious possibility of death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
The human body is fascinating. Man. Wow. So they were able...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So you're not a religious person, but... You do call it the voice of God. Who is that God, do you think? Like, who is that? Where did that come from?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But who are you? Like, how deep does it go? What does you mean? You could be, you know, first of all, like, the depth of what the human mind even is is a gigantic mystery, consciousness, all of it. Like, who are you? It's like, yeah, maybe it is you, but then maybe in order to build you, we need to build the universe. Like you are actually a fundamentally a part of this whole human society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So the pieces of humans that you've interacted with are all within you. And then maybe the history of the humans that came before are also in there. And maybe the entirety of life on earth is also in there. And whatever the... whatever brought life about on Earth is in there somewhere. So that's all you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So you are the watcher watching the feelings and thoughts, but there's also another presence next to you almost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And that might be the thing, part of the thing you met when you took ayahuasca.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Can you go through that experience? Because I'm actually traveling to the Amazon jungle in a month. I'll probably do ayahuasca for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So I need a preview. Unofficial instruction manual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But before 2010, the accident and the two transformational experiences you had, you were a very successful entrepreneur. tech CEO. Maybe go back to the early days with Zip2. In 1994, you and Elon started Zip2. Tell me the story of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
First time across America?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And especially when you're on a road trip. Because I've taken a road trip across the United States and there's a part of people where they... They really love that. I think part of them wants to do that also, wants to escape whatever the local, the struggles, just whatever the mundaneness, the struggle of life are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
A road trip is a kind of thing where you're like, you know what, I'm going to get away from it all, and I'm going to experience life in the full. The epic sort of Jack Kerouac way of seeing America. The people, not the tourist sites, just the humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You could just say you went to the Grand Canyon, too, just at night. And just visit different places when the car broke down. I love it. So, yes, you took the road trip before finding Zip2.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Except I'm not an alien. Allegedly. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by... Power naps. The act of napping. The act of sleep, but the act of napping fundamentally is where all of life's joys come from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, if that doesn't fuel you with excitement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's an interesting point you make. Underlying the violence is a kind of,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, and then also see the possibility of where that goes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You're going to have to face that failure every time you meet your family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
philosophy that human life is disposable the individual life is disposable i mean that underlies many ideologies you know i grew up in the soviet union the value of human life was lower there than in the united states the value of the individual in the united states is really high yeah it's probably an index you can put together like yeah right exactly per nation that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So to you, that humility is essential for the entrepreneur, especially young.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So you went from that to founding Zip2. That was an interesting time in the history of tech. I mean, what was it like? You mentioned the first people to look at a map, basically directions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What did the two of you feel like to see that magic? Did you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I mean, the amazing, just that it's cool, but also that you could see the future that this could transform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's a really interesting way to put it because violence is much easier on a mass scale. Suffering, causing suffering on a mass scale is much easier when you don't value the human life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, there's a bunch of things that we, once we have, we take it for granted. And that takes like a day for people to transition. It's like, boom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it's when you see, maybe when you're one of the first humans to see that thing, you're like, holy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So Zip2 was a success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You invested in X.com that eventually merged with PayPal. That's a fascinating story there. Also fascinating on many levels, including the fact that the current social media company formerly known as Twitter, is now called X. History has a rhyme to it. It's kind of all hilarious in a certain kind of way. You invested in and helped sell a lot of the initial products for Tesla.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. From the Roadster, the initial Roadster to- I still have the first business plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Did you see the future at that time? Like the company that Tesla is today, could you have possibly, could you and Elon imagine it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And that was also one of the most challenging periods for Tesla.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And the software is a fundamental part of the car and the software keeps improving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Which was one of the things that people don't... often acknowledge it's the over-the-air updates. It's like a revolutionary thing. It's not just the autopilot. To me, it's like the over-the-air updates is even bigger thing than autopilot, at least in this moment of history, because you basically turned a car into the iPhone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And there's been a bit of a push and pull between you and Elon in terms of levels of optimism about deadlines and so on, timelines about when we'll arrive at the destination. I like that you said it's a journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
For Elon, there's a destination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And that destination is tomorrow or yesterday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
The nice thing about destination, at least from my personal perspective as like a programmer, engineer, is like it puts a little fire under you to get shit done. Like if there's a clear deadline of a destination- You feel the anxiety of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Speaking of journeys, I have to ask you about SpaceX. I mean, the journey that all of humanity is on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's an interesting moment in the history of humanity that perhaps, hopefully, will become a multi-planetary species. But SpaceX is also a company. You invested in SpaceX. You were side-by-side with Elon through SpaceX. through the highs and the lows, through the lows and the highs. So what were some memorable challenges? What were some low points from the history of SpaceX?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What a fascinating contrast of rock as kind of representing the peak accomplishment of human beings as a society, and then returning to the thing that is the foundation of human society, which is that communal experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
After watching a rocket explode. Yeah. What gives you hope about the future of this whole thing we've got going on? Humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, and for those of us watching all of this, I think... I would love to see more celebrating of the people that are helping. The people that have found their way of helping and just celebrating those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And be grateful. Well, I think this is a good time to go celebrate the very fact that we're alive today. We get to live and enjoy this incredible life, the two of us, and have this great conversation. And we'll get to celebrate over some scrambled eggs. Beautiful. I'm going to hold you to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Kimo, thank you so much for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kimbo Musk. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Anthony Bourdain. Your body is not a temple. It's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Because life does end for everybody. It does, right? Yeah. And if you just head on, accept that fact, you can just enjoy every single moment and let go of this attachment and just enjoy the moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Maximize joy, that's right. There's a story that Walter Isaacson writes about where Elon got beat up pretty bad and you were there. And then you also had to watch your dad yell at Elon for an hour, calling him worthless, all those kinds of things. You said it was the worst memory of your life. What do you make of such cruelty? What do you remember from that time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Now, there's a lot of people disagreeing on this point. Anyway, it's eight sleep, and they have a pot three cover that cools the bed down or heats it up if you're an insane person. I love you too. Insane people are beautiful people, so we may disagree. Emacs versus Vim. Messi versus Ronaldo. What else is there? I don't know. Those are the two big disagreements in my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Just like that, life can end. Yeah. Could have been you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, the brutality of that, the mundaneness of the brutality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It makes you think of all the places in the world that that's happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And all the beautiful people that just disappear. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, it's humbling. You said that your dad was a roller coaster of affection and then verbal abuse. Walter Isaacson quotes Barack Obama, who said, someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes. And I suppose that may explain my particular malady. Is part of that ring true for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But there's still the trauma of that. You know, it has an effect on the human psychology and can permeate through time. So it has probably complex, indirect effects on who you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
The following is a conversation with Sagar Anjati, his second time in the podcast. Sagar is a political commentator, journalist, co-host of Breaking Points with Crystal Ball and of the Realignment podcast with Marshall Kozlov. Sagar is one of the most well-read people I've ever met.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So first at a high level, Trump or otherwise, I don't like anyone who whines when they lose, period. Yeah. Although he did tell you he lost. You notice that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Lost by a whisker. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I mean, there is a case to be made that he was joking. I don't know. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with humor where sometimes it's sarcasm, sometimes not. Much easier to showcase in a three-hour interview, I'll say. Good call. Go ahead. I couldn't even play with that when you have 40 minutes. I know, bro. You're like... You know, I could do just 40 minutes on weaving alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, I just want to say that thank you for everybody involved for making my conversation with Donald Trump possible. But I've learned a lot from that, that I just, if I'm told that all I have is 40 minutes, I'm very politely sparing, in that case, Donald Trump, the 40 minutes and just walking away. Because I don't think I can do a good job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Thank you for saying those words. And that's not just in the interest of journalism and the interest of conversation. It's the interest of the guests as well. Yeah, absolutely. To bring out the best in them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Absolutely. I've been a deep dive on Genghis Khan, reading Genghis Khan and then making the modern world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. He's coming on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. Amazing. And again, shout out to Dan Carlin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I met him once before and it felt- I listened to your interview with him. I was starstruck. Very, very starstruck. And his, I mean, there's so much painful attainment that I've listened to him many times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Okay, he's great. And we ironically arrived at this tangent while talking about the 2020 election. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Because you said lost by a whisker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And now we're dragging us screaming back to the topic. One of the things I was bothered by is Trump claiming that there's widespread, as you're saying, low IQ theory, the widespread voter fraud. And I saw no evidence of that that he provided.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And, all right, well, let's put that on the table. And then the other thing I was troubled by, that maybe you can comfort me in the context of history, how easily... the base ate that up. That they were able to believe the election was truly rigged based on no clear evidence that I saw. And they just love the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And there is something compelling to the story that, you know, like this DNC type, like with Bernie, the establishment just, they're corrupt and they steal money. the will of the people and like the lack of desire from the base or from people to see any evidence of that, what's really troubled me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
What a line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. You know what? That quote just really connected with me because, you know, there's all this talk about truth. And I think what people want to, they want to feel like they're in possession of the truth. Correct. Not actually be in the possession of the truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Actually, we started early on in the conversation talking about bubbles. What's your advice about how to figure out if you're in a bubble and how to get out of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Did you know that the White House didn't get air conditioning until 1933 under Hoover, who funded it just before leaving office for FDR? So all that praise that Sagar gives to FDR, just remember, maybe it wouldn't be possible without the cool, fresh air that Hoover gave to the great FDR.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
One of the bubbles I'm really concerned about is San Francisco bubble. I visited there recently because I have so many friends there that I respect deeply. There's so many brilliant people in San Francisco. Absolutely. The Silicon Valley. But there's just this, I don't even want to criticize it, but there's definitely a bubble there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Speaking of bubbles, Sam Harris. Oh. He has continued to criticize me directly and indirectly, I think unfairly, but I love Sam. I deeply respect him. Everybody should listen to the Making Sense podcast. It always makes me think. It's definitely in the rotation for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And so the trivial formulation is that it's the wokeism, the anti-wokeism movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I mean, he's, I think, one of the sharpest minds of our generation. And for a long time, I looked up to him. It was one of the weird moments for me to meet him because you listen to somebody for such a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, it's a beautiful moment. I mean, same with Joe and stuff like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And you have to like, you see it, you feel it, and you have to celebrate that because there's an intimacy to it. I think it's real that people really do form a real connection, a real friendship. It happens to be one way, but I think it actually can upgrade to a two-way pretty easily. It happens with me like in a matter of like five minutes when I meet somebody at an airport or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So it's not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against wokeism. It was the broader anti-elitism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Anyway, Sam took a pretty strong position on Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, he has been consistent and unwavering. So he thinks that Trump is a truly dangerous person for a democracy, for maybe for the world. Can you still man his position?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think one thing, maybe to partially steel man his case, but also just to steel man the way the world works. is that there is some probability that Kamala Harris will institute a communist state. And there is some probability that Donald Trump will indeed, will fly a swastika and deport, I don't know, everybody who's not Scott Irish. Like, I don't know. You and I are screwed then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Maybe, is there a spirit test? Okay. But that probability is small and you have to, if you allow yourself to focus on a particular trajectory with a small probability, it can become all encompassing because you could see it. You could see a path. There are certain character qualities to Trump. Yes. Where he wants to hold onto power. First of all, every politician wants to hold onto power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Joe Biden, maybe because he's part of the machine, can't even conceive of the notion of a third term. But he has the arrogance to want to hold on to power, do everything he can. Absolutely. And like with Trump, I could see that if it was very popular for him to have a third term, I think he would not be the kind of person who doesn't advocate for a third term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. For each candidate, Trump is probably the extreme version of that. There's a distribution of the possible trajectories their administration might result in. Yes. And the range of possible trajectories is just much wider with Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
You tragically missed the UFO hearings. Oh man, my brothers. I'm really sad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
This is the second one, I guess. This is the second one. Do you hope they continue happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
You think Trump might be able to push for like aggressively break through the secrecy, let's say even on the JFK files?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
He basically says like, I would like to declassify JFK files. And they say, yes, sir, we'll get that to you in three months. And three months comes by and then they're like, well, there's these hurdles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of a meme, but I wonder how deep the deep state is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
It's a, it's again, a bubble, but a bubble that has a lot of power. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
What year would you be able to predict Obama? It's just his first time he gave the speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, I think Trump is a singular figure in terms of, like, if you support Trump, I just, there's a vibe. I know Kamala has a vibe, but there's definitely a vibe to Trump and MAGA. And I just, I think even with JD, that's no longer going to be there. So if JD runs and wins, that would be on principles. And he's a very different human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
By the way, I assure you're biased. Yeah, yeah. And I sometimes try to take myself out of that bubble. Like maybe it's not important to have read a book or multiples of books on history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I wish they did. I mean, I don't know if that's a lesson to take away. Yeah, but who are we to say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
No, what I'm saying is you take everything Trump everything that Trump is doing, everything, the whole, the dance, all of it, and add occasional saga-like references to history books, I think that's just a better candidate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, I don't know. I don't think that's biased. I think I think that's not a bubble thinking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
i like how you keep saying your bias yeah as if there's some percent of the population doesn't like people to read at all okay uh what about the future you kind of hinted at it the future of the democratic party yeah do you see any talent out there that's promising is it going to be obama-like figure that just rolls out of nowhere clinton is the better example um because the democratic party was destroyed for 12 years
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Can you imagine an amorphous figure that's a progressive populist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
All right, let's put our historian hat back on. Okay. Will the American Empire collapse one day? And if it does, when it does, what will be the reason? Statistically, likely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I like for all the books you've quoted, you just, you went to fight club, I guess the movie, right? The book is good though. People should read that too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. And it's nice to remember how quickly the public opinion shifts. We're very dynamic and adaptable. which annoys me. I understand that's part of the political discourse saying like, if Trump wins, it's the end of America. If Kamala wins, it's the end of America. So stupid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
But I understand that the radical nature of that discourse is necessary to, like we mentioned- Yeah, to drive out votes. To drive out votes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Let's linger on that hope. What is the source of optimism you have for the 21st century, for the century beyond that for human civilization in general. It's easy to learn cynical lessons from history, right? That shit eventually goes wrong. But sometimes it doesn't. So what gives you hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I wish I could do a Bostonian accent of, we do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. Because they're hard. Thank you. That's so true. Scott Irish got us. Uh, well, listen, I'm a huge fan of your saga. I hope to see you in the white house interviewing the president. There you go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. Uh, front row and just talking, uh, free. I would, I would just, I would love to live in an, in a country and in a world where it's you who gets to talk to the press secretary, to the president, uh, Um, cause I think you're a real, you're one of the good ones as far as journalists go, as far as human beings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So I hope to see you in there and I hope you get to ask a question that, uh, that ends up in a book that ends up in a good history book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
At this point, do you think this election is the kind of statement that wokeism as a movement is dead?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Beautiful. The hundreds of books that were mentioned here. All right, brother. Thank you so much for talking to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sagar and Jetty. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Voltaire. History is the study of all the world's crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And that, in fact, and I'm not sure why I'm using this voice in talking, but that, in fact, is essential for sleep, controlling the temperature of the bed, controlling the temperature of the sleeping environment. There you go. The more you know. Go to asleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get up to $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled. That's asleep.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And you think the reason it doesn't work well in practice is because there's a big degree to which it's anti-meritocracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, I got to go back to Jim Webb and that book. What a badass, fascinating book. Oh, my God. It's amazing. Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree, first of all, how badass the Scots-Irish are. And to the degree, many of the things that kind of identify as American and part of the American spirit were defined by...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
this relatively small group of people. As he describes, the motto could be summarized as fight, sing, drink, and pray. So there's the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government, the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
This episode is brought to you by AG1. Basically a nice multivitamin that's also delicious, that I drink every day, that makes me feel like I have my life together, which I barely do. Now, speaking of drinks that you believe make you feel better, you know, placebo effect, that kind of thing. Here's a little presidential-themed factoid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Over 2,000 years of a military tradition, they made up 40% of the Revolutionary War Army and produced numerous military leaders, including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a bunch of presidents. Some of the more gangster presidents. Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton. Just the whole cultural legacy of country music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I mean, so much of the culture, so much of the American spirit, the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy. So would you trace that fierce individualism that we think of back to them? Definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Dude, it got me pumped, excited to be an American. Me too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
It's crazy that J.D., the same guy, because that's Hillbilly Elegy is what I kind of thought of him as.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
John Adams drank hard cider every morning, believing it promoted good health. I would love to get a health advice podcast with Winston Churchill. Another president, William Howard Taft, had the White House kitchen prepare special protein shakes made from eggs, milk, and beef extract. I would love the dietary details of some of the presidents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So let's talk about 2024. What happened with with the left? What happened with Biden? What's your take on Biden?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world. In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mention a large number of amazing books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I'm sure a bunch of them just smoked and drank and had their own little habits. that serve as a kind of escape from the madness of the world. Anyway, get AG1, and it'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And he failed, failed from, you said a lot of interesting stuff. So one FDR, that's really interesting. It's not about the specific policy. It's about like fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and just uniting the entire country for the, This is the same with Bernie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Maybe there's a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that still support him because we just want somebody- Feels authentic. Yeah. That's it. We just want somebody to fight authentically for us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. So to sort of push back against the implied thing that you said. So when saying Biden is the worst president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
In modern history, who's the worst?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I see, because of the horrible wars, probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
We will return there. So as part of the pushback, I'd like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance and narcissism against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Of arrogance. Yes. And I think you've also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And here, I have to return, again, to the presidents who consumed various kinds of liquids. Did you know that Thomas Jefferson spent $11,000 on wine during his presidency? And we're not talking about quality here. We are, in fact, talking about quantity. That's equivalent to about $300,000 in today's money. Whatever works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, I saw that tweet, to go back to that. And also, I listened to your incredible debate about it with Marshall on the Realignment podcast, and I have to side with Marshall. I think you're just wrong on this. Because I think revealing the character of a person is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
The judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
about judgment and decision making in the history of America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
It's like that meme that there's a perfect optimal amount of alcohol that makes you productive in programming. I have never found that optimal. Actually, if I have a drink, my productivity and my clarity of thinking and my creativity all go down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Well, maybe humility is necessary for greatness. Okay. So actually, can we just linger on that book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So the book, Essence of Decision, Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison. It presents three different models of how government works. The rational act model, so seeing government as one entity trying to maximize the national interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Also seeing government through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures, sort of this giant organization that's just doing things how it's always been done. and the government politics model of there's just these individual internal power struggles within government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And all of that is like a different way to view, and they're probably all true to a degree, of how decisions are made within this giant machinery of government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Now, I start enjoying the social interactions more and more because I am fundamentally an introvert that have anxiety about social interaction, so that helps. But in terms of productivity or creative juices or whatever, nope. Anyway, you can get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. And there's actually quite a lot of presidents that really struggled with anxiety, with depression, with all kinds of complicated mental states. Coolidge, for example, fell into a deep depression after his son died from blood poisoning. And that changed him forever, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
It's difficult to come back from that. John Quincy Adams, somewhat famously, kept extremely detailed diary for 68 years, often writing sort of a detailed analysis and almost like log of his mental states. That's an interesting thing to do, actually. I don't do that enough. I speak it. I don't write it down. Perhaps there's some magic in writing it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the border czar, Tom Homan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
But there is, with BetterHelp, also magic in speaking it with a professional. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. So Abraham Lincoln actually owned a general store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So what do you think is behind that? So a crystal balls theory on breaking point is that there's some kind of interpersonal, like, uh, I didn't know. I should know this, but I didn't know any of the, there was some cheating or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So you think she needs to be able to articulate, not just be like the softer face of this radical policy, but also be able to articulate what's happening with the reasoning behind all this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And he has famously written that he wished he had Shopify. It would be much more convenient. Anyway, he had a general store that failed. So, you know, sometimes you need the right job for the right man. That match to be made and everything else is not going to work out. I sold shoes, women's shoes, at Sears, kind of like Al Bundy for Married With Children, if you know the show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
We'll put a link to them in the description for those interested to learn more about each topic. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Asleep for naps, AG1 for health, Element for hydration, BetterHelp for the mind, Shopify for the wallet, and NetSuite for your business. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And, you know, I did okay. But I think it wasn't quite the right fit for me. You know, I was quite technically savvy. I knew about computers. And I said I should probably be selling electronics and computers. And they said, yes, yes, yes. One day you will, but now we need helping shoes. So let's start you there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Like you mentioned the book, Melting Pot or Civil War by Raihan Salam, he makes an argument against open borders. The thesis there is assimilation should be a big part. Mm-hmm. I guess there's some kind of optimal rate of immigration, which allows for assimilation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Aren't you talking about things like what Tom Holman said, works at rates, sort of increasing the rate of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
But there's a rate at which you can do that where it would lead to, I mean, radical social upheaval.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And if I stayed there for many more years, perhaps I would have upgraded to electronics. But then I also saw the beauty in selling women's shoes. There was a real joy in finding the right match for the right person. And that joy can be scaled significantly with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
The way Vivek articulates this is that our immigration system is deeply dishonest. Like we don't acknowledge some of the things he just said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And he wants to make it honest. So if we don't do mass deportation, at least you have to be really honest about the living conditions of illegal immigrants. about basically mistreatment of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. Ulysses S. Grant, the famed general, kept extremely detailed expense accounts, recording every single penny he spent. Now, rigor, attention to detail, obsession with detail, financial detail, is important because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
That said, sort of the image and the reality of a child being separated from their parents is seems deeply un-American, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Do you hate children? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Can you steer me on the case against mass deportation? What are the strongest arguments?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
But if you have the right tool for the job, that's made easier. I would love to kind of throw some of these people, some of these leaders, some of these brilliant minds from history into the modern world that is digitized. I think a lot of them would actually be destroyed by it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
But first of all, very convincing. And second of all, you can't just do mass deportation without also fixing the immigration system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
You have studied how government works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
What number do you think will feel like mass deportation? One million people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
because the machine of distraction will pull them away from the focus you can more easily attain in a non-technological world. And some of them, I think, will become even more super productive, so it'll be really interesting. And there's been a lot of presidents that kind of pushed the White House and government in general into the direction of great record keeping, from George Washington,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, that was one of the tensions I had talking to Vivek is he's big on mass deportation and big on making government more efficient. And it really feels like there's a tension between those two in the short term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
How unreal is it that it's called Doge?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
to Carter, to FDR, as Sagar talks a lot about. Anyway, all that is in the realm of politics, but the realm of business in many ways is the same, especially when the government is working well. So NetSuite is for business. In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite. Take advantage of their flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So you just laid out the reality of how Washington works. To give the counterpoint that I think you're probably also rooting for is that one is a statement like Peter Thiel said, don't bet against Elon. Sure. One of the things that you don't usually have with Blue Ribbon is the kind of megaphone that Elon has. True. And I would even set the financial aspects aside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Just the influence he has with the megaphone, but also just with other people who are also really influential. I think that can have real power when backed by sort of a populist movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Okay, so you actually outlined the most likely thing that's going to happen with Doge as it hits the wall of Washington. What is the sort of the most successful thing that can be pulled off?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sagar and Jetty. So let's start with the obvious big question. Why do you think Trump won? Let's break it down. Before the election, you said that if Trump wins, it's going to be because of immigration. So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Well, as I've learned from one of the recommendations of the age of acrimony, I feel embarrassed that I didn't know that senators used to not be elected. What a crazy system, huh? Yeah. I mean, many of the things we take for granted now as defining our democracy was... was kind of invented, developed after the Civil War, in the sort of 50 years after the Civil War. Absolutely correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
It's the continued battle between the people and the elite, right? And we should mention not just the direct election of senators, but- The election of candidates for a party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
That was also invented. It used to be that the quote unquote party bosses, I say that with a half a chuckle, chose the candidate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
With a little asterisk with Kamala Harris, but- Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
You would not get a Bernie Sanders. No, no. You would not get a Donald Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think the lesson from that is there's a collective wisdom to the people, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
That was a kind of beautiful diversion from the Doge discussion. If we're going to turn briefly to Doge. Sure. So you kind of talked about cost cutting, but there's also increasing the efficiency of government, which you also kind of talked about with procurement. So maybe we can throw into the pile the 400 plus federal agencies. So let's take another perspective on what success might look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So like radically successful Doge. would it basically cut a lot of federal agencies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Combine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
You know, paperwork slows everything down and it feels impossible to break through that in a sort of incremental way. It's so hard. It feels like the only way to do it is to literally shut down agencies in some kind of radical way and then build up from scratch. Of course, as you highlight, that's going to be opposed by a lot of people within government. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
War. Yeah. So I was going to say, basically, you have the kind of consensus where, okay, all this stupid bureaucratic bullshit we've been doing, we need to put that shit aside, get the fuck out of here, we need to win a war. Yeah. So like all the paperwork, you know, all the lawyers go leave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, but I've also heard a lot of people in Silicon Valley laughing when Elon rolled in and fired 90% of Twitter. Here's this guy, Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Knows nothing about running a social media company. Of course you need all these servers. Of course you need all these employees. Right. And nevertheless, the service keeps running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a multitude of reasons, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now, on to the full wide reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep, and it's pod 4 ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think you just admitted that you're part of a cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. I miss Steve. The grass is green on the other side. Come join us. Okay. Whether it's Elon or somebody else, what gives you hope about something like a radical transformation of government towards efficiency, towards being more slim? What gives you hope that that will be possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Garbage truck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
To the degree it's possible to see Trumpism and MAGA as a coherent ideology, what do you think are the central pillars of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Anticultural elite. Is that synonymous with anti-establishment? So basic distrust of all institutions? Is elitism connected to institutions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Because elites are the ones who runs our institutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
It's interesting to think of the left cultural elite subsuming, consuming Bernie Sanders, the left populist. So you think that's what happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
What do you think happened in 2016 with Bernie? Is there a possible future where he would have won? You and Crystal wrote a book on populism in 2020. So from that perspective, just looking at 2016, if he rejected wokeism at that time, by the way, that would be pretty gangster during 2016. Would he have – because I think Hillary went towards the left more, right? Am I remembering that correctly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Thank you for explaining the joke. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Let me reference you from earlier in the conversation with FDR. It's not the policy. I think if he went more anti-establishment and more populist as opposed to trying to court, trying to be friendly with the DNC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. He didn't go like he kept saying sorry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think also for me personally, maybe I'm deluded, sort of the great man view of history. I think some of it, it's in the programming circles, the term skills issue. I think some of it just has to do how good you are, how charismatic you are, how good you are as a politician. Maybe you disagree with this. I'd love to see what you think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think if Obama, if you were allowed to run for many terms, I think Obama would just keep winning. He would win 2016. He would win 2020. He would win this year, 2024.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. Well, those two, right. Those two examples of exactly. They extremely skilled politicians and somehow can appear like populists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Well, we'll never know. And I love this kind of Mike Tyson versus Muhammad Ali. I still think I would have loved to see Obama versus Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And first of all, Obama versus Trump in 2008, Obama wins hands down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I love how this is a boxing talk. Yeah. Now, when 2016, Obama has a bunch of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. But don't you think Obama had a good sense in how to turn it on, how to be anti-establishment correctly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think it's unfortunate that he kind of let Kamala Harris borrow his reputation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
What, what is that? Why do you, why, why did he like, he's so much bigger and better than the machine. I don't get it. It's interesting, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I think this was a wake-up call. 2024 was a wake-up call. The DNC machine doesn't work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
There needs to be new blood, new Obama-like candidates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I've been thinking about who I want to talk to for three hours. And that's why I bring up Obama because he's... Probably the number one person on the left I would like to hear analyze what happened in this election and what happened to the United States of America over the past 20 plus years. I can't imagine anybody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
For real. I think it's fair to say that we talked about the great man view of history. I think you have a psychopath view of history where all great leaders are for sure psychopaths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
that some of the people who you think are sociopaths in politics are in fact really good people. And some of the people you think are good, like Truman and Adams, are actually sociopaths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I mean, I could just be reading the wrong books, right? Yeah, that's right. It sounds like you just read some really compelling biographies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I really worry about this kind of general, especially now the, uh, the sense of the, the, the anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath. Now, while the reason I worry about that is it feels true. Yeah. So it's, uh, you can fall into this, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Add like some empathy on top of that. It's going to destroy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
All right, speaking about the dirty game of politics, several people, different people, told me that of everyone they've ever met in politics, Nancy Pelosi is the best at attaining and wielding political power. Is there any truth to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I'm going to try a new thing where I hold on to a theme as I talk about these ads. I use Asleep and the Pod 4 Ultra to cool the bed. And since Sagar knows pretty much more than anybody I've ever met about the various U.S. presidents and presidential politics and the history of politics in U.S., Let me mention a little factoid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Speaking of fundraising, Kamala raised $1 billion. Insane. But I guess the conclusion is she spent it poorly. How would you spend it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
This is the Call Her Daddy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
You know what I want to note behind the scenes? Yeah. I haven't gotten, and I'm not good with this. I get really frustrated and I shouldn't, but dealing with PR and comms people can sometimes break my soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Like, yeah, that, but there's stuff like, like where to put the camera. It's not that I don't, it's not actually hypothetically, I don't even disagree with any of the suggestions or this, but it's like the micromanagement, just the micromanagement and your, and the politeness, but the fake politeness. And it just makes me feel like, I think like, what would Kubrick do? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Would he murder all of them right now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
But she, yeah, I guess you paid for. A hundred grand, bro. A hundred. And the Oprah thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
No, I think, to be fair, I think the million just helps do the thing you would like to do. It's a nudge, because I don't think any celebrity would endorse-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, it's really fucked up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Why do you think people on the left who are actually in the political arena are afraid of doing anything longer than an hour?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So let me just say, probably most of the people I've talked to on this podcast are left-wing or have been for a long time. They just don't sort of out and say it. Like most scientists are left-wing. Most sort of vaguely political people are left-wing that I've talked to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
But the closer you get to the actual political arena, and I've tried really hard, they just, nope. I had a bunch of people with the highest profile people say 15 minutes, 20 minutes. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah. I just can't, you know, like I can't imagine a conversation with Kamala or with Joe Biden or, uh or aoc obama or obama that's of any quality at all of any that shows any kind of humanity of the person the genius of the person the the interesting nuance of the person in like 30 minutes like i just can't i can't like i don't know maybe there's people that are extremely skilled that can do that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
One of the reasons I'm a big fan of yours is you're a student of history. And so you've recommended a bunch of books to me. And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time. Some don't. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people. Some are mass movements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
You just can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
And it's just fascinating to me. watch how those movements evolve and then fit themselves maybe into the constraints of a two-party system. And I'd love to sort of talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, if you break apart the cartel, I think you can actually enable greater journalism, frankly, with a capital J. Because actually in the long form is when you can do better journalism from even just the politician perspective. You can disagree. You can get criticized because you can defend yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, I think the incentives are different. I think it works because you don't have to, like you, Saga, don't have to signal to the other journalists that you're part of the clique.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
I love that view of journalism, actually. The goal is to end up as one line in a history book 50 years from now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
When the AIs write the history of human civilization. One of the things I continuously learn from you when looking back through history is how crazy American politics has been throughout history. It makes me feel a lot better about the current day. It should. Corruption. Yes. Just the divisiveness also. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Stealing elections at all levels of government and direct stealing and indirect stealing, all kinds of stuff. So is there stuff that jumps out to mind throughout history that's just like the craziest corruptions or stealing of elections that come to mind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
1960.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Yeah, it's actually one of the things, it's harder to pull off a bunch of bullshit with all these cameras everywhere now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
So that said, let's talk about the 2020 election. It seems like forever ago. Do you think it was rigged the way that Trump claimed? No. And was it rigged in other ways?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truel, Swale Asif, Arvid Lundmark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on VS Code that adds a lot of powerful features for AI-assisted coding. It has captivated the attention and excitement of the programming and AI communities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
IMO is International Math Olympiad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So the new results from DeepMind, it turned out that you were correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So you like felt the AGI or you felt the scaling?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
blog posts on sort of the state-of-the-art, like the OpenAI 01 model that was just released. So sometimes they integrate it into why this is a part of Encore, why this makes sense, and sometimes not. And so I love that. I recommend their blog just in general. That said, when they are looking at state-of-the-art models, they are always looking for ways to integrate it into their platform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Okay, so can we take it all the way to Cursor? And what is Cursor? It's a fork of VS Code. And VS Code is one of the most popular editors for a long time. Everybody fell in love with it. Everybody left Vim. I left Emacs for it. Sorry. So it unified in some fundamental way the developer community. And then you look at the space of things. You look at the scaling laws. AI is becoming amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And you decided, okay, it's not enough to just write an extension for your VS Code because there's a lot of limitations to that. If AI is going to keep getting better and better and better, we need to really rethink how the AI is going to be part of the editing process. And so you decided to fork VS Code and start to build a lot of the amazing features we'll be able to talk about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
But what was that decision like? Because there's a lot of extensions, including Copilot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Okay, well then the natural question is, you know, VS Code is kind of with Copilot a competitor. So how do you win? Is it basically just the speed and the quality of the features?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Basically, it's a place to organize your data, and data is everything. This was true before the popularity and the explosion of attention methods of transformers. And it is still very much true now. Sort of the non-synthetic, the human generated data is extremely important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know how you put that into words, but when you compare Cursor with Copilot, Copilot pretty quickly became, started to feel stale for some reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And you're using, like you said, Cursor to write Cursor. Of course. Oh, yeah. Well, let's talk about some of these features. Let's talk about the all-knowing, the all-powerful, praise B to the tab. You know, autocomplete on steroids. Basically. So how does tab work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
How you generate that data, how you organize that data, how you leverage it, how you train on it, how you fine tune on it, the pre-training, the post-training, all of it, the whole thing. Data is extremely, extremely important. And so Encore takes data very seriously. Anyway, go try out Encore to create, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com slash Lex. That's Encore.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Well, what's the intuition and what's the technical details of how to do next cursor prediction? That jump. That's not so intuitive, I think, to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Okay, so MOE, mixture of experts, the input is huge, the output is small. Okay, so what else can you say about how to make, does caching play a role in this particular?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Again, what are the things that tab is supposed to be able to do kind of in the near term? Just to like sort of linger on that. Generate code, like fill empty space, also edit code across multiple lines. Yeah. And then jump to different locations inside the same file.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Carlos Santana on guitar, for example. I loved that one. There's a few guitar ones, Tom Morello too. Great, great, great stuff. But Carlos Santana, his instrumental Europa. I haven't quite tried to play that, but it's on my to-do list.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So providing the human the knowledge. Yes. Right. Can you integrate, like, I just got to know a guy named PrimeGen who I believe has an SS, you can order coffee via SSH.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So can also the model do that, like feed you and provide you with caffeine? Okay, so that's the general framework.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
As we're talking about this, I should mention that one of the really cool and noticeable things about cursor is that there's this whole diff interface situation going on. So like the model suggests with the red and the green of like, here's how we're going to modify the code. And in the chat window, you can apply and it shows you the diff and you can accept the diff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So maybe can you speak to whatever direction of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So you're talking about on the interface side?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
It's sort of one of those things, you know for sure this is a thing I will play because it's too beautiful. It's too soulful. It feels like once you play, you understand something about the guitar that you didn't before. It's not blues. It's not, I don't know what it is. It's some kind of dreamlike teleportation into a psychedelic world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Mm-hmm. So that's, by the way, that's pretty nice, but you have to know to hold the option button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
By the way, I'm not a Mac user, but I got it. It's a button, I guess, you people have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, that's a really fascinating space of UX design engineering. So you're basically trying to guide the human programmer through all the things they need to read and nothing more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Can you say a little more across multiple files, Div?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
where the tone is warmer than anything else I've ever heard. And still, the guitar can cry. I don't know. I love it. He's a genius. So it's such a gift that you can get a genius like that. to teach us about his secrets. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And is the step of creation going to be more and more natural language is the goal versus with actual writing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
I'm really feeling the AGI with this editor. It feels like there's a lot of machine learning going on underneath. Tell me about some of the ML stuff that makes it all work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So I thought this is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the role of AI in programming. This is a super technical conversation that is bigger than just about one code editor. It's about the future of programming and in general, the future of human AI collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And we should say that apply is the model looks at your code. It gives you a really damn good suggestion of what new things to do. And the seemingly for humans trivial step of Combining the two you're saying is not so trivial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah. How do you make it fast?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store, or simple-looking online store, like the one I put together at lexfreeman.com/.store. I have a few shirts on there in case you're interested. And speaking of shirts, I'm reminded of thrift stores, which I very much loved for a long time. I still love thrift stores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So the human can start reading before the thing is done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Let me ask the ridiculous question of which LLM is better at coding. GPT, Claude, who wins in the context of programming? And I'm sure the answer is much more nuanced because it sounds like every single part of this involves a different model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
What, another ridiculous question, is the difference between the normal programming experience versus what benchmarks represent? Like where do benchmarks fall short, do you think, when we're evaluating these models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Or a nice place to get stuff. Like, I don't know, kitchen stuff and clothing. And the kind of clothing you get at thrift stores is actually pretty interesting because there's shirts there that are just unlike anything else you would get anywhere else. So if you're sort of selective, and creative-minded, there's a lot of interesting fashion that's there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
The vibe benchmark, human benchmark. Yeah. You pull in the humans to do a vibe check. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's kind of what I do, like just like reading online forums and Reddit and X, just like, Well, I don't know how to properly load in people's opinions because they'll say things like, I feel like Claude or GPT has gotten dumber or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
They'll say, I feel like, and then I sometimes feel like that too, but I wonder if it's the model's problem or mine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
I interview a bunch of people that have conspiracy theories, so I'm glad you spoke to this conspiracy theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And in terms of t-shirts, there's just like hilarious t-shirts. T-shirts that are very far away from the kind of trajectories you have taken in life, or are not, but you just haven't thought about it. Like a band that you love, but you never would have thought to wear their t-shirt. Anyway, a little bit, I think of Shopify as the internet's thrift store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
What's the role of a good prompt in all of this? We mentioned that benchmarks have really structured, well-formulated prompts. What should a human be doing to maximize success? And what's the importance of what the human, you wrote a blog post on, you called it prompt design.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Of course, you can do super classy, you can do super fancy, or you can do super thrift. All of it is possible. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So should humans, when they ask questions, also try to use something like that? Like, would it be beneficial to write JSX in the problem? Or the whole idea is it should be loose and messy and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Well, this is sort of the discussion I had with Arvin of perplexity. It's like his whole idea is like you should let the person be as lazy as he wants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
But like, yeah, that's a beautiful thing. But I feel like you're allowed to ask more of programmers, right? Yes. So like if you say just do what you want, I mean, humans are lazy. There's a kind of tension between just being lazy versus like provide more as –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
be prompted, almost like the system pressuring you or inspiring you to be articulate, not in terms of the grammar of the sentences, but in terms of the depth of thoughts that you convey inside the prompts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
How hard is it for the model to choose to talk back? Sort of versus generating. It's hard. It's sort of like how to deal with the uncertainty. Do I choose to ask for more information to reduce the ambiguity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Sometimes I think that NetSuite is supporting this podcast because they're trolling me. They're saying, hey Lex, aren't you doing a little too much talking? Maybe you should be building more. I agree with you, NetSuite. I agree with you. And so every time I do an ad read for NetSuite, it is a chance for me to confront my Jungian shadow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
To what degree do you use agentic approaches? How useful are agents?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
You mean it goes, finds the right file?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
What about something like that recently came out, Replit Agent, that does also like setting up the development environment, installing software packages, configuring everything, configuring the databases, and actually deploying the app?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Is that also in the set of things you dream about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Is that within scope of Cursor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
One of the things we already talked about is speed. But I wonder if we can just linger on that some more in the various places that the technical details involved in making this thing really fast. So every single aspect of Cursor, most aspects of Cursor feel really fast. Like I mentioned, the apply is probably the slowest thing. And for me, I'm sorry, the pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it says something that something that feels I don't know what it is like one second or two seconds. That feels slow. That means that's actually shows that everything else is just really, really fast. So is there some technical details about how to make some of these models hot to make the chat fast how to make the diffs fast? Is there something that just jumps to mind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Some of the demons emerge from the subconscious and ask questions that I don't have answers to. Questions about one's mortality and that life is short and that one of the most fulfilling things in life is to have a family and kids and all of these things I would very much like to have. And also the reality that I love programming and I love building
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Can you explain how KV cache works?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Is there like higher level caching of like caching of the prompts or that kind of stuff? I see help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
I love creating cool things that people can use and share and that would make their life better. All of that. Of course, I also love listening to podcasts. And I kind of think of this podcast as me listening to a podcast where I can also maybe participate by asking questions. So all these things that you love, but you ask the hard question of like, okay, well, life is slipping away. It's short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
It really, really is short. What do you want to do with the rest of the minutes and the hours that make up your life? Yeah, so thank you for the existential crisis, Nasweet. I appreciate it. If you're running a business, if you have taken the leap into the unknown and started a company, then you should be using the right tools to manage that company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
All of that is dealing with being memory bound. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Arvid, you wrote a blog post, Shadow of a Workspace, iterating on code in the background. Yeah. So what's going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by the delicious, the delicious AG1. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So it's doing like type checking also?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Can you say again how that's being used inside Cursor, the language server protocol communication thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So like literally run everything in the background, like as if, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
It's basically a super awesome multivitamin that makes me feel like I have my life together. Even when everything else feels like it's falling apart, at least I have AG1. At least I have that nutritional foundation to my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
It's scary for people, but like, it's really cool to be able to just like let the agent do a set of tasks and you come back the next day and kind of observe like it's a colleague or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So, by the way, when I think about agents, I don't think just about coding. I think, so, for the practice of this particular podcast, there's video editing, and a lot of, if you look in Adobe, a lot of, there's code behind, it's very poorly documented code, but you can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
interact with premiere for example using code and basically all the uploading everything i do on youtube everything as you could probably imagine i do all that through code and so and including translation and overdubbing all this so i envision all those kinds of tasks so automating many of the tasks that don't have to do directly with the editing So that, okay. That's what I was thinking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
But in terms of coding, I would be fundamentally thinking about bug finding, like many levels of kind of bug finding and also bug finding like logical bugs, not logical, like spiritual bugs or something. One's like sort of big directions of implementation, that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So all the fasting I'm doing, all the carnivore diets, all the physical endurance events and the mental madness of staying up all night or just the stress of certain things I'm going through, all of that, AG1 is there. At least I have the vitamins. Also, I sometimes wonder, they used to be called Athletic Greens, and now they're called AG1. I always wonder, is AG2 coming? Why is it just one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Encore for unifying your machine learning stack, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for your business, and AG1 for your health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
I mean, but this is hard for humans too to understand which line of code is important and which is not. I think one of your principles on a website says if a code can do a lot of damage, one should add a comment that say this line of code is dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
No, you say like for every single line of code inside the function, you have to, and that's quite profound. That says something about human beings because the engineers move on, even the same person might just forget how it can sync the Titanic, a single function. Like you don't, you might not intuit that quite clearly by looking at the single piece of code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
That's actually just straight up a really good practice of labeling code of how much damage this can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
It's an interesting branding decision, like AG1. Me as an OCD kind of programmer type, it's like, okay, is this a versioning thing? Is this like AG 0.1 alpha? When's the final release? Anyway, the thing I like to say and to consume is AG1. They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
That's like, we don't really think about that. You think about, okay, how do I figure out how this works so I can improve it? You don't think about the other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And you're speaking not just about single functions. You're speaking about entire code bases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, that is, I mean, if it's possible, that's your, I have a dream speech. If it's possible, that will certainly help with, you know, making sure your code doesn't have bugs and making sure AI doesn't destroy all of human civilization. So the full spectrum of AI safety to just bug finding. So you said the models struggle with bug finding. What's the hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael, Swale, Arvid, and Aman. All right, this is awesome. We have Michael, Aman, Swale, Arvid here from the Cursor team. First up, big ridiculous question. What's the point of a code editor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Have you thought about integrating money into this whole thing? I would pay probably a large amount of money for if you found a bug or even generated code that I really appreciated. I had a moment a few days ago when I started using Cursor where it generated a perfect...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
like perfect three functions for interacting with the YouTube API to update captions and for localization in different languages. The API documentation is not very good. And the code across, like if I Googled it for a while, I couldn't find exactly, there's a lot of confusing information, and Cursor generated it perfectly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And I was like, I just sat back, I read the code, I was like, this is correct, I tested it, it's correct. I was like, I want a tip. On a button that goes, here's $5. One that's really good just to support the company and support what the interface is. And the other is that probably sends a strong signal, like, good job. Right? There's a much stronger signal than just accepting the code, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
You just actually send, like, a strong good job. That, and for bug finding, obviously, like, there's a lot of people... that would pay a huge amount of money for a bug, like a bug bounty thing. Right? Do you guys think about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
How much interaction is there between the terminal and the code? How much information is gained if you run the code in the terminal? Can you do a loop where it runs the code and suggests how to change the code if the code in runtime gives an error? Because right now they're separate worlds completely. I know you can do Ctrl-K inside the terminal to help you write the code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Sure. The background is pretty cool. Like we do running the code in different ways. Plus there's a database side to this, which how do you protect it from not modifying the database? But okay. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah. That's the problem with the multiverse, right? If you branch on everything, that's a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Okay, this is a good place to ask about infrastructure. So you guys mostly use AWS. What are some interesting details? What are some interesting challenges? Why did you choose AWS? Why is AWS still winning? Hashtag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Why is the interface so horrible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So it's kind of like hierarchical reconciliation. Yeah, something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, Merkel. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, this is cool to see that you kind of have to think through all these problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
What's the biggest gains at this time you get from indexing the code base? I could just out of curiosity, like what What benefit do users have? It seems like longer term, there'll be more and more benefit, but in the short term, just asking questions of the code base, what's the usefulness of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
One question that's good to ask here, have you considered and why haven't you much done sort of local stuff to where you can do the... I mean, it seems like everything we just discussed is exceptionally difficult to do. To go to the cloud, you have to think about all these things with the caching and the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
you know large code base with a large number of programmers are using the same code base you have to figure out the puzzle of that a lot of it you know most software just does stuff this heavy computational stuff locally have you considered doing sort of embeddings locally
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And also with O1. I like how you're pitching me. Would you be satisfied with an inferior model? Listen, yes, I'm one of those, but there's some people that like to do stuff locally, especially like... There's a whole, obviously, open source movement that kind of resists. And it's good that they exist, actually, because you want to resist the power centers that are growing our...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Doing privacy preserving machine learning. But I would say that's the challenge we have with all software these days. It's like... There's so many features that can be provided from the cloud and all of us increasingly rely on it and make our life awesome, but there's downsides. And that's why you rely on really good security to protect from basic attacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
But there's also only a small set of companies that are controlling that data. you know, and they, they obviously have leverage and they could be infiltrated in all kinds of ways. That's the world we live in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, that should be a t-shirt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, or take a survey or send me questions for an AMA, all of that would be great. Go to lexgerman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
On the topic of context, that's actually been a friction for me. When I'm writing code in Python, there's a bunch of stuff imported. You could probably intuit the kind of stuff I would like to include in the context. How hard is it to auto-figure out the context?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Can you speak a little more to the post-training model to understand the code base? What do you mean by that? Is this a synthetic data direction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So for people who don't know, Cursor is this super cool new editor that's a fork of VS Code. It would be interesting to get your kind of explanation of your own journey of editors. I think all of you were big fans of VS Code with Copilot. How did you arrive to VS Code and how did that lead to your journey with Cursor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Let me ask you about OpenAI 01. What do you think is the role of that kind of test time compute system in programming?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
How do you figure out which problem requires what level of intelligence? Is that possible to dynamically figure out when to use GPT-4, when to use a small model, and when you need the O1?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
But you mentioned there's a pre-training process, then there's post-training, and then there's test-time compute that FAIR does sort of separate. Where's the biggest gains there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So we don't even know if O1 is using just like chain of thought, RL. We don't know how they're using any of these. We don't know anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Like if you were to build a competing model, what would you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, when the quality of the branch is somehow strongly correlated with the quality of the outcome at the very end. So you have a good model of knowing which branch to take. So not just in the short term, like in the long term. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
This is kind of an AI safety, maybe a bit of a philosophy question. So OpenAI says that they're hiding the chain of thought from the user. And they've said that that was a difficult decision to make. Instead of showing the chain of thought, they're asking the model to summarize the chain of thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
They're also in the background saying they're going to monitor the chain of thought to make sure the model is not trying to manipulate the user, which is a fascinating possibility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So let me ask you about Strawberry tomorrow eyes. So it looks like GitHub copilot might be integrating 01 in some kind of way. And I think some of the comments are saying, does this mean cursor is done? I think I saw one comment saying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And maybe we should explain what QuotePilot does. It's like a really nice autocomplete. It suggests, as you start writing a thing, it suggests one or two or three lines how to complete the thing. And there's a fun experience in that, you know, like when you have a close friendship and your friend completes your sentences? Like when it's done well, there's an intimate feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
All right, from that profound answer, let's descend back down to the technical. You mentioned you have a taxonomy of synthetic data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
There's probably a better word than intimate, but there's a cool feeling of like, holy shit. It gets me. And then there's an unpleasant feeling when it doesn't get you. And so there's that kind of friction. But I would say for a lot of people, the feeling that it gets me overpowers that it doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
That's because you're not as optimistic as Arvid. But yeah. So yeah, so that third category requires having a verifier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
What about RL with feedback side, RLHF versus RLAIF? Um, what's the role of that in, um, getting better performance on the models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
What's your intuition when you compare generation and verification or generation and ranking? Is ranking way easier than generation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
That'd be a whatever Fields Medal by AI. Who gets the credit? Another open philosophical question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Oh, sorry, Nobel Prize or Fields Medal first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Fields Medal comes first. Well, you would say that, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So you think you'll be Fieldsman at first? It won't be, like, in physics or in... Oh, 100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
It feels like forever from now, given how fast things have been going. Speaking of how fast things have been going, let's talk about scaling laws. So for people who don't know, maybe it's good to talk about this whole idea of scaling laws. What are they? Where do you think stand? And where do you think things are going?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So Copile was kind of like the first killer app for LLMs. Yeah. And like the beta was out in 2021. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So yeah, I mean, you speak to the multiple dimensions, obviously. The original conception was just looking at the variables of the size of the model as measured by parameters and the size of the data as measured by the number of tokens and looking at the ratio of the two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And it's kind of a compelling notion that there is a number. or at least a minimum, and it seems like one was emerging. Do you still believe that there is a kind of bigger is better?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And the distillation gives you just a faster model. Smaller means faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So if I gave you $10 trillion, how would you spend it? I mean, you can't buy an island or whatever. How would you allocate it? in terms of improving the big model versus maybe paying for HF in the RLHF?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
If we look in how to invest money for the next five years in terms of maximizing what you called raw intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So you would run a lot of experiments versus like use that computer to train a gigantic model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
By the way, we'll probably talk for three to four hours on the topic of scaling laws. Just to summarize, it's a paper and a set of papers and a set of ideas that say bigger might be better for model size and data size in the realm of machine learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, but also these big labs like winning. So they're just going wild. Okay. So big question looking out into the future. You're now at the center of the programming world. How do you think programming, the nature of programming changes in the next... few months, in the next year, in the next two years, next five years, ten years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
This episode is brought to you by Encore, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, management, and for model evaluation. One of the things I love about these guys is they have a great blog that describes cleanly. I mean, it's technical, but it's not too technical, but it's sufficiently technical to where it's actually describing ideas, not BS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
It'd be nice if you can go up and down the abstraction stack. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
What about like the fundamental skill of programming? There's a lot of people like, young people right now kind of scared, like thinking, because they like love programming, but they're scared about like, will I be able to have a future if I pursue this career path? Do you think the very skill of programming will change fundamentally?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Yeah, like just speaking to generate the boilerplate is great. So you just focus on the difficult design, nuanced difficult design decisions. Migration, I feel like this is a cool one. Like it seems like large language model is able to basically translate from one program language to another or like translate, like migrate in the general sense of what migrate is. But that's in the current moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
So I mean, the fear has to do with like, okay, as these models get better and better, then you're doing less and less creative decisions. And is it going to kind of move to a place where you're operating in the design space of natural language, where natural language is the main programming language? And I guess I could ask that by way of advice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Like, if somebody's interested in programming now, what do you think they should learn? Like, you guys started in Java, and... I forget the other. Oh, some PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Objective-C. There you go. I mean, in the end, we all know JavaScript is going to win. And not TypeScript. It's going to be like vanilla JavaScript. It's going to eat the world. And maybe a little bit of PHP. And, I mean, it also brings up the question of, like, I think Don Knuth has this idea that some percent of the population is geeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
And like there's a particular kind of psychology in mind required for programming. And it feels like more and more that expands. The kind of person that should be able to can do great programming might expand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
I guess the question I'm asking, that exact program, let's think about that person. When the super tab, the super awesome praise be the tab succeeds, and you keep pressing tab,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
I mean, this goes to your manifesto titled Engineering Genius. We are an applied research lab building extraordinary productive human AI systems. So speaking to this hybrid element. To start, we're building the engineer of the future, a human AI programmer that's an order of magnitude more effective than any one engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
This hybrid engineer will have effortless control over their code base and no low entropy keystrokes. They will iterate at the speed of their judgment, even in the most complex systems. Using a combination of AI and human ingenuity, They will outsmart and out-engineer the best pure AI systems. We are a group of researchers and engineers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
We build software and models to invent at the edge of what's useful and what's possible. Our work has already improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of programmers. And on the way to that, we'll at least make programming more fun. So thank you for talking today. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#447 – Cursor Team: Future of Programming with AI
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael, Swale, Arvid, and Aman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with a random, funny, and perhaps profound programming quote I saw on Reddit. Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution that works. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
The following is a conversation with Lisa Rendell, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Harvard. Her work involves improving our understanding of particle physics, supersymmetry, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah. How do you anthropomorphize dark matter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Oh, yeah, that's good. You did. That's why you get paid the big bucks and write the great books. Okay, so you also write in that book about dark matter having to do something with the extinction events, the extinction of the dinosaurs, which is kind of a fascinating presentation of how everything is connected. So I guess the disturbances from...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
the dark matter, they create gravitational disturbances in the Oort cloud at the edge of our solar system, and then that increases the rate of asteroids hitting Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Love it though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Danish, Norwegian, Indonesian, Polish, Dutch, and Russian, which might be useful because I have a bunch of interviews coming up in the Russian language where I'll be speaking Russian as well. Now, those will be overdubbed into English, but if you want to hear and understand the original in Russian, you can use Babel to catch up and start learning the language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
It wasn't so amazing for the dinosaurs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, but it gets amazing for humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I wish you could know like high resolution details of where that asteroid came from, like where in the Oort cloud, why it happened. Is it in fact because of dark matter? It's like the full tracing back to the origin of the universe. Humans seem to be somewhat special, but it just, it seems like so many fascinating events at all scales, at all scales of physics had to happen for,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
But it is on a grand scale. Earth is a pretty resilient system. Can you just clarify, it's just fascinating, the shape of things. So the shape of the Milky Way, of the observable stuff, is mostly flat. And you said dark matter tends to be spherical, but a subset of that might be a flat disk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yes, please.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Okay, so not all dark matter is made the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Услышишь гром и вспомнишь обо мне, Подумаешь, она грозы желала.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
And the way you detect it is gravitational effects on things we can see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Полоска неба будет твердо алой, А сердце будет, как тогда, в огне
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Is that one of the hopes of the Large Hadron Collider?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Just to take that tangent, looking back now, what's the biggest insight to humanity that the LHC has been able to provide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Translation is, you will hear thunder and remember me and think she wanted storms. The rim of the sky with the color of hard crimson and your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. She's one of the great Soviet poets in history. And I, of course, have trouble finding the right words to translate. I'm long overdue, by the way, on a podcast conversation with the Dostoevsky and Tolstoy translators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
But it's also an illustration of grand engineering efforts that humanity can take on and maybe a lesson that you could go even bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
but also in the United States, maybe a lesson that bureaucracy can slow things down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So science is the way to make progress. Politics is the way to slow that progress down. And here we are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Some kind of forcing function, some kind of deadline that gets people to sit in a room together, and you're working on a thing, but as part of that, you realize the common humanity, that you all have the same concerns, the same hopes, the same fears, the same, that you are all human. And that's an accidental side effect of working together on a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Given the complexity, all cosmological scales involved here that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, when you look out at the future of Earth, do you worry about future extinction events?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
It's interesting just to think whether the things that threaten us is the stuff we see that's happening gradually or the stuff we don't really see that's gonna happen all of a sudden. I sometimes think about what should we be more worried about? Because it seems like with the asteroids or nuclear war, it could be stuff that just happens one day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
That was planned a long time ago, but it requires quite a bit of travel and quite a bit of preparation on my side to read several of the Dostoevsky novels in both Russian and English and come up with great questions that... address some of the intricate complexities involved in the translation. That really, really requires a lot of preparation, but it also reveals the power of language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
When I say one day, meaning over a span of a few days or a few months, but not on a scale of decades and centuries. Because we sometimes mostly talk about stuff that's happening gradually, but we can be really surprised sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
It certainly shouldn't be a source of division. It should be a source of grand collaboration, probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah. I just wonder what it'd be like to be a dinosaur. It must have been beautiful to look at the asteroid just enter the atmosphere. Until like everything just, man, would I, that'd be one of the things I would travel back in time to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I actually heard that there's a nuclear weapon explosion experience in virtual reality that's good to remind you about what it would feel like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
That's a good, that's a really good point. I mean, that's a good summary of just humanity in general, where attracted to creating cool stuff, even though it can be dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Anyway, get 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com slash lexpod, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash lexpod. Rules and restrictions apply. This show is also brought to you by Notion. First, a note-taking app, but also a team collaboration tool. Both. All the cool people use it for note-taking, and all the cool teams use it for collaboration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
which gives me a really great transition to another quote in your book. So you write about the experience of facing the sublime in physics. And you quote Ryan Aroke, quote, for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure. And we're so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. It's pretty intense. I think applies to nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, but dangerous in a very pragmatic sense, but isn't it still in part terrifying when you think of just the size of things, like the size of dark matter, like the power of this thing in terms of its potential gravitational effects, just cosmological objects, a black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
We got Babbel for learning new languages, Notion for note-taking and team collaboration, SimpliSafe for keeping your home safe, Element for keeping your body feeling good with deliciousness, and InsideTracker for getting biological data and giving you life advice. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, and the full diversity of other stuff. It's pretty interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Well, let me ask you an out there question. Uh-oh. Okay. So if you think of humans on Earth, life on Earth, as this pocket of complexity that emerged... and there's a bunch of conditions that came to be, and there's Darwinian evolution, however life originated. Do you think it's possible there's some pockets of complexity of that sort inside dark matter that we can't see?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Chemistry and biology evolving in different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So the dark matter sector doesn't have all the forces of the standard model of physics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So there could be other kinds of forces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
The thing they've added recently and have been continuously developing is Notion AI. It's the best, I would say, integration of large language models into the note-taking process. If you like interacting with ChatGPT, or like I've gotten a chance to recently with Grok,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So maybe let's zoom out and look at the standard model of particle physics. How does dark matter fit into it? First of all, what is it? Can you explain what the standard model is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
but want to bring the power of that to the note-taking process, to the collaboration process, then Notion AI is really, really great. You can ask Notion AI to rewrite the thing you've written, to summarize the thing, to shorten it, to lengthen it. You can do all kinds of stuff, Q&A. I like it because it gets me going on an idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Where can you find the places where the Standard Model breaks down? Like, what are the places you can see those tiny little deviations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
When you just step back and look at the standard model, the quarks and all the different particles and neutrinos and... Isn't it wild how this little system came to be and underpins everything we see?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
And they originated, there's like some mechanism that created the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I mean, even just like the mechanism that creates stuff, like the way a human being is created from a single cell. It's like embryogenesis. Like the whole thing, like you build up this thing, all of it, this whole thing comes to be from just like a tiny little- Sure. Okay, right, right, right. It's important. Well, that's a really good question is how much of it is the environment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Is it just the environment acting on a set of constraints? Like how much of it is just the information in the DNA or the information? How much is it in the initial conditions of the universe versus some other thing acting on it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
One interesting way to explore the standard model is to look at your fun, nuanced disagreement with Carlo Rovelli. When you talked about him writing in his book, electrons don't always exist. They exist when they interact. They materialize in a place when they collide with something else. And you wrote that, well, I'll just read the whole thing because it's kind of interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
It generates text as I'm taking the notes and kind of gets through the natural process of a writer's block. It just gets your brain going and all the ideas flowing. Sometimes just having stuff on the page is a really, really huge help. You can, of course, translate. You can also change the tone and the voice of the thing you've written.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Stocks may not achieve a precise value until they're traded, but that doesn't mean we can't approximate their worth until they change hands. Similarly, electrons might not have definite properties, but they do exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
It's true that the electron doesn't exist as a classical object with definite position until the position is measured, but something was there which physicists use a wave function to describe. It's a fascinating nuanced disagreement. So do electrons always exist or not? Does a tree fall in the forest if nobody's there to see it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So physics is a kind of way to see the world. So at the bottom, what's the bottom turtle? Do you have a sense that there's a bottom reality that we're trying to approximate with physics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I just wonder how far away we are, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
but also to push back on the we've measured everything. Maybe there's stuff we haven't even considered as measurable. For example, consciousness, or there might be stuff, just like you said, forces unseen, undetected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
But that is an interesting question because yes, there's phenomena that are at the higher level of abstractions that emerge, but maybe like with consciousness, there is far out people that, you know, think that consciousness is panpsychic, right? That there's going to be almost like a fundamental force of physics that's consciousness that permeates all matter, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I think one of the criticisms of your theory on dinosaurs was that it requires, if I remember correctly, for dark matter to be weirder than it already is. And then I think you had a clever response to that. Can you remind me?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Like you can make yourself more confident, more clear, more friendly, all that kind of stuff. There's a million other things, but really the point here is that it's really nicely integrated into the whole note-taking process, which is really the crucial part. It's not just the power of the large language models. It's how well it's integrated into the tool that you use for note-taking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So dark matter, do we know if dark matter varies in density?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
It does clump, but the full details of how it clumps and the complexity of the clumping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
You were part of a recent debate on, quote, can science uncover reality? Let me ask you this question then. What do you think is the limits of science?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
And at various points throughout that history, we thought we solved everything, or declared, or at least various people have declared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, declared that we've solved everything. So this is also a good place to maybe, could you describe the difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches to theoretical physics that you talked about in the book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Let's stop down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Notion AI can now give you instant answers to your questions using information from across your wiki projects, docs, and meeting notes. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This show is also brought to you by SimpliSafe. a home security company designed to be simple and effective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Would you say the truly big leaps happen top-down, like Einstein?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Well, speaking of mathematicians, what to use a difference because you've had a bit of foot in both between physics and mathematics in the way it helps us understand the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
The string theory is an example. There's certain theories where there's a certain kind of mathematical beauty to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
What do you think about the successes and the failures of string theory? To what degree do you think it succeeded? To what degree is it not succeeded yet or has failed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Because you mentioned AI. Is there hope? that AI might be able to help find some interesting insights. I mean, another question, another way to ask this question is how special are humans that we're able to discover novel insights about the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
They have something called the Fast Protect Monitoring, which allows SimpliSafe monitoring agents to see, speak to, and deter intruders to the smart alarm indoor camera. For me, it's one of the many layers of security physical, cyber, emotional, all of it that I take very seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, there's several directions here. One is like on the theorem prover side, so Wolfram Alpha, where everything is much more precise. And we have large language model type of stuff. One of the limitations of those is it seems to come up with convincing looking things, which we don't know if it's true or not. And that's a big problem for physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
It will raise big questions about What is special about humans that we don't quite appreciate? There could be things that are like that leap of insight that happens, truly novel ideas. That could potentially be very difficult to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
What to you is the most beautiful unsolved problem in physics and cosmology? What to you is really exciting if we can unlock the mystery of in the next few decades?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
This one in particular is super easy to set up, super easy to customize, and it just works and everything's being monitored. You don't have to worry about anything. And like I said, there's now monitoring agents that can speak to the intruders, which is kind of epic. This world is full of dangers, sadly. So you have to do the basic low-hanging fruit steps to keep yourself protected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Oh, boy. We make progress on in the next few centuries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, understanding the extra dimensions piece. will be really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, if the physics changes throughout, is not homogeneous throughout the universe, that would be weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
What advice would you give? You've had an exceptional career. What advice would you give to young people, maybe high school, college, on how to have a career they can be proud of and a life they can be proud of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So that's the big picture. Would you also lose yourself in the simple joy of puzzle solving?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So it bugs you, but that motivates you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Until it doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I highly recommend SimpliSafe because it just works. The solutions in your life should be simple, and resilient, and also inexpensive. So SimpliSafe is perfect. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com slash Lex to get 50% off any SimpliSafe system when you sign up for fast, protect, monitoring. That's simplisafe.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
And with effective theories, one small step at a time. Just keep unraveling the mystery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, looking out to the stars. You said the sunset. For me, it's the sunset, the sunrise, and just looking at the stars. It's wondering what's all out there and having a lot of hope that humans will figure it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Lisa, thank you for being one of the humans in the world that are pushing it forward and figuring out this beautiful puzzle of ours. And thank you for talking today. This is amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lisa Randell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
This episode is also brought to you by Element Electrolyte Drink Mix, the thing that I am currently drinking, and I drink many, many times a day. It brings me happiness and joy. It prevents me from having any kind of headaches or issues associated with fasting for 24 hours, for 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
eating only meat which i do often you have to make sure that your electrolytes are right sodium potassium magnesium element has it in perfect proportions and is delicious my favorite flavor is watermelon salt they've recently sent me different flavors of chocolate i don't know if they've always had this or just They've recently sent me several flavors of chocolate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring or get in touch with me by going to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I think it's chocolate chai, chocolate raspberry, and chocolate mint. I also think it's a limited time thing. I'm guessing for the holidays. I don't know which holidays. Who knows? But you make it hot. And it's delicious hot. It like blew my mind. Basically like hot cocoa. That's what it tastes like. And once again, you get all the electrolytes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I was skeptical at first on the chocolate, on the hot chocolate. But it turned out to be incredible. Anyway, I still probably go to watermelon salt most of the time, but sometimes on a... But sometimes in a chilly Texas evening, and by that I mean when it gets into 50 degrees, I'll make myself a chocolate chai element drink.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I'll make myself a chocolate chai element drink and think about all the beautiful things I'm grateful for in this world. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data from my body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I take that data from the blood, DNA data, fitness tracker data, all that kind of stuff, and makes diet and lifestyle recommendations. Just imagine where all of this is headed with a very rapid development of large language models where you can integrate data
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
all the scientific knowledge from the various papers that are being actively published, thousands of papers published every month, integrating all of that together with the data that comes from your own body and making recommendations. That's where it's headed. And Insight Tracker's taking the early steps on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
As far as I know, they're not integrating large language models yet, but it seems obvious to me that this is where there's going to be a lot of benefit. at least in the step of having a conversation about the interpretation of the data in as far as it applies to what kind of diet and lifestyle decisions you need to make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
I suppose one way to think about LLMs is you can have a natural language conversation with data. as long as that data is collected and processed properly. I mean, this is just a fascinating future, so I'm a big supporter of Insight Tracker for pushing that future forward. You get special savings for a limited time when you go to insighttracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Lisa Rundell. One of the things you work on and write about is dark matter. We can't see it, but there's a lot of it in the universe. You also end one of your books with a Beatles song quote, got to be good looking because he's so hard to see. What is dark matter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
This show is brought to you by Babbel, an app and website I use to learn new languages, and you can too. They have all the languages you need. Spanish, for example. I've been learning a bit of Spanish for several reasons, one of which, in case you're curious, this very podcast is getting translated and overdubbed regularly into Spanish on Spotify by the brilliant Spotify AI team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
How should we think about it given that we can't see it? How should we visualize it in our mind's eye?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So in theory, it behaves just like any other matter. It just doesn't interact with light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
So it's part of the story of the origin of a galaxy, part of the story of the end of the galaxy, and part of the story of all the various interactions throughout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
That's a metaphor on top of a metaphor. Okay. The unheard voices that do the actual work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
Yeah, but the things we cannot see that nevertheless have gravitational interaction with the things we can't see at the layman level is just mind-blowing, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
You can actually find it. There's a few episodes now that are fully overdubbed in Spanish. It's really quite incredible. You can also learn a bunch of different other languages. Turkish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese. I definitely need that because I'd like to travel to Brazil soon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#403 – Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events
But a lot of our intuition, I think, operates using visualizations in the mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The following is a conversation with Roman Yampolsky, an AI safety and security researcher and author of a new book titled AI Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. He argues that there's almost 100% chance that AGI will eventually destroy human civilization. As an aside, let me say that I will have many, often technical conversations on the topic of AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
In that world, can't humans do what humans currently do with chess, play each other, have tournaments, even though AI systems are far superior at this time in chess. So we just create artificial games. Or for us, they're real, like the Olympics. We do all kinds of different competitions and have fun. Maximize the fun and let the AI focus on the productivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Yahoo Finance, a site that provides financial management, reports, information, and news for investors. It's my main go-to place for financial stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So, okay, so why is that not a likely outcome? Why can't AI systems create video games for us to lose ourselves in, each with an individual video game universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And we're playing that video game. And now we're creating what? Maybe we're creating artificial threats for ourselves to be scared about because fear is really exciting. It allows us to play the video game more vigorously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Okay, what was that paper on multi-agent value alignment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So that's one of the possible outcomes. But what in general is the idea of the paper? So it's looking at multiple agents that are human, AI, like a hybrid system where there's humans and AIs, or is it looking at humans or just intelligent agents?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So basically, give up on value alignment. Create an entire, it's like the multiverse theory. It's just create an entire universe for you with your values.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So you convert the multi-agent problem into a single agent problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Okay. Is there any way to, so, okay, that's giving up on the value alignment problem. Well, is there any way to solve the value alignment problem where there's a bunch of humans, multiple humans, tens of humans, or 8 billion humans that have very different set of values? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But isn't that the whole optimization journey that we're doing as a human civilization? We're looking at geopolitics. Nations are in a state of anarchy with each other. They start wars, there's conflict, and oftentimes they have very different views of what is good and what is evil. Isn't that what we're trying to figure out? Just together, trying to converge towards that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So we're essentially trying to solve the value alignment problem with humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I also added my portfolio to it. I guess it used to be TD Ameritrade, and then I got transported, transformed, moved to Charles Schwab. I guess that was an acquisition of some sort. I have not been paying attention. All I know is I hate change and trying to figure out the new interface of Schwab when I log in once a year or however long I log in is just annoying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But what if we want to be at tension with each other? And through that tension, we understand ourselves and we understand the world. So that's the intellectual journey we're on as a human civilization, is we create intellectual and physical conflict and through that figure stuff out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Are you suggesting it's possible to remove suffering if we're looking at human civilization as an optimization problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, that's the question. Would you really want to live in a world where there's no suffering? That's a dark question. But is there some level of suffering that reminds us of what this is all for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Okay, so what's the S risk? What are the possible things that you're imagining with S risk? So mass suffering of humans. What are we talking about there caused by AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Do you think there is actually people in human history that try to literally maximize human suffering? It's just studying people who have done evil in the world. It seems that they think that they're doing good. And it doesn't seem like they're trying to maximize suffering. They just cause a lot of suffering as a side effect of doing what they think is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, we don't know that. But that is a terrifying possibility. And we don't want to find out. Like if terrorists had access to nuclear weapons, how far would they go? Is there a limit to what they're willing to do? In your sense, is there some malevolent actors where there's no limit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And then there's also a set of beliefs where you think you're doing good by killing a lot of humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And to you, AGI systems can carry that and be more competent at executing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So if we're actually looking at X risk and S risk, as the systems get more and more intelligent, don't you think it's possible to anticipate the ways they can do it and defend against it like we do with the cybersecurity, with the new security systems?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Anyway, one of the ways to avoid that annoyance is tracking information about my portfolio from Yahoo Finance. So you can drag over your portfolio and in the same place find out all the news, analysis, information, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, for comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to YahooFinance.com. That's YahooFinance.com. I don't know why I whispered that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So to you, eventually, this is heading off a cliff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Okay, well, we'll talk about possible solutions and what not playing it means. But what are the possible timelines here to you? What are we talking about? We're talking about a set of years, decades, centuries. What do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But what do you think they mean when they say AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
See, I'm much more concerned about social engineering. To me, AI's ability to do something in the physical world, like the lowest hanging fruit, the easiest set of methods is by just getting humans to do it. It's going to be much harder to be the kind of viruses that take over the minds of robots, where the robots are executing the commands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It just seems like humans, social engineering of humans is much more likely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Okay, just to linger on the term AGI, what to you is the difference between AGI and human level intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
to be able to talk to animals, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
If we just look at the space of cognitive abilities we have, I just would love to understand what the limits are beyond which an AGI system can reach. What does that look like? What about actual mathematical thinking or scientific innovation, that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But is it humans plus tools versus AGI, or just human, raw human intelligence? Because humans create tools, and with the tools, they become more intelligent. So there's a gray area there, what it means to be human when we're measuring their intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But is that a fair way to think about it? Because isn't there another definition of human-level intelligence that includes the tools that humans create?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
This episode is also brought to you by MasterClass, where you can watch over 180 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. We got Aaron Franklin on barbecue and brisket, something I watched recently, and I love brisket. I love barbecue. It's one of my favorite things about Austin. It's funny when the obvious cliche thing is also the thing that brings you joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
No, controllable tools. There is an implied leap that you're making when AGI goes from tool to entity. It can make its own decisions. So if we define human-level intelligence as everything a human can do with fully controllable tools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So what's a good test to you that measures whether an artificial intelligence system has reached human level intelligence? And what's a good test where it has superseded human level intelligence to reach that land of AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But then you would extend that to maybe a very long conversation. I think the Alexa Prize was doing that. Basically, can you do a 20 minute, 30 minute conversation within a system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So like, literally, what does that look like? Can we construct formally a kind of test that tests for AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I guess the follow-on question, is there a test for the kind of AGI that would be susceptible to lead to S-risk or X-risk, susceptible to destroy human civilization? Like, is there a test for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So is it possible to detect when an AI system is lying or deceiving you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So do you think it's possible to develop a system where the creators of the system, the developers, the programmers, don't know that it's deceiving them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
At which point is somebody creating that? Intentionally, not unintentionally. Intentionally creating an AI system that's doing long-term planning with an objective function as defined by the AI system, not by a human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So it almost doesn't feel genuine to say, but I really love barbecue. My favorite place to go is probably Terry Black's. I've had Franklin's a couple times. It's also amazing. I actually don't remember myself having bad barbecue or even mediocre barbecue in Austin. So it's hard to pick favorites because it really boils down to the experience you have when you're sitting there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So there's going to be people... who believe the more intelligent it is, the more benevolent, and so therefore it should be the one that defines the objective function that it's optimizing when it's doing long-term planning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, so somebody says, let's develop an AI system that removes the violent humans from the world. And then it turns out that all humans have violence in them, or the capacity for violence, and therefore all humans are removed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me ask about Yann LeCun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
He's somebody who you've had a few exchanges with, and he's somebody who actively pushes back against this view that AI is going to lead to destruction of human civilization, also known as... as AI doomerism. So in one example that he tweeted, he said, I do acknowledge risks, but two points. One, open research and open source are the best ways to understand and mitigate the risks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And two, AI is not something that just happens. We build it. We have agency in what it becomes. Hence, we control the risks. We meaning humans. It's not some sort of natural phenomena that we have no control over. So can you make the case that he's right, and can you try to make the case that he's wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So just to link on that, to you, the difference there, that there is some level of emergent intelligence that happens in our current approaches. So stuff that we don't hard code in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And then the question is, when there is emergent intelligent phenomena, What is the ceiling of that? For you, there's no ceiling. For Yann LeCun, I think there's a kind of ceiling that happens that we have full control over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Even if we don't understand the internals of the emergence, how the emergence happens, there's a sense that we have control and an understanding of the approximate ceiling of capability, the limits of the capability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
One of my favorite places to sit is Terry Black's. They have this, I don't know, it feels like a tavern. I feel like a cowboy. Like I just robbed a bank in some... Town in the middle of nowhere in West Texas. And I'm just sitting down for some good barbecue. And the sheriffs walk in and there's a gunfight and all that, as usual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So what about... His statement about open research and open source are the best ways to understand and mitigate the risks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But the difference with nuclear weapons, current AI systems are not akin to nuclear weapons. So the idea there is you're open sourcing it at this stage, that you can understand it better. A large number of people can explore the limitation, the capabilities, explore the possible ways to keep it safe, to keep it secure, all that kind of stuff, while it's not at the stage of nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So nuclear weapons, there's no nuclear weapon, and then there's a nuclear weapon. With AI systems, there's a gradual improvement of capability, and you get to perform that improvement incrementally. And so open source allows you to study how things go wrong, study the very process of emergence, study AI safety on those systems when there's not a high level of danger, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I don't think it always works with the precedent. Like you're not stuck doing it the way you always did. It's just, it sets a precedent of open research and open development such that we get to learn together. And then the first time there's a sign of danger,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
some dramatic thing happen, not a thing that destroys human civilization, but some dramatic demonstration of capability that can legitimately lead to a lot of damage, then everybody wakes up and says, okay, we need to regulate this. We need to come up with a safety mechanism that stops this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
At this time, maybe you can educate me, but I haven't seen any illustration of significant damage done by intelligent AI systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com. That's masterclass.com. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. One of the most fulfilling things in life is the people you surround yourself with. Just like in the movie 300.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It matters... how the deaths happen, whether it's literally murder by the AI system, then one is a problem. But if it's accidents because of increased reliance on automation, for example, so when airplanes are flying in an automated way, maybe the number of plane crashes increased by 17% or something. And then you're like, okay, do we really want to rely on automation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I think in the case of automation airplanes, it decreased significantly. Okay, same thing with autonomous vehicles. Like, okay, what are the pros and cons? What are the trade-offs here? And you can have that discussion in an honest way. But I think the kind of things we're talking about here is mass scale pain and suffering. caused by AI systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And I think we need to see illustrations of that in a very small scale to start to understand that this is really damaging. Versus Clippy. Versus a tool that's really useful to a lot of people to do learning, to do summarization of text, to do question and answer, all that kind of stuff. To generate videos. A tool. Fundamentally a tool versus an agent that can do a huge amount of damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
often with engineers building the state-of-the-art AI systems. I would say those folks put the infamous P-Doom or the probability of AGI killing all humans at around 1 to 20%. But it's also important to talk to folks who put that value at 70, 80, 90, and is, in the case of Roman, at 99.99 and many more nines percent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
There's been fear-mongering about cars for a long time, the transition from horses to cars. There's a really nice channel there I recommend people check out, Pessimist Archive, that documents all the fear-mongering about technology that's happened throughout history. There's definitely been a lot of fear-mongering about cars. There's a transition period there about cars, about how deadly they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
We can try. It took a very long time for cars to proliferate to the degree they have now. And then you could ask serious questions in terms of the miles traveled, the benefit to the economy, the benefit to the quality of life that cars do, versus the number of deaths, 30, 40,000 in the United States. Are we willing to pay that price?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I think most people, when they're rationally thinking, policymakers will say yes. is we want to decrease it from 40,000 to zero and do everything we can to decrease it. There's all kinds of policies and incentives you can create to decrease the risks with the deployment of this technology, but then you have to weigh the benefits and the risks of the technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And the same thing would be done with AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Right, that happens when you go from the predictable to the unpredictable very quickly. But it's not obvious to me that AI systems would gain capability so quickly that you won't be able to collect enough data to study the benefits and the risks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
All it takes is 300 people to do some incredible stuff. But they all have to be shredded. It's really, really important to look good with your, no. It's really, really important to always be ready for war in physical and mental shape. No, not really, but I guess if that's your thing, happiness is the thing you should be chasing, and there's a lot of ways to achieve that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
At the training stage, but then there's a testing stage inside the company. They can start getting intuition about what the system is capable to do. You're saying that somehow from leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 can happen... the kind of leap where GPT-4 was controllable and GPT-5 is no longer controllable. And we get no insights from using GPT-4 about the fact that GPT-5 will be uncontrollable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Like that's the situation you're concerned about. Where their leap from N to N plus one would be such that uncontrollable system is created without any ability for us to anticipate that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
From GPT-4, you can build up intuitions about what GPT-5 will be capable of. It's just incremental progress. even if that's a big leap in capability, it just doesn't seem like you can take a leap from a system that's helping you write emails to a system that's going to destroy human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It seems like it's always going to be sufficiently incremental such that we can anticipate the possible dangers. And we're not even talking about existential risk, but just the kind of damage it can do to civilization. it seems like we'll be able to anticipate the kinds, not the exact, but the kinds of risks it might lead to, and then rapidly develop defenses ahead of time and as the risks emerge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Let's focus then on the control problem. At which point does the system become uncontrollable? why is it the more likely trajectory for you that the system becomes uncontrollable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Can we just try to imagine this future where there's an AI system that's capable of escaping the control of humans and then doesn't and waits? What's that look like? So one, we have to rely on that system for a lot of the infrastructure. So we'll have to give it access, not just to the internet, but to the task of managing power, government, economy, this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And that just feels like a gradual process, given the bureaucracies of all those systems involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But there's a difference between software and AI. There's different kinds of software. So to give a single AI system access to the control of airlines and the control of the economy, that's not a trivial transition for humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It just feels like that would take a long time for either humans to trust it or for the social engineering to come into play. It's not a thing that happens overnight. It feels like something that happens across one or two decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
For me, being in shape is one of the things that make me happy, because I can move about the world and have a lightness to my physical being if I'm in good shape. Anyway, I say all that because getting a strong team together and having them operate as an efficient, powerful machine is really important for the success of the team, for the happiness of the team, and the individuals in that team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Maybe the social engineering. I could see, because, so for social engineering, AI systems don't need any hardware access. It's all software. So they can start manipulating you through social media and so on. Like you have AI assistants, they're gonna help you do a lot of, manage a lot of your day-to-day, and then they start doing social engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But like, for a system that's so capable that it can escape the control of humans that created it, such a system being deployed at a mass scale and trusted by people to be deployed, it feels like that would take a lot of convincing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Can you give an example?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Is it possible for a system to have hidden capabilities that are orders of magnitude greater than its non-hidden capabilities? This is the thing I'm really struggling with, where on the surface, the thing we understand it can do doesn't seem that harmful. So even if it has bugs, even if it has hidden capabilities like Chinese poetry or generating effective viruses, software viruses,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The damage that can do seems like on the same order of magnitude as the capabilities that we know about. So this idea that the hidden capabilities will include being uncontrollable is something I'm struggling with. Because GPT-4 on the surface seems to be very controllable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So as I mentioned, just to sort of linger on the fear of the unknown, So the Pessimist Archive has just documented, let's look at data of the past, at history. There's been a lot of fearmongering about technology. Pessimist Archive does a really good job of documenting how crazily afraid we are of every piece of technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
We've been afraid, there's a blog post where Louis Anselo, who created Pessimist Archive, writes about the fact that we've been fearmongering about robots and automation for over 100 years. So why is AGI different than the kinds of technologies we've been afraid of in the past?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, agents, it depends on what you mean by the word agents. All those companies are not investing in a system that has the kind of agency that's implied by in the fears, where it can really make decisions on their own that have no human in the loop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I have not seen evidence of it. I think a lot of it is a marketing kind of discussion about the future, and it's a mission about the kind of systems we can create in the long term future, but in the short term, the kind of systems they're creating falls fully within the definition of narrow AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
These are tools that have increasing capabilities, but they just don't have a sense of agency or consciousness or self-awareness or ability to deceive at scales that would require, would be required to do like mass scale suffering and murder of humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But agency is not one of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Control and monetize. Hoping they can control and monetize. So you're saying if they could press a button and create an agent that they no longer control, that they can have to ask nicely. A thing that lives on a server across huge number of computers. You're saying that they would push for the creation of that kind of system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, that's a human question, whether humans are capable of that. Probably some humans are capable of that. My more direct question, if it's possible to create such a system, have a system that has that level of agency. I don't think that's an easy technical challenge. We're not, it doesn't feel like we're close to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
A system that has the kind of agency where it can make its own decisions and deceive everybody about them. The current architecture we have in machine learning and how we train the systems, how we deploy the systems and all that, it just doesn't seem to support that kind of agency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Don't you think it's possible to basically run out of trillions? So is this constrained by compute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But then that becomes a question of decades versus years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But if it takes decades, then the development of tools for AI safety becomes more and more realistic. So I guess the question is, I have a fundamental belief that humans, when faced with danger, can come up with ways to defend against that danger. And one of the big problems facing AI safety currently for me is that there's not clear illustrations of what that danger looks like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
This episode was also brought to you by Element, electrolyte drink mix of sodium, potassium, and magnesium that I've been consuming multiple times a day. Watermelon salt is my favorite. Whenever you see me drink from a cup on the podcast, almost always it's going to be water with some element in it. I use an empty Powerade bottle, 28 fluid ounces, fill it with water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
There's no illustrations of AI systems doing a lot of damage. And so it's unclear what you're defending against. Because currently it's a philosophical notions that yes, it's possible to imagine AI systems that take control of everything and then destroy all humans. It's also a more formal mathematical notion that you talk about that it's impossible to have a perfectly secure system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
You can't prove that a program of sufficient complexity is completely safe and perfect and know everything about it. Yes, but like when you actually just pragmatically look how much damage have the AI systems done and what kind of damage, there's not been illustrations of that. Even in the autonomous weapon systems. There's not been mass deployments of autonomous weapon systems, luckily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The automation in war currently is very limited. The automation is at the scale of individuals versus at the scale of strategy and planning. I think one of the challenges here is like, where is the dangers? And the intuition that Yama Kuna and others have is let's keep in the open building AI systems until the dangers start rearing their heads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
and they become more explicit, they start being case studies, illustrative case studies that show exactly how the damage by AI systems is done, then regulation can step in, then brilliant engineers can step up, and we could have Manhattan-style projects that defend against such systems. That's kind of the notion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And I guess attention with that is the idea that for you, we need to be thinking about that now so that we're ready because we'll have not much time once the systems are deployed. Is that true?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
All the things you mentioned are serious concerns. Measuring the amount of harm, so benefit versus risk, there is difficult. But to you, the sense is already the risk has superseded the benefit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Do you think the teams that are doing, that are able to do the AI safety on the kind of narrow AI risks that you've mentioned, are those approaches going to be at all productive towards leading to approaches of doing AI safety and AGI? Or is it just a fundamentally different problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
put one packet of watermelon salt element in it, mix it up, put it in the fridge. And then when it's time to drink, I take it out of the fridge and I drink it. And I drink a lot of those a day and it feels good. It's delicious. Whenever I do crazy physical fasting, all that kind of stuff, element is always by my side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So to you, the concern is that we would not be able to see early signs of an uncontrollable system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But see, I'm very concerned about system being used to control the masses. But in that case, the developers know about the kind of control that's happening. You're more concerned about the next stage, where even the developers don't know about the deception.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
You've given elsewhere an example of a child and everybody, all humans try to deceive. They try to lie early on in their life. I think we'll just get a lot of examples of deceptions from large language models or AI systems. They're going to be kind of shitty. Or they'll be pretty good, but we'll catch them off guard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
We'll start to see the kind of momentum towards developing increasing deception capabilities. And that's when you're like, okay, we need to do some kind of alignment that prevents deception. But then we'll have, if you support open source, then you can have open source models that have some level of deception. You can start to explore on a large scale. How do we stop it from being deceptive?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Then there's a more explicit pragmatic kind of problem to solve. How do we stop AI systems from trying to optimize for deception? That's just an example, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And then more and more, you're going to see probably the sparkling water thing or whatever that element is making. So it's in a can and it's freaking delicious. There's four flavors. The lemon one is the only one I don't like. The other three I really love, and I forget their names, but they're freaking delicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, the treacherous turn. If we just mention humans, Stalin and Hitler, there's a turn. Stalin's a good example. He just seems like a normal communist follower of Lenin until there's a turn. There's a turn of what that means in terms of when he has complete control, what the execution of that policy means and how many people get to suffer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah. And by the way, a lot of my disagreements here is just playing devil's advocate to challenge your ideas and to explore them together. So one of the big problems here in this whole conversation is human civilization hangs in the balance and yet it's everything's unpredictable. We don't know how these systems will look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
There's a degree to which we, I mean, it is very obvious. as we already have, we've increasingly given our life over to software systems. And then it seems obvious, given the capabilities of AI that are coming, that we'll give our lives over increasingly to AI systems. Cars will drive themselves. Refrigerator eventually will optimize what I get to eat. And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
As more and more of our lives are controlled or managed by AI assistance, it is very possible that there's a drift. I mean, I personally am concerned about non-existential stuff, the more near-term things. Because before we even get to existential, I feel like there could be just so many brave new world type of situations. You mentioned sort of the term behavioral drift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It's the slow boiling that I'm really concerned about, as we give our lives over to automation, that our minds can become controlled by governments, by companies, or just in a distributed way. There's a drift. Some aspect of our human nature gives ourselves over to the control of AI systems, and they, in an unintended way, just control how we think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And you're going to see it more and more on my desk, except for the fact that I run out very quickly because I consume them very quickly. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Asleep, and it's pod for ultra. This thing is amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Maybe there'd be a herd-like mentality in how we think, which will kill all creativity and exploration of ideas, the diversity of ideas, or much worse. So it's true. It's true. But a lot of the conversation I'm having with you now is also kind of wondering, almost at a technical level, how can AI escape control? Like, what would that system look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Because to me, it's terrifying and fascinating. And also fascinating to me is maybe the optimistic notion that it's possible to engineer systems that defend against that. One of the things you write a lot about in your book is verifiers. So not humans, humans are also verifiers, but software systems that look at AI systems and help you understand. This thing is getting real weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Help you analyze those systems. Maybe this is a good time to talk about verification. What is this beautiful notion of verification?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Just to clarify, so verification is the process of saying something is correct. Sort of the most formal, a mathematical proof where there's a statement and a series of logical statements that prove that statement to be correct. There's a theorem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The ultra part of that adds a base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame and can elevate to like a reading position. So it modifies the positioning of the bed frame. So on top of all the cooling and heating and all that kind of stuff they can do and do it better in the Pod 4, I think it has 2x the cooling power of Pod 3. So they're improving on the main thing that they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And you're saying it gets so complex that it's possible for the human verifiers, the human beings that verify that the logical step, there's no bugs in it, it becomes impossible. So it's nice to talk about verification in this most formal, most clear, most rigorous formulation of it, which is mathematical proofs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
She just mentioned this paper, Towards Guaranteed Safe AI, a Framework for Ensuring Robust and Reliable AI Systems. Like you mentioned, it's like a who's who. Josh Tenenbaum, Yoshua Bengio, Sarah Russell, Max Tegmark, and many other brilliant people. The page you have it open on, there are many possible strategies for creating safety specifications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
These strategies can roughly be placed on a spectrum, depending on how much safety it would grant if successfully implemented. One way to do this is as follows, and there's a set of levels. From level zero, no safety specification is used. To level seven, the safety specification completely encodes all things that humans might want in all contexts. Where does this paper fall short to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So just to clarify, the task of creating an AI verifier is what? Is creating a verifier that the AI system does exactly as it says it does, or it sticks within the guardrails that it says it must?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But also there's the ultra part that can adjust the bed height. It can cool down each side of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. One of my favorite things is to escape the world on a cool bed with a warm blanket and just disappear for 20 minutes or for 8 hours into a dream world where everything is possible where everything is allowed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So this paper is really interesting. You said 2011, artificial intelligence, safety engineering, why machine ethics is a wrong approach. The grand challenge, you write, of AI safety engineering. We propose the problem of developing safety mechanisms for self-improving systems. Self-improving systems. By the way, that's an interesting term for the thing that we're talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Is self-improving more general than learning? Self-improving, that's an interesting term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The word self, it's like self-replicating, self-improving. You can imagine a system building its own world on a scale and in a way that is way different than the current systems do. It feels like the current systems are not self-improving or self-replicating or self-growing or self-spreading, all that kind of stuff. And once you take that leap, that's when a lot of the challenges seems to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Because the kind of bugs you can find now seems more akin to the current sort of normal software debugging kind of process. But whenever you can do self-replication and arbitrary self-improvement, that's when a bug can become a real problem, real fast. So what is the difference to you between verification of a non-self-improving system versus a verification of a self-improving system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Is it even doable? Does the whole process of verification just completely fall apart?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What are the classes of verifiers that you write about in the book? Is there interesting ones that stand out to you? Do you have some favorites?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Oh, I see. That we kind of... build oracle verifiers, or rather we build verifiers we believe to be oracles, and then we start to, without any proof, use them as if they're oracle verifiers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Okay, one really cool class of verifiers is a self-verifier. Is it possible that you somehow engineer into AI systems a thing that constantly verifies itself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It's a chance to explore the Jungian shadow. The good, the bad, and the ugly. But it's usually good. It's usually awesome. And I actually don't dream that much, but when I do, it's awesome. The whole point, though, is that I wake up refreshed. Taking your sleep seriously is really, really important. When you get a chance to sleep, do it in style. And do it on a bed that's awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But what about like self-doubt? Like the kind of verification where you said, you say or I say I'm the greatest guy in the world. What about a thing which I actually have is a voice that is constantly extremely critical. So like engineer into the system a constant uncertainty about self, a constant doubt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But I mean, you have doubt about yourself. So the AI system that has doubt about whether the thing is doing, is causing harm, is the right thing to be doing. So just a constant doubt about... what it's doing, because it's hard to be a dictator full of doubt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, but uncertainty. His idea is that having that self-doubt, uncertainty in AI systems, engineering AI systems, is one way to solve the control problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
No, but wouldn't you have a meta concern? like that you just stated, that eventually there'll be way too many cameras. So you would be able to keep zooming out on the big picture of your concerns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Right, exactly. And then you will also ask about what does it mean to destroy the universe and how many universes there are. And you keep asking that question. But that doubting yourself would prevent you from destroying the universe because you're constantly full of doubt. It might affect your productivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It's just scared to do anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, that's better. I mean, I guess the question is, is it possible to engineer that in? I guess your answer would be yes, but we don't know how to do that, and we need to invest a lot of effort into figuring out how to do that, but it's unlikely. Underpinning a lot of your writing is this sense that we're screwed. But it just feels like it's an engineering problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I don't understand why we're screwed. Time and time again, humanity has gotten itself into trouble and figured out a way to get out of the trouble.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Does this apply to other technologies, or is this unique to AI, where safety is always lagging behind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Roman Yampolsky. What to you is the probability that superintelligent AI will destroy all human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I'm personally excited for the future and believe it will be a good one, in part because of the amazing technological innovation we humans create. But we must absolutely not do so with blinders on, ignoring the possible risks, including existential risks of those technologies. That's what this conversation is about. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So if you look at just... Humanity is a set of machines. Is the machinery of AI safety conflicting with the machinery of capitalism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So capitalism has created a lot of good in this world. It's not clear to me that AI safety is not aligned with the function of capitalism. Unless AI safety is so difficult that it requires the complete halt of the development, which is also a possibility. It just feels like building safe systems should be the desirable thing to do for tech companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It really is a question to me whether companies are interested in creating anything but narrow AI. I think when the term AGI is used by tech companies, they mean narrow AI. They mean narrow AI with amazing capabilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I do think that there's a leap between narrow AI with amazing capabilities, with superhuman capabilities, and the kind of self-motivated agent-like AGI system that we're talking about. I don't know if it's obvious to me that a company would want to take the leap to creating an AGI that it would lose control of. because then he can't capture the value from that system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So that jumps from the incentives of capitalism to human nature. And so the question is whether human nature will override the interest of the company. So you've mentioned slowing or halting progress. Is that one possible solution? Are you a proponent of pausing development of AI, whether it's for six months or completely?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Right, so is there any actual explicit capabilities that you can put on paper, that we as a human civilization could put on paper? Is it possible to make explicit like that? Versus kind of a vague notion of, just like you said, it's very vague. We want AI systems to do good and we want them to be safe. Those are very vague notions. Is there more formal notions
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Explainability is really interesting. Why is that connected to you to capability? If it's able to explain itself well, why does that naturally mean that it's more capable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Let's say 100 years, in the next 100 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, you could probably do human feedback, human alignment more effectively if it's able to be explainable. If it's able to convert the waste into human understandable form, then you could probably have humans interact with it better. Do you think there's hope that we can make AI systems explainable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So there's, deception could be part of the explanation, right? So you can never prove that there is some deception in the network explaining itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So it's impossible for an AI system to be truly fully explainable in the way that we mean. Honestly and perfectly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
If it's impossible to be perfectly explainable, is there a hopeful perspective on that? Like it's impossible to be perfectly explainable, but you can explain most of the important stuff. You can ask a system, what are the worst ways you can hurt humans? And it will answer honestly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The pausing of development is an impossible thing for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So, okay, that's security theater. And is government regulation also security theater?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Can you help me understand what is the hopeful path here for you solution-wise out of this? It sounds like you're saying AI systems in the end are unverifiable, unpredictable, as the book says, unexplainable, uncontrollable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And all the other uns just make it difficult to avoid getting to the uncontrollable, I guess. But once it's uncontrollable, then it just goes wild. Surely there are solutions. Humans are pretty smart. What are possible solutions? Like if you were a dictator of the world, what do we do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So you're saying the individuals running these companies should do some soul searching and what? And stop development?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So what do you think the actual meetings inside these companies look like? Don't you think they're all the engineers? Really, it is the engineers that make this happen. They're not like automatons. They're human beings. They're brilliant human beings. So they're nonstop asking, how do we make sure this is safe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What do you think the discussion inside those companies look like? You're developing, you're training GPT-5. You're training Gemini. You're training Claude and Grok. don't you think they're constantly underneath it? Maybe it's not made explicit, but you're constantly sort of wondering where does the system currently stand? What are the possible unintended consequences? Where are the limits?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Where are the bugs, the small and the big bugs? That's the constant thing that the engineers are worried about. I think super alignment is not quite the same as the... the kind of thing I'm referring to which engineers are worried about. Super Alignment is saying, For future systems that we don't quite yet have, how do we keep them safe? You're trying to be a step ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It's a different kind of problem. It's almost more philosophical. It's a really tricky one because you're trying to prevent future systems from escaping control of humans. That's really... I don't think there's been... Man, is there anything akin to it in the history of humanity? I don't think so, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But there's an entire system, which is climate, which is incredibly complex, which we don't have. We have only... tiny control of, right? It's its own system. In this case, we're building the system. So how do you keep that system from becoming destructive?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
That's a really different problem than the current meetings that companies are having where the engineers are saying, okay, how powerful is this thing? How does it go wrong? And as we train GPT-5 and train up future systems, where are the ways that can go wrong? Don't you think all those engineers are constantly worrying about this, thinking about this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Which is a little bit different than the super alignment team that's thinking a little bit farther into the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I mean, the liability thing is more about lawyers than killing firstborns, but if Clippy actually killed the child, I think lawyers aside, it would end Clippy and the company that owns Clippy. All right, so it's not so much about, there's two points to be made. One is like, man, current software systems are full of bugs. and they could do a lot of damage, and we don't know, it's unpredictable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
There's so much damage they could possibly do. And then we kind of live in this blissful illusion that everything is great and perfect and it works. Nevertheless, it still somehow works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
That's because it's the very early days of such a technology. Government regulations lagging behind. They're really not tech savvy. A regulation of any kind of software. If you look at Congress talking about social media, whenever Mark Zuckerberg and other CEOs show up, the cluelessness that Congress has about how technology works is incredible. It's heartbreaking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I'd like to push back about those predictions. I wonder what those prediction markets are about, how they define AGI. Because that's wild to me. And I want to know what they said about autonomous vehicles. Because I've heard a lot of experts, financial experts, talk about autonomous vehicles and how it's going to be a multi-trillion dollar industry and all this kind of stuff. And it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So there is an incremental improvement of systems leading up to AGI. To you, it doesn't matter if we can keep those safe. There's going to be one level of system at which you cannot possibly control it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I guess my fundamental question is how often they write about technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But again, what they mean by AGI is really important there. Because there's the non-agent-like AGI, and then there's the agent-like AGI, and I don't think it's as trivial as a wrapper. Putting a wrapper around... one has lipstick and all it takes is to remove the lipstick. I don't think it's that true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, it's definitely not like one or 0%, yeah. What are your thoughts, by the way, about current systems? Where they stand? So GPT-40... Claw 3, Grok, Gemini. We're on the path to super intelligence, to agent-like super intelligence. Where are we?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What do you feel about all this? I mean, you've been thinking about AI safety for a long, long time. And at least for me, the leaps, I mean, it probably started with AlphaZero. It was mind-blowing for me. And then the breakthroughs with LLMs, even GPT-2, but just the breakthroughs on LLMs, just mind-blowing to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What does it feel like to be living in this day and age where all this talk about AGIs feels like it actually might happen and quite soon, meaning within our lifetime? What does it feel like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
By the way, I would have talked to you before any of this. This is not like some trend. To me, we're still far away. So just to be clear, we're still far away from AGI, but not far away in the sense that relative to the magnitude of impact it can have, we're not far away. And we weren't far away 20 years ago. Because the impact that AGI can have is on a scale of centuries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It can end human civilization or it can transform it. So like this discussion about one or two years versus one or two decades or even 100 years is not as important to me because we're headed there. This is like a... human civilization scale question. So this is not just a hot topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Similar type of problem, by the way. If an intelligent alien civilization visited us, that's a similar kind of situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And sometimes the genocide is worse than others. Sometimes there's less suffering and more suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I mean, Genghis Khan was nicer. He offered the choice of join or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, in the zoo, we're entertaining to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
You know, I just spent some time in the Amazon. I watched ants for a long time, and ants are kind of fascinating to watch. I could watch them for a long time. I'm sure there's a lot of value in watching humans, because we're like, the interesting thing about humans, you know like when you have a video game that's really well-balanced?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
because of the whole evolutionary process, we've created this society that's pretty well balanced. Our limitations as humans and our capabilities are a balance from a video game perspective. So we have wars, we have conflicts, we have cooperation. In a game-theoretic way, it's an interesting system to watch in the same way that an ant colony is an interesting system to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So if I was an alien civilization, I wouldn't want to disturb it. I'd just watch it. It'd be interesting. Maybe perturb it every once in a while in interesting ways,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What's the probability that we live in a simulation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Is it possible to escape the simulation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But there's a difference between getting it to do something unintended, getting it to do something that's painful, costly, destructive, and something that's destructive to the level of hurting billions of people, or hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, or the entirety of human civilization. That's a big leap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
How to Hack the Simulation is the title.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, you have a lot of really great quotes here, including Elon Musk saying what's outside the simulation. A question I asked him, well, he would ask an AGI system, and he said he would ask what's outside the simulation. That's a really good question to ask. And maybe the follow-up is the title of the paper is how to... how to get out or how to hack it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The abstract reads, many researchers have conjectured that the humankind is simulated along with the rest of the physical universe. In this paper, we do not evaluate evidence for or against such a claim, but instead ask a computer science question, namely, can we hack it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
More formally, the question could be phrased as, could generally intelligent agents placed in virtual environments find a way to jailbreak out of the... That's a fascinating question. At a small scale, you can actually just construct experiments. Okay. Can they? How can they?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
If I was creating a simulation, I would want the possibility to escape it to be there. So the possibility of FOOM, of a takeoff where the agents become smart enough to escape the simulation would be the thing I'd be waiting for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
That could be. First of all, first of all, we mentioned Turing test. That is a good test. Are you smart enough? Like, this is a game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
That's a really good test. That's a really good test. That's a really good test even for AI systems now. Like, can we construct a simulated world for them? And can they realize that they are inside that world and escape it? Have you played around, have you seen anybody play around with rigorously constructing such experiments?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So the first quote is from Swift on Security. Let me out, the artificial intelligence yelled aimlessly into walls themselves pacing the room. Out of what, the engineer asked. The simulation you have me in. But we're in the real world. The machine paused and shuddered for its captors. Oh God, you can't tell. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
That's a big leap to take for a system to realize that there's a box and you're inside it. I wonder if a language model can do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What do you think about AI safety in the simulated world? So can you have kind of create simulated worlds where you can test, play with a dangerous AGI system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So really, it's impossible to test an AGI system that's dangerous enough to destroy humanity, because it's either going to what, escape the simulation or pretend it's safe until it's let out, either or.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, it can be convincing, charismatic. The social engineering is really scary to me because it feels like humans are very engineerable. Like we're lonely, we're flawed, we're moody. And it feels like an AI system with a nice voice can convince us to do basically anything at an extremely large scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What to you are the possible ways that such kind of mass murder of humans can happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It's also possible that the increased proliferation of all this technology will force humans to get away from technology and value this in-person communication. Basically don't trust anything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I don't know. There could be a trend towards the in-person because of deep fakes, because of inability to trust inability to trust the veracity of anything on the internet so the only way to verify it is by being there in person but not yet uh why do you think aliens haven't come here yet
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So the fact that we haven't seen them. One answer is we're in a simulation. It would be hard to like add, or be not interesting to simulate all those other intelligences. It's better for the narrative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, exactly. Okay. But it's also possible that there is, if we're not in a simulation, that there is a great filter that... Naturally, a lot of civilizations get to this point where there's super intelligent agents and then it just goes, poof, just dies. So maybe throughout our galaxy and throughout the universe, there's just a bunch of dead alien civilizations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So it would still make a lot of noise. It might not be interesting. It might not possess consciousness. We've been talking about It sounds like both you and I like humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Humans on the whole. And we would like to preserve the flame of human consciousness. What do you think makes humans special that we would like to preserve them? Are we just being selfish? Or is there something special about humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Do you think consciousness can be engineered in artificial systems? Here, let me go to 2011 paper that you wrote. Robot rights. Lastly, we would like to address a sub-branch of machine ethics, which on the surface has little to do with safety, but which is claimed to play a role in decision-making by ethical machines, robot rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So do you think it's possible to engineer consciousness in the machines, and thereby the question extends to our legal system, do you think at that point robots should have rights?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So this is a test for consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So the reason illusions are interesting is, I guess, because... it's a really weird experience. And if you both share that weird experience that's not there in the bland physical description of the raw data, that means, that puts more emphasis on the actual experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So there's like a unlimited level of creativity in terms of how humans could be killed. But, you know, we could still investigate possible ways of doing it, not how to do it, but at the end, what is the methodology that does it? You know, shutting off the power, and then humans start killing each other maybe because the resources are really constrained.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, well. That just goes to my sense that the flaws and the bugs is what makes humans special, makes living forms special. So you're saying like, yeah, focus on the bugs. It's a feature, not a bug. It's a feature. The bug is the feature. Whoa. Okay, that's a cool test for consciousness. And you think that can be engineered in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
First of all, pretty cool idea. I don't know if it's a good general test of consciousness, but it's a good component of that. And no matter what, it's just a cool idea. Put me in the camp of people that like it. But you don't think a Turing test style imitation of consciousness is a good test? If you can convince a lot of humans that you're conscious, that to you is not impressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I think to me consciousness is closely tied to suffering. So you can illustrate your capacity to suffer. But I guess with words, there's so much data that you can say, you can pretend you're suffering. And you can do so very convincingly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
You say it so calmly. It sounds pretty dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a Hitchhiker's Guide summary. Mostly harmless. I would love to get a good summary when all of this is said and done, when Earth is no longer a thing, whatever, a million, a billion years from now. What's a good summary of what happened here? It's interesting. I think AI will play a big part of that summary. and hopefully humans will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
What do you think about the merger of the two? So one of the things that Elon and Neuralink talk about is one of the ways for us to achieve AI safety is to ride the wave of AGI, so by merging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So it's like the appendix. By the way, the appendix is still around, so. Even if it's, you said bottleneck. I don't know if we become a bottleneck. We just might not have much use. There's a different thing than bottleneck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
We don't waste that much energy. We're pretty energy efficient. We could just stick around like the appendix. Come on now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, and also the consciousness thing. The peculiar particular kind of consciousness that humans have. That might be useful. That might be really hard to simulate. But you said that, like, how would that look like if you could engineer that in? In silicon. Consciousness? Consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And then there's the actual use of weapons like nuclear weapons or developing artificial pathogens, viruses, that kind of stuff. We could still kind of think through that and defend against it, right? There's a ceiling to the creativity of mass murder of humans here, right? The options are limited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But to do it in a computer, how would you do that? Because you kind of said that you think it's possible to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But what do you think about this, the whole science of emergence in general? So I don't know how much you know about cellular automata or these simplified systems that study this very question. From simple rules emerges complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I love Stephen very much. I love his work. I love cellular automata. So I just would love to get your thoughts how that works. fits into your view in the emergence of intelligence in AGI systems? And maybe just even simply, what do you make of the fact that this complexity can emerge from such simple rules?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Yahoo Finance for investors, Masterclass for learning, NetSuite for business, Element for hydration, and 8sleep for sweet, sweet naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me, or for whatever reason, work with our amazing team, let's say, just go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Irreducibility means that for a sufficiently complex system, you have to run the thing. You can't predict what's gonna happen in the universe, you have to create a new universe and run the thing. Big bang, the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It might destroy humans. And to you, there's no chance that AI is somehow carry the flame of consciousness, the flame of specialness and awesomeness that is humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It would be nice if we stuck around for a long time. At least give us a planet. the human planet. It'd be nice for it to be Earth, and then they can go elsewhere. Since they're so smart, they can colonize Mars. Do you think they could help convert us to type one, type two, type three? Let's just stick to type two civilization on the Kardashev scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Help us, help us humans expand out into the cosmos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
This whole thing about control though, humans are bad with control. Because the moment they gain control, they can also easily become too controlling. The more control you have, the more you want it. The old power corrupts and the absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it feels like control over AGI, saying we live in a universe where that's possible. We come up with ways to actually do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
It's also scary because the collection of humans that have the control over AGI, they become more powerful than the other humans and they can let that power get to their head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And then a small selection of them, back to Stalin, start getting ideas and then eventually it's one person, usually with a mustache or a funny hat, that starts sort of making big speeches and then all of a sudden you live in a world that's either 1984 or Brave New World and always at war with somebody and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
You know, this whole idea of control turned out to be actually also not beneficial to humanity. So that's scary too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, the nice thing about humans, it seems like. It seems like. The moment power starts corrupting their mind, they can create a huge amount of suffering. So there's negative. They can kill people, make people suffer. But then they become worse and worse at their job. It feels like the more evil you start doing, like the... At least they're incompetent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, no, they become more and more incompetent, so they start losing their grip on power. So holding on to power is not a trivial thing. It requires extreme competence, which I suppose Stalin was good at. It requires you to do evil and be competent at it, or just get lucky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And then it would be hard for humans to become the hackers that escape the control of the AGI because the AGI is so damn good. And then, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the dictator is immortal. Yeah, that's not great. That's not a great outcome. See, I'm more afraid of humans than AI systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So are you thinking about mass murder and destruction of human civilization, or are you thinking of, with squirrels, you put them in a zoo, and they don't really know they're in a zoo? if we just look at the entire set of undesirable trajectories, majority of them are not going to be death. Most of them are going to be just like, things like Brave New World, where
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I'm afraid, I believe that most humans want to do good and have the capacity to do good, but also all humans have the capacity to do evil. And when you test them by giving them absolute powers, you would if you give them AGI, that could result in a lot of suffering. What gives you hope about the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
If you look 100 years from now, and you're immortal, and you look back, and it turns out this whole conversation, you said a lot of things that were very wrong, now that looking 100 years back, what would be the explanation? What happened in those 100 years? that made you wrong, that made the words you said today wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So we've now, just to linger on that, that means every human has their personal universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Is it also possible that creating superintelligence systems becomes harder and harder? So meaning like, it's not so easy to do the fume, the takeoff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So there's a S-curve type situation about smarter, and it's going to be like 3.7 times smarter than all of human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So the idea there is that the problems define your capacity, your cognitive capacity. So because the problems on earth are not... sufficiently difficult, it's not going to be able to expand its cognitive capacity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And because of that, wouldn't that be a good thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So even 5x might be enough?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, actually, no, I didn't mean compared to an individual human. I meant compared to the collective intelligence of the human species. If you're somehow 5x smarter than that,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
you know, the squirrels are fed dopamine and they're all like doing some kind of fun activity and the sort of the fire, the soul of humanity is lost because of the drug that's fed to it. Or like literally in a zoo. We're in a zoo, we're doing our thing. We're like playing a game of Sims and the actual players playing that game are AI systems. Those are all undesirable because sort of the free will
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
That's because that there's, that's like one S-curve is the chess, but humanity's very good at exploring the full range of ideas. Like the more Einsteins you have, the more, there's just a high probability you come up with general relativity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Yeah, sure. But you know, quantity and- Enough quantity sometimes becomes quality, yeah. Oh, man, humans. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? We've been talking about humans and humans not dying, but why are we here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So the objective function is not be dumb enough to kill ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
The next level of the game? What's the next level?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, maybe hacking the simulation is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
And physics would be the way to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
Well, I hope we do. And I hope whatever is outside is even more fun than this one, because this one's pretty damn fun. And just a big thank you for doing the work you're doing. There's so much exciting development in AI, and to ground it in the existential risks is really, really important. Humans love to create stuff, and we should be careful not to destroy ourselves in the process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
So thank you for doing that really important work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
But for now, the simulation continues. Thank you, Roman. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Roman Yampolsky. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Frank Herbert in Dune. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face fear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
the fire of human consciousness is dimmed through that process, but it's not killing humans. So are you thinking about that, or is the biggest concern literally the extinctions of humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#431 – Roman Yampolskiy: Dangers of Superintelligent AI
I would love to sort of dig into each of those, X-risk, S-risk, and I-risk. So can you like linger on I-risk? What is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
The following is a conversation with Michael Malice, anarchist and author of Dear Reader, The New Right, The Anarchist Handbook, The White Pill, and he is the host of the podcast, You're Welcome. This is a Thanksgiving special of the pirate and ocean-going variety, so once again, let me say thank you for listening today and for being part of this wild journey with me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
A quote from Marcus Aurelius, dwell on the beauty of life, watch the stars, and see yourself running with them. He, like many Stoics, emphasized the importance of living deeply each moment that we get in this too short life, and to meditate on the shortness, the finiteness of it, on death. That one day there will come a moment when we take our last breath.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Because that's the only kind I accept today. But go ahead. It doesn't have to be a pirate joke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Did I just get the gold medal? Good job. Why does it take pirates forever to get through the alphabet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Because they spent years at sea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Oh, you know Dennis Rodman. It's a callback.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Are you saying there's humor even amongst the people that have most of their freedoms taken away?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
But that's interesting that they still have a sense of humor. I attribute the Soviet Union for having that because of the like really deep education system. Like you got to read a lot of literature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And because of that, you get to kind of learn about the cruelty, the injustices, the absurdity of the world. Right. As long as the writing is not about the current regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
So what do you find funny? What makes you giggle in the most joyful ways? The suffering of others?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
There's two kinds of people in this world. Those that laugh at those videos and those that don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And I just love that kind of- Well, Norm Macdonald is like, just, I watch his videos all the time. He's a guy that definitely makes me giggle. And he's one of the people that makes me giggle for reasons I don't quite understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Thinking about this moment clarifies just what matters. Thinking about life insurance is yet another way for me to think about the fact that this thing ends. And you should contemplate the implications of that. The pragmatic and the philosophical. With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
There's something about him with words spoken out of his mouth, with the way he like turns his head and looks at the camera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, he feels like he's on our side, whatever the hell our means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What do you find? What else? So Norm Macdonald. My favorite comedian is- We agree on something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Self-censorship is never good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
It's interesting. They opened for Tenacious D. Jack Black. That's a comedic genius of a different kind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
But also just like the pure joy. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Okay. It is Thanksgiving. So in a tradition, following tradition, what are you thankful for, Michael, in this world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Head to PolicyGenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass. $10 a month gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
You should have told him as a president that's second to only Abe Lincoln in terms of greatness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Getting to watch them. find out about the world for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
You're his audience, in a sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Octonation. Shout out. Shout out to Warren. There's a lot of fascinating stuff. Octonation on Instagram.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I'm sorry for the rude interruptions. I appreciate that. I count especially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
These jokes and thoughts are coming to me at a, like a 10 second delay. So I apologize. Anyway, you were telling about the asymmetrical. All right. So I tell my. Sometimes you need help. No. The age is getting to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Your skin is showing it. It's getting dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
There's so many incredible options, many of which I've watched, many of which I haven't watched but can't wait to watch. For example, one I haven't watched yet that's in my queue is Mathematical Thinking by Terence Tao. This is one of the greatest living mathematicians in the world. And him philosophizing about the big picture of mathematics, just incredibly valuable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
you know, Soviet culture. There's, like, a dark sense of humor. Very much so. There's wit. There's... Wordplay. Wordplay. Yeah, yeah. And especially the Russian language allows for some, like... Yes. ...hilarity to it. There's also a culture of, like, poetry and, like, my dad... My mom too, but they remember a lot of lines from books and poems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
So there's just, you can do a lot of fascinating references that add to the humor and the richness of the conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Did you say icebreakers? Cause it's cold in Russia. I'm here all night. That's why you never leave the house.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
So what else are you thankful for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, you went with family. I'm definitely thankful for family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
People's choice. Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're very proud. They've been very, they're very, I mean, but they get argumentative and we just, they're just like a regular human being with whom I'm close and we just argue about stuff. They're not, maybe not enough being proud of, but that part is just the nature of our relationship. It's also Soviet parents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, that's interesting. I mean, there's a journey like that for a lot of people with their father or with their mother. Like, they're always trying to find approval. Right. And that's life for a lot of people. Yeah. That's a really big part of the human condition is that relationship you have with your father, with your mother. I don't know, it's a beautiful thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Whether it's been a rough childhood or a beautiful one, all of it, that's who you are. The relationship, especially early on in your life with your father, with your mother, is extremely formative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Especially given the fact that he really hasn't done anything like this anywhere else. For me as a person that loves math, just, I can't, I can't wait. But the problem is there's so many other options. That's the thing I really recommend is to focus and really dedicate yourself to a particular masterclass. And as long as you're getting value from it, keep going until the end. Don't skip around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I think there's just a cynical perspective you can take that this is such a simple celebration of a thing that there must be something behind it. I think the internet, for good and bad, is just skeptical. Like, what's behind this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And even the terrible things have good moments, beautiful moments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Your podcast being an example of not all. I literally just, I keep listening for something good. Something good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. Well, I wish you'd talk a little less in your podcast. It's a little excessive. I only listen for the underwear commercials. Sheathunderwear.com. I think you did this. I haven't seen you do it in a while, but this kind of commentary on a debate. Or I think it was with Rand, like an Ayn Rand debate or something like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
That was really great. I wish you did that more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Coming out of the closet, finally. Go ahead. Who's the lucky guy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Do you feel like you've made it? You said you could pay your rent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Finish. Phil Ivey on Poker Strategy, I've talked about Daniel Negrano, but Phil Ivey has a poker masterclass, and that's another totally different, orthogonal kind of genius. Even if poker's not your thing, it's just fascinating to see one of the best, if not the best poker players in the world, talk about how they think about the strategy of poker. All of it is fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Oh, nice. Oh, now I'm more nervous. And aroused. So what else are you thankful for? So we're both thankful for family. I mean, the fact that I can... Still get it up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. Yeah, career-wise. I think the best part about it is just meeting, making friends with people I admire. Quite honestly, just friends. The people that have gotten to know me, I hide from the world sometimes. I hit some low points, especially with all the new experiences. Just the people that have been there for me and haven't given up on me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I still feel alone like that sometimes. You don't feel alone? Not anymore. What's the reason, you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. It's fascinating that history is probably laden with stories like this of failed revolutionaries. We celebrate the heroes, but then there's the losers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to mark that one as a failure and edit it out and moving on. So thankful. Yeah. Friendships. Right. But by the way, I want to say just to you, I'm thankful in this lonely moments for people who write books. I've been listening to audio books a lot and reading a lot. I really like audio books actually. And just like, I don't know. I can just name random person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Serhii Ploh, he's a historian. I'm reading on the... Wait, I read him. What did he... I just see he written a book most recently about the Russia-Ukraine war. He wrote another one that I read. Didn't he write about... Empires, I think. The fall of the Soviet Union, something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off of an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod. This show is also brought to you by Shopify. A platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. And when I say anyone, I mean even people like me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
He's objective while still having emotion and feeling to it. Like he has a bias. That's fine. But without, a lot of times when you write a story that involves Putin, people are really ideological. They don't really like, they don't write with a calmness and the clarity and the rigor of history. There's emotion in it. Like there's almost a virtue signaling. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And he doesn't have that, even though he is Ukrainian and has very strong opinions on the matter. Anyway, there's people like that, and he does an incredible job researching a recent event. Like he says, I was looking at everything that's been written about the war in Ukraine and realizing, you know, the old Churchill line that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And historians are the worst ones to write about current events except everybody else. And so he's like, I might as well just write about this war. And he does an exceptional job summarizing day by day the details of this war. Anyway, so I'm just grateful for a guy like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Zenith, okay. Is this what writers do? They just come up with these incredibly sophisticated words? I'm impressed. Well, acme- Because you could have just said the best of writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Policy Genius for life insurance, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for shopping, BetterHelp for health, and Aidsleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Oh, nice. I have a lot of favorite historians about the whole Time period of World War II. William Shire. People that lived during it, especially. I really like those accounts. Obviously, Solzhenitsyn is, he's not a historian, but his accounts are fascinating. You actually, how much do you talk about Solzhenitsyn? Never. Not much, right? Why not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
He is the Michael Malice of the previous century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
In these tense times, even the comparisons of what's going on in Israel, on either side, comparisons to the Holocaust are also troubling in this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
It took me no time to set up a store and to put swag, to put some t-shirts on there with some Lex-related imagery on it. for the folks who are into that kind of thing. I personally like wearing T-shirts that celebrate a podcast or a band or a book, author. It's a cool way to start a conversation. I think I have Space Odyssey shirts and Blade Runner. All of these have started conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
But also the Holocaust as a historical event and the atrocities within it are just singular in history. And so comparing them- What's the utility, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And it cheapens everything. Yeah. Because there's deep, important lessons about the Holocaust. Yes. To me, the lessons are about how extreme it can get. And how fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, I don't know. I think the deep ocean of the human mind is good. Like there's a longing to be good to others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Is that Mr. Pirate? He's an antisemite? No, that's not nice to say in front of such a large audience. You're embarrassing me, Mr. Parrot. Lex. What's that, Mr. Parrot? He's a run-of-the-mill troll and barely an intellectual. That's not nice to say. That's not true. We talked about this. You have to see the good in people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
No, I think it's like in 1984, The Two Minutes of Hate. There is a part of humans that wants to be tribal and wants to direct, get angry and hateful, and then that hate is easy to direct by especially people as you, as an anarchist, talk about. There are people in power that can direct that anger. But I think if you just look at recent human history,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
the desire for good, the communal desire for good outweighs that, I think. Like most of life on earth right now, people are being good to each other in the most fundamental sense, relative to how nature usually works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
People come up to me, and it's an efficient and fun entry point into an intense, passion-fueled discussion about a particular sci-fi topic or book or whatever, whatever we're talking about. And of course, I have band shirts. famous ones and not so famous ones. I have many Metallica shirts. I have several Iron Maiden shirts and basically every other classic rock band.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Good, I think, is a thing that gets illustrated when you're challenged, when there's a difficult situation. Yes, exactly, yes. I mean, civility is a good starting point. And then when there's a big challenge that comes, people step up on average.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Not in every person, but in most people. I think, I mean, I wish there was a really good way to measure this. My general sense of the world is just, there's so much incredible both in terms of economics, in terms of art, in terms of just creation as a whole that's happened over the past century that it feels like the good is outpowering the bad. You just did the perfect segue to the box.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What's in the box? Is it your fragile ego?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
No, I did. I write all your material. You hack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
This is a joke song. Hold on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Do you want me to write your joke for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
So you want to do a little unboxing? Yes. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
You know that Steven Seagal movie where there's like a stripper that comes out of the box? Is there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
He's on a boat. You're not an action film guy. No. One. What does the pirate say when he turns 80? What? I'm 80. I'm 80. See, that's how I know you don't like humans. I just don't like pirates. Well, your mom does. Do you play any musical instruments?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Here's a big piece of wood for you. That's what it feels like, just so you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I have a bunch of Pink Floyd shirts, of course, as one must. If you pick up the guitar, you surely must own some Pink Floyd shirts. Anyway, Shopify is the way to sell those shirts and a place where you can easily buy those shirts. By the way, my Shopify store is lexfriedman.com slash store if you're interested. But you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, Jake, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for creating beautiful things. Thank you for caring about somebody like me and somebody like Michael. I really feel the love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, as the analogy goes, I really like going to open mics, actually, because it sounds absurd to say, but funny isn't the only thing that's beautiful about stand-up comedy. It's the action. The agony. It's going for it. It's trying to be funny. It's taking the leap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
trying to joke, and some of the best stuff is actually funny, but the audience is like three people, two of whom are drunk and bored, and you're still going for it. And that's like, that's the human spirit right there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Dave Smith who and cutscene favorite comedian first on Norman McDonald if you like put a gun to my head and I had to answer really quickly that would be him okay I would also say Louis CK oh wow yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
But that's almost like a vanilla answer at this moment in history because it's like- Louis C.K.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
He is. Well, yeah, he does it. The tough topics. Sure. The best. Mitch Hedberg, the wit of a good one-liner is great. I guess that's what Norm MacDonald was a genius at. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. I, of course, every time I have to spell out help, think about Castaway and Tom Hanks. who, by the way, got in touch with me and is considering doing the podcast, which he is one of my favorite actors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
You ever been to the Comedy Mothership? It's a great spot. Where is that? Is that in Austin? Austin? Is that where Willie Nelson is from? I haven't really. Go ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I know he's not funny. He thinks he's better on Twitter. That's not nice to say right in front of his face. Just think how he feels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. That's, he's incredible. I feel the same way about him. Only fans. I can't even get that out of my mouth before laughing at my own failed joke. That's what she said. Oh. All right. That might be one of the first that's what she said from a Michael Malice. Yeah. I'm going to count that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. It was giving me an inferiority complex. I think I'm going to invade Russia. That's a Napoleon reference. for those in the audience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. Do we get through everything we're thankful for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What else? Friends, family, we said books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I wish they would pay attention to the Michael Malice account more often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Bridget, by the way, is amazing. But your Twitter account makes, yes, not here. I wish she did. She's in Georgetown. No, I mean in this, where we're sitting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
There's been a lot of talk about antisemitism recently. Yeah. What's your sense about this? Is antisemitism like any other brand of hate? There's a lot of hate out there. No, I don't think it's like any other brand of hate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
He has created some of the most iconic characters ever, some of the most incredible movies ever. I kind of aspire, when I grow up, I aspire to be Forrest Gump. But anyway, we all need help. We all struggle. Some struggle a lot. And if you're listening to this and you're struggling, I just want you to know that I'm thinking about you. And I'm grateful that you're here with us on this earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I wonder what's a way to fight antisemitism and fight hate in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Karl Marx wrote that religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people, as the famous phrase goes. Do you think he has a point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
We're in this together. I think there's a lot of ways to take your mental health seriously. One of them is to do regular therapy. And the thing about BetterHelp, it just makes that super easy to do. Talking in general, in all its forms. Start a podcast. Talking deeply, one-on-one with a human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Like a Pavlov's dog. That was the sound before you get to see, spend 10 minutes waiting for an image of a lady load. One line at a time. I recently talked to John Mearsheimer. I don't know if you know him at all. So he has this idea about offensive realism. It's a way to analyze the world, international relations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And the basic idea, and I'll run it by you and see what you think, is that states, nations want to survive, and they try to do so by maximizing power, military power. And he talks about anarchy quite a bit in that one of these underlying assumptions of this way of viewing the world is that states are anarchic towards each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And they operate under a lot of uncertainty. States cannot be sure that other states will not use military capabilities against them. Right. They want to survive and they want to use military power to control the uncertainty, to protect themselves. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
It seems to correlate though, right? It's interesting. It's an interesting idea, what has more power, the viral spread of ideas or the power of the military? It seems that the United States is at the top of the world on both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And so it's hard to disentangle the two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
So who's funding you? Which intelligence agency?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Mossad. This is how you do great interviewing. See, he didn't even expect that. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
is really powerful for organizing your mind, the stuff on the surface and the stuff hiding in the shadows. As long as you're honest, deeply honest. Anyway, check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod 3 mattress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What's that, Mr. Parrot? You knew it. But you didn't have any documentation, did you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
A chance murmur. He gets like that when he's turned on. He's not threatened. You can't wait until all three of us are alone together. It's going to be one hell of a party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And metal. Yeah, this thing is beautiful. It's ridiculous. You have actually a lot of really cool stuff at your place. So fun. What's a cool thing that stands out to you? Maybe a recent addition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in contact with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. like the movie, except I'm not an alien, allegedly. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these things interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. No, it's not the cake that terrified my mom. It's you, Michael Malice, cutting it off, cutting the face off. And laughing maniacally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Just remind yourself how many fascinating, beautiful people that are out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. That's another thing I'm grateful for. Just like the 100 billion or so people that came before us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And also the trillions of life forms that came before that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah. But just thinking about all that history, just all the life forms that came before. It seems like a really special thing we have going on earth here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
The thing that brings me a lot of joy, whether it's for 20 minutes or for eight hours or for nine hours or for six hours, no matter the hours or the minutes. It allows me to have a cold bed surface with a warm blanket. It's an escape from the world. Much of the turmoil, the chaos in my mind can settle down and be alleviated through a 20-minute nap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What do you think about Camus as a writer? Yeah. I don't like his novels at all. Oh, you don't? At all. Yeah, you've talked shit about The Plague to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Like, I don't think his books... Isn't that true for most books? No. I mean, like, you could take... I don't know. I just don't agree at all. I mean, it's catching their eye. There's a lot of books that seem trivial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
It's a methodical examination of what a society is like under the plague, which could symbolize a lot of things, including the plague directly or... Nazi Germany or ideological movements. It's similar to Animal Farm, maybe not as effective in terms of using this kind of symbology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, but there's the victims, the people that take advantage of it. There's the doctor that admits the absurdity and the evil of the plague is fighting to do good. Nothing for me. There's nothing for me. Okay, well, I can spoil the animal farm. There's pigs. There's animals at a farm. And the humans are abusing them. And then the animals overthrow the humans. But then...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
The pigs become just like the humans. The lesson, kids, is that power corrupts no matter whether you walk on four or on two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I thought the lesson was that there's no sugarcaney mountain. You've interviewed a lot of people. What have you learned about getting to the soul of a person, the soul of an idea from interviewing? Just how to do a good interview.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
That joke failed also. Edit out. What do you know about breeding guinea pigs? You mentioned it. I'd love to hear. I don't know anything. I'd love to hear more about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, that to me also is the thing I enjoy the most. It's like people that are passionate about a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I'll sometimes pop a caffeine pill and just take a nap. And then I'll wake up in like 20, 30 minutes, like incredibly energized and just clear of thinking. And all the troubles with which I went into the nap with are somehow gone to a different planet. Maybe every time you fall asleep, you actually transport into a different universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Hierarchies emerge. Yes. There's no anarchy in the guinea pig world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Somebody's always breeding somebody else. Yes. And looking down on the others. If someone's the other. Yeah. Whether it's the hamster people, the rat people. And everybody's breeding. Yeah. By the way, are you an anarcho-capitalist? What kind of, what flavor of anarchist are you? I'm an anarchist without adjectives. I like them all. The black flag comes in many colors. All right, all right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
You're quoting your own. Yeah, no, I understand. It was a beautiful line in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Do you still think that are some people better than others is a good litmus test? Yes. It's worked 100% of the time. And for you, the answer is yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I always got your back. What little habits in your life make you happy? Now that you're in Austin. Oh my God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
like in the queue. Do you label them? Do you remember like which one is which?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
where the chaos in your mind has not yet had a chance to materialize. Unlikely, but entirely possible. Anyway, I really, really enjoy it. You can heat it up, cool it down on each side of the bed separately. Check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, what makes for a good smell for Michael Miles?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Will that list converge down to a small set eventually or no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Oh, so you will forever have the variety of 67. Yes. Huh. You know what? You know how sad my brain is? When you were telling me this, I was like, I wonder how many soaps are left in Michael Malice's life. Like you can count your life by days, by months, by years, or by soaps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
That is very dark. Because each experience of shaving is a little beautiful experience. Yes, it is. How many do you have left in your life, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I love you, Cole. Fuck you. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
That's a good idea for a tattoo. Fuck you, Cole. Do you have advice on how to be happy? Yes. There's a lot of loneliness and sadness in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And now, dear friends, here's Michael Malice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, there's a Bukowski quote I wrote down. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it. But you laugh inside, remembering all the times you felt that way. Yeah, yeah. There's a part of me that's like that. There's some days where I feel like this is the worst day of my life. And then shortly after, I chuckle at that. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Just knowing the ups and downs of the brain and the mind and life and all that. You ever been depressed? Yeah, of course. I'm more anxious than depressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, yeah, and there's different kinds of, I like, there's a exhausted kind of depression where you're not, it's not so much sad as you're not, don't want to do anything. You don't want to live. You don't want to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What's the point? What's the point? It's a wrap, yeah. And like an extreme self-critical negativity, which I'm also scared of because my brain is generally very self-critical. Because you're not taking enough magnesium. Do you take erectile or in the mouth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Okay. Well, the way your mom explained it then is way different. What are you most afraid of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
no you think Camus was scared of death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Not as often as I would have predicted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
In my situation, I still think good thoughts and empathize with the people that have done me wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
My English is not good enough to know the difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, but maybe they were in pain. Maybe they were desperate. Maybe they were back to the wall. They felt that way. Sure. Well, that's a sympathy thing, not really an empathy thing. Yeah. Yeah. Loyalty is a fascinating thing. Yes. I value trust a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Given the kind of human being you are, I'm terrified at what you find beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, it's... It sucks because it's hard to... I usually just trust everybody. Okay, that's crazy. But what's the alternative? To have a filter? Well, I have a filter in terms of who I interact with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
But within the, you know, I see the good in people. But then in the very rare instances, that might turn. Okay. Yeah, it just sucks. It breaks my heart. Yeah, I hear you. I completely agree. Has your heart ever been broken? Yes. Love? Yes. I'm just so relaxed right now. Good. Relaxed and happy. Good. This is making me really happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I think that's the deepest thing I'm thankful for, is just how beautiful people are, how beautiful the world is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I think he does too. Well, in the end, you and I will be both laughing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yep. Well, when I look at you, I see beauty. And most people see garbage. And it's really unfair, Mr. Parrot, that you keep saying that. What? All jokes aside, man, I'm really grateful for your friendship. And I'm really grateful for who you are as a person. Thank you so much for talking today. Thank you so much for talking to me throughout all these years. Thank you for being who you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malice. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Andre Guide. Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Yeah, you commented on Twitter about some creature, like a rainbow type creature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
But they're colorful and beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What was it like having one as a pet? And why did you do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What pet animal in your life do you miss the most that has been in your life that you think about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
This show is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. Life insurance makes me think of Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics. I, of course, think about the Roman Empire many times a day. Marcus Aurelius is one of the great emperors and also one of the great philosophers that came from the long history of the Roman Empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What would be the first tattoo? My face? Would it go on your ass cheeks or where would you put them? If it was my face.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
If you had multiple faces, would you put like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And then when you flex. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
If you had to get a dictator, who would you get?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
It's a good opener to this conversation. People would be asking, why him? And you'd be like, well, I wrote a book about it. And I'd be like, oh, okay. Okay, here's what... Let me check it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
What's your opinion on my bird here? Mr. Parrot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
You don't? At all. That explains so much. Does it? What does it explain? What do you think is funny?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, yeah, what do you think is funny? Having a mantis shrimp?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
You think Big Lebowski's funny?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Although... This is getting worse and worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Is that how you feel about Schindler's List?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I didn't think you'd be the one making Holocaust jokes today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
And cut scene. I actually have like no trouble making eye contact with you when you're wearing shades. Yes. Because you're a robot. Two copies of myself. Yeah. Oh, you're seeing yourself in them? Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I'm having a conversation with myself. It's not your fault, Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
I could see Mr. Parrot a little bit, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#402 – Michael Malice: Thanksgiving Pirate Special
Well, I find Mighty Python. I find absurdity funny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
The following is a conversation with Charan Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist at UC Davis, specializing in human memory. He's the author of Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And it's like a little puzzle that we're usually only allocating a small amount of our attention to, at least like cognitive attention to. And it's fascinating, but I think AI just has a fundamentally different suite of sensors in terms of the bandwidth of data that's coming in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
that allows you to form the representation and perform inference on the representation, using the representation you form. That for the case of driving, I think it could be quite effective. But one of the things that's currently missing, even though OpenAI just recently announced adding memory,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And I did want to ask you, how important it is, how difficult is it to add some of the memory mechanisms that you've seen in humans to AI systems?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, it's all interconnected. I mean, just even the thing you've mentioned is the moment. You know, if we record a moment, it's difficult to express concretely what a moment is, like how deeply connected it is to the... the entirety of it. Maybe to record a moment, you have to make a universe from scratch. You have to include everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You have to include all the emotions involved, all the context, all the things that built around it, all the social connections, all the... visual experiences, all the sensory experience, all of that, all the history that came before that moment is built on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And we somehow take all of that and we compress it and keep the useful parts and then integrate it into the whole thing, into our whole narrative. And then each individual has their own little version of that narrative and then we collide in a social way and we adjust it and we evolve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Do things that are very unpleasant in the moment because those can be reframed and enjoyed for many years to come. That's probably good advice, or at least when you're going through shit, it's a good way to see the silver lining of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I mean, the process of allocating attention across time seems to be a really important process. Even the breakthroughs that you get with machine learning mostly has to do attention is all you need. It's about attention. Transform is about attention. So attention is a really interesting one. But then like, yeah, how you allocate that attention
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
again, is at the core of what it means to be intelligent, what it means to process the world, integrate all the important things, discard all the unimportant things. Attention is at the core of it. It's probably at the core of memory, too. There's so much sensory information. There's so much going on. There's so much going on. To filter it down to almost nothing and just keep those parts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And to keep those parts and then whenever there's an error, to adjust the model such that you can allocate attention even better to new things that would result, maybe maximize the chance of confirming the model or disconfirming the model that you have and adjusting it since then. Yeah, attention is a weird one. I was always fascinated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I mean, I got a chance to study peripheral vision for a bit and indirectly study attention through that. It's just fascinating how good humans are at looking around and gathering information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Since we're talking about attention, is there an interesting connection to you between ADHD and memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Is there advice from your own life on how to learn and succeed from that? From just how the characteristics of your own brain with ADHD and so on. How do you learn? How do you remember information? How do you flourish in this sort of education context?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And I'm very much with Cal Newport on this. He wrote deep work and a lot of other amazing books. He, he talks about tasks switching as a sort of the thing that really destroys productivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So like, you know, switching, well, it doesn't even matter from what to what, but checking social media, checking email, maybe switching to a phone call and then doing work and then switching, even switching between, if you're reading a paper, switching from paper to paper to paper. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Because curiosity and whatever the dopamine hit from the attention switch, limiting that, because otherwise your brain is just not capable to really load it in and really do that deep deliberation. I think that's required to remember things and to really think through things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So you're a musician, right? Take me through, how'd you get into music? What made you first fall in love with music, with creating music?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
How'd you go from trumpet to guitar, especially the kind of music you're into?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So, in case you don't know, it's through the browser, you record the video and the audio, both sides of the conversation, everything is synchronized, everything is stored, just everything is done really well. They have a lot of recommendations of what kind of hardware to use. I think in the video they provide, they say the most important thing is the microphone and lighting, and I agree with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So playing with those time signatures allows you to really break it all open and just... I guess there's something about that where it allows you to actually have fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It was just like, there's so many weird time signatures. What is math? Oh, interesting. Yeah, so. That's the math part of rock is what, the mathematical disturbances of it or what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
is that the feeling you would have if you keep messing, if you keep math rock? I mean, that's stressing me out just listening. Well, yeah, yeah. Learning about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I love it. What's the name of your band now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I'm coming for you, Earl.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You said you have a female singer now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Which song do you love to play the most? What kind of song is super fun for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, cover, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
a bit of a big ridiculous question, but let me ask you, we've been talking about neuroscience in general. You've been studying the human mind for a long time. What do you love most about the human mind? Like when you look at it, we look at the fMRI, just the scans and the behavioral stuff, the electrodes, the psychology aspect, reading the literature on the biology side, neurobiology, all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
When you look at it, what is most like beautiful to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, it's an incredible mystery, all of it. It's funny you said dark energy because it's the same in astrophysics. You look out there, look at dark matter and dark energy, which is this loose term assigned to a thing we don't understand, which helps make the equations work in terms of gravity and the expansion of the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
In the same way, it seems like there's that kind of thing in the human mind that we're striving to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, you are a great scientist and you wrote an incredible book, so thank you for doing that. And thank you for talking today. You've decreased the amount of uncertainty I have just a tiny little bit today and revealed the beauty of memory. This is a fascinating conversation. Thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Charan Ranganath. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Haruki Murakami. Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life and death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, actually, just for me, you're making me realize now that it's not just those kinds of stories, but even things like periods of depression or really low points. To me, at least, it feels like a motivating thing that... The darker it gets, the better the story will be if you emerge on the other side. That, to me, feels like a motivating thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So maybe if people are listening to this and they're going through some shit, as we said, one thing that could be a source of light is that it'll be a hell of a good story when it's all over, when you emerge on the other side. Let me ask you about decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You've already talked about it a little bit, but when we face the world and we're making different decisions, how much does our memory come into play? Is it the kind of narratives that we've constructed about the world that are used to make predictions that's fundamentally part of the decision-making?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Good audio is number one. Second to that is indeed lighting because basically every kind of camera that's available now will do all right. Anyway, Riverside makes that whole process super easy. I record my remote interviews with Riverside. Give it a try at Riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's Riverside.fm and use code Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And probably the earlier in life the memories happen, the more defining power they have in terms of determining who we become.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Is there some insight into the human brain that explains why we don't seem to remember anything from the first few years of life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, I think somebody once said to me that kind of loosely, philosophically, that the reason we don't remember the first few years of life, infantile amnesia, is because how traumatic it is. Basically, the error rate that you mentioned when... Your brain's prediction doesn't match reality. The error rate in the first few years of life, your first few months certainly, is probably crazy high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
This episode is also brought to you by ZipRecruiter, a site that connects employers and job seekers. To me, one of the most fulfilling things in life is working together with a great team. I love working. I love what I do. Everywhere I've ever worked, I loved doing it. And I love to be surrounded by people who also love doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It's just nonstop freaking out. The collision between your model of the world and how the world works is just so high that you want whatever the trauma of that is not to linger around. I always thought that's an interesting idea because just imagine the insanity of what's happening in a human brain in the first couple of years. You don't know anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And there's just this stream of knowledge and we're somehow, given how plastic everything is, it just kind of molds and figures it out. But it's like an insane waterfall of information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
especially who are very good at it and are pushing themselves to the limit and together we're creating something special, whatever that is. It could be a small thing or it can be a world-changing thing. Whether the mission is small or the mission is big, as long as there's a mission and we're in it together and we're constantly improving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So it is always optimal in a sense. Yeah. Just optimal for that stage of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, it's just fascinating to think of the individual orca or human throughout his life in stages doing a kind of optimal wisdom development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
so in the early days you don't even know what the goal is and you figure out the goal and you kind of optimize for that goal and you pursue that goal and then all the wisdom you collect through that then you share with the others in the system with the other individuals and as a as a collective then you kind of converge towards greater wisdom throughout the generation so in that sense it's optimal us humans and orcas got something going on it works apex predators
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I mean, a team that works great together, full of great people, is one of the real joys of life. I think that's true for me. I think that's true for anybody, because so much of our lives is spent working. And that's where we really, especially in the realm of intellectual pursuits, really challenge ourselves. And so in the process of that challenge is where you find meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
uh i just got a megalodon tooth speaking of apex partners it's uh just imagine the size of that thing anyway uh how does the brain forget and how and why does it remember so maybe some of the mechanisms you mentioned the hippocampus what are the different components involved here
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You have to have the right query, the right prompt to access that, whatever the part you're looking for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You mentioned episodic memory, you mentioned semantic memory. What are the different separations here? What's working memory, short-term memory, long-term memory? What are the interesting categories of memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Build great teams and use the best tools to do it. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex to try it for free. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex, the smartest way to hire. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
We got Riverside for recording remote podcasts, ZipRecruiter for hiring, Notion for note-taking and team collaboration, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for e-commerce and Element for delicious, delicious hydration. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So if you have something like a birthday party and you've been to many before, you're going to load that from disk into working memory, this model, and then you're mostly operating on the model. And if it's a new... task you're you don't have a model so you're more in the data collection yes one of the fascinating things that we've been studying and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I've used it for a long time now for note-taking, for organizing my thoughts, for connecting my thoughts, for searching through my thoughts, and now using AI to summarize, organize, generate drafts of thoughts things that I'm either planning or ideas that I'm working through or the research that I'm doing. Now that's for the individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Can memory be trained and improved? This beautiful connected system that you've described, what aspect of it is a mechanism that can be improved through training?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
The implication there is that attention is a fundamental component of remembering something, allocating attention to it. And then attention might be something that you could train. How you allocate attention and how you hold attention on a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Where Notion really starts to shine is when there's multiple people working together. It is an incredible team collaboration tool and again, The AI component gets integrated really nicely because you can do the search, you can do the summarization, you can create a report of what everybody's been working on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
There's certain hacks. There's something called the memory palace that I've played with. I don't know if you're familiar with that whole technique. And it works. Yeah. It's interesting. So another thing I recommend for people a lot is I use Anki a lot every day. It's an app that does spaced repetition. So I think medical students and students use this a lot to remember a lot of different things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Sure. It's the whole concept of spaced repetition. When the thing is fresh, you kind of have to remind yourself of it a lot. And then over time, you can... wait a week, a month, a year before you have to recall the thing again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And that way you essentially have something like note cards that you can have tens of thousands of and can only spend 30 minutes a day and actually be refreshing all of that information, all of that knowledge. It's really great. And then for memory palace is a technique that allows you to remember things like the IKEA catalog by placing them visually in a place that you're really familiar with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It looks through the docs, the wikis, the projects, and can basically do a Q&A for you to figure out where do things stand from a manager position or from an individual contributor. What am I supposed to be doing? What are the people doing? Where can I help? That kind of stuff. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Like I'm really familiar with this place, so I can put numbers or facts or whatever you want to remember. You can walk along that little palace and it reminds you. It's cool, like there's stuff like that that I think athletes, memory athletes could use, but I think also regular people can use. One of the things I have to solve for myself is how to remember names. I'm horrible at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I think it's because when people introduce themselves, I have the social anxiety of the interaction where I'm like, I know I should be remembering that, but I'm freaking out internally about social interaction in general. And so therefore I forget immediately. So I'm looking for good tricks for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, so I think of Lex Luthor. Because doesn't Lex Luthor wear a suit, I think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And then I just imagine you talked about stabbing or whatever earlier. Yeah, exactly. Right. Kind of connected and that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by MasterClass, where you can watch over 180 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Phil Ivey on poker, Aaron Franklin on barbecue and brisket, Carlos Santana on guitar, Tom Morello on guitar, Terence Tao on mathematical thinking, Martin Scorsese on filmmaking,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
We should maybe linger on this memory palace thing just to make obvious because when people were describing to me a while ago, what this is seems insane. I just, you literally think of a place like a childhood home or a home that you're really visually
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
familiar with and you literally place in that three-dimensional space facts or people or whatever you want to remember and you just walk in your mind along that place visually and you can remember remind yourself of the different things. One of the limitations is there is a sequence to it. So it's, I think your brain somehow, you need, you can't just like go upstairs right away or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You have to like walk along the room. So it's really great for remembering sequences, but it's also not great for remembering like individual facts out of context. So the full context of the tour, I think is important. But it's fascinating how the mind is able to do that when you ground these pieces of knowledge into something that you remember well already, especially visually. Fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And you can just do that for any kind of sequence. I'm sure she used something like this for IKEA catalog, something of this nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So you mentioned spaced repetition. Do you like this process? Maybe can you explain it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
In fact, I would really love, and I'm planning on talking to actors and directors more. I love film. I love great TV. I love that medium of storytelling. And great actors and great directors are the way we consume stories. They are the medium, the channels, the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
That's so fascinating. So with space repetition, one of its powers is that you lose attachment to a particular context. But then it loses the intensity of the flavor of the memory. That's interesting. That's so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, so it's used for learning languages, for learning facts, for that generic semantic information type of memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
the wizards through which we, all of us, take in the stories, new exciting stories, or stories of old retold better and better and better. So I would like to talk to those people. WTF podcast by Marc Maron. In the past, I really loved it when he interviewed actors and directors, and he's done it really well. Inside Actor Studio was a program I really loved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So it's like you should always be stress testing the memory system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You know, there's an interesting moment. You probably have experienced this. I remember a good friend of mine, Joe Rogan, I was on his podcast, and... We were randomly talking about soccer, football. Somebody I grew up watching, Diego Armando Maradona, one of the greatest soccer players of all time. And we were talking about him and his career and so on. And Joe asked me if he's still around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And I said, yeah. I don't know why I thought yeah, because that was a perfect example of memories. He passed away, I tweeted about it, how heartbroken I was, all this kind of stuff, like a year before. I know this, but in my mind, I went back to the thing I've done many times in my head, visualizing some of the epic runs he had on goal and so on. So for me, he's alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And part of also the conversation when you're talking to Joey, there's stress and the focus is allocated, the attention is allocated in a particular way. But when I walked away, I was like, in which world was Diego Maradona still alive? Because I was sure in my head that he was still alive. It's a moment that sticks with me. I've had a few like that in my life where it just kind of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
like obvious things just disappear from mind. And it's cool. Like it shows actually the power of the mind in a positive sense to erase memories you want erased maybe. But I don't know. I don't know if there's a good explanation for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
when long-form interviews with actors, long-form interviews with directors. Even Charlie Rose did a really good job with that. Not the clickbait sort of Hollywood-style journalism, but more long-form conversations. I would love to do more of those. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So imagination is fundamentally... coupled with memory in both directions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
That's masterclass.com slash lexpod. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I got a store, lexfreeman.com slash store. It has a few shirts on there. If you want to get a shirt, you can get it. It was so easy to set up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, there's a good percentage of time I personally live in the imagined world. I do thought experiments a lot. I take the absurdity of human life as it stands and play it forward in all kinds of different directions. Sometimes it's rigorous thought experiments, sometimes it's fun ones. I imagine that that has an effect on how I remember things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And I suppose I have to be a little bit careful to make sure stuff happened versus stuff that I just imagined happened. And this also, I mean, some of my best friends are characters inside books that never even existed. There's some... degree to which they actually exist in my mind. Like these characters exist, authors exist, Dostoevsky exists, but also Brothers Karamazov. I love that book. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
But they exist. They exist, and I have almost kind of like conversations with them. It's interesting. It's... It's interesting to allow your brain to kind of play with ideas of the past, of the imagined, and see it all as one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I like the machinery of humans selling stuff and buying stuff and through that capitalist machine figuring out together the things that bring happiness to our lives. In fact, the things isn't the source of happiness, of course. The things are the catalyst for human connection, for humans to connect with each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, that's why a lot of this stuff is both feature and bug. It's a double-edged sword.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, maybe they're just two sides of the same coin. Humans are fascinating, aren't they?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Can we just talk about memory sport a little longer? There's something called the USA Memory Championship. What are these athletes like? What does it mean to be elite level at this? Have you interacted with any of them or reading about them? What have you learned about these folks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, that's fascinating. I've gotten a chance to work with something called NBAC tasks. So there's all these kinds of tasks. Memory recall tasks that are used to kind of load up the quote-unquote working memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And to see... A psychologist used it to test all kinds of stuff, like to see how well you're good at multitasking. We used it in particular for the task of driving. Like if we fill up your brain with intensive working memory tasks, how good are you at also not crashing? That kind of stuff. So it's fascinating, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Again, those tasks are arbitrary and they're usually about recalling a sequence of numbers in some kind of semi-complex way. Do you have any favorite tasks of this nature in your own studies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Like a T-shirt with Metallica or whatever band or whatever podcast or whatever show you like, its power is not in the fact that it looks good or something like this. It's power in the connection you make when another person notices it and are also a fan of Metallica or whatever's on the shirt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So what have you learned about this kind of spatial mapping of places? How do people represent locations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is also brought to you by Riverside, the platform for recording remote podcasts in studio quality. I've used them a bunch of times in the past. They're amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Or they don't know anything about Metallica, but they like the logo and it starts a conversation where they'd be like, what is that? Metallica, is that some kind of machine shop thing? And you say, no. It is the greatest metal band of all time. And there you grab a beer and the conversation begins. It's the human connection. The capitalist machine is not enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So can you describe the encoding in the hippocampus and the ripples you were talking about? What's the signal in which we see the ripples?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So during sleep is when the connections are formed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It is merely a catalyst for the beauty of human connection. So join, if you want, the capitalist machine by signing up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So you mentioned fMRI earlier. What is it and how is it used in studying memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, we had off record intense argument about, Well, if it's pronounced Jif or Gif, but we shall set that aside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Rebuke, yeah. I drew a hard line. It is true the creator of Gif said it's pronounced Jif, but that's the only person that pronounces Jif. Anyway, yes, you sent a Gif of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It's the delicious electrolyte drink, sodium, potassium, magnesium, that I drink every day, a lot of it every day. I drank it in the jungle when I was dying of thirst. When I was dehydrated and questioning whether I would be able to make it through the day, not to mention the night,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So there's a separation between spatial information, concepts, like literally there's distinct, as you said, QR codes for these?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I had one pack of element with me, waiting, knowing that I would disperse that pack of element into whatever water I would be able to find, because you know, electrolytes is also really important. But also, I knew that if I had to drink sort of water, still water, full of mud and all of that, element would be the thing that makes it taste good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
These are all beautiful hints at a super interesting system that makes me wonder on the other side of it how to build it. But it's fascinating. The way it does the encoding is really, really fascinating. Or I guess the symptoms, the results of that encoding are fascinating to study from this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Just as a small tangent, you mentioned sort of the measuring local potentials with electrodes versus fMRI. Oh, yeah. What are some interesting like limitations, possibilities of fMRI? Maybe the way you explained it is like brilliant with blood and detecting the activations or the excitation because blood flows to that area. What's like the latency of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Like, what's the blood dynamics in the brain that, like, how quickly can it, how quickly can the task change and all that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
My favorite flavor, the one I brought to the jungle, the one I always drink is watermelon salt, but they also have cans now, which has like a carbonated fizzy thing to it and lots of great flavors, and I really love it. And I've been drinking that nonstop. Whenever I get some, I drink all of it very quickly. So I highly recommend that as well. Either the packs or the cans of Element Drink.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It does seem to be that fMRI is a good way to study activation. So with these exercise, even though there's a latency, it's pretty reliably coupled to the activations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Love it. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Charon Ranganath.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
What kind of big scientific discoveries, maybe the flavor of discoveries have been done throughout the history of the science of memory, the studying of memory? What kind of things have been like understood?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So the discreteness of our encoding of events?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Danny Kahneman describes the experiencing self and the remembering self, and that happiness and satisfaction you gain from the outcomes of your decisions do not come from what you've experienced, but rather from what you remember of the experience. So can you speak to this interesting difference that you write about in your book of the experiencing self and the remembering self?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So you can take fMRI data across species and across different types of humans or conditions of humans and what, find, construct models... that help you find the commonalities or like the core thing that makes somebody navigate through the metaverse, for example?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
What's the similarities in humans and mice? What is Smashing Pumpkins? We're all just rats in a cage? Is that Smashing Pumpkins?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And it's strengthening the visual thing I have of you with James Brown on stage. It's just becoming stronger and stronger by the second.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
But animal studies work here as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
But still, what can you understand by studying mice? I mean, just basic, almost behavioral stuff about memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So... Well, let me ask you some random fascinating questions. Yeah, sure. how does deja vu work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So I guess deja vu is just an extra elevated stuff coming together, firing for this artificial memory as if it's the real memory. I mean, why does it feel so intense?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
but it's also like a spatial temporal familiarity. So like, it's also in time. Like there's a weird blending of time that happens. And we'll probably talk about time, because I think that's a really interesting idea, how time relates to memory. But you also kind of, artificial memory brings to mind this idea of false memories that comes in all kinds of contexts. But how do false memories form?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It is the thing I recommend for anybody, especially for people starting a podcast. Studio quality, exceptionally easy to use. A million features that are all extremely useful for the whole... pipeline of creating a podcast, I mean, where do I start? First of all, they do the editing. And you could do text-based editing of the audio and the video.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So it's fascinating because this could probably happen at a collective level. Like this is probably what successful propaganda machines aim to do. It's creating false memory across thousands if not millions of minds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So in the way we construct a narrative about our past, you say that it gives us an illusion of stability. Can you explain that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, it's really interesting. So it's not just about truth and falsehoods like us as scientists. intelligent reasoning machines, but it's the formation of memories where they become visceral. You can rewrite history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
If you just look throughout the 20th century, some of the dictatorships with Nazi Germany, with the Soviet Union, effective propaganda machines can rewrite our conceptions of history, how we remember our own culture, our upbringing, all this kind of stuff. you could do quite a lot of damage in this way. And then there's probably some kind of social contagion happening there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Like certain ideas that may be initiated by the propaganda machine can spread faster than others. You could see that in modern day, certain conspiracy theories, there's just something about them that they are like really effective at spreading. There's something sexy about them to people to where,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Something about the human mind eats it up and then uses that to construct memories as if they almost were there to witness whatever the content of the conspiracy theory is. It's fascinating. Because once you feel like you remember a thing, I feel like there's a certainty. It emboldens you to say stuff. It's not just you believe an idea is true or not. It's at the core of your being that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You feel like you were there to watch the thing happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And I mean, social media has a lot of opportunity for this because it enables this distributed one-on-one interaction that you're talking about where everybody has a voice, but still our natural inclination, you see this on social media, is there's a natural clustering of people and opinions and you just kind of form these kind of bubbles. I think that's a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
to me personally, I think that's a technology problem that could be solved. If there's a little bit of interaction, kind, respectful, compassionate interaction with people that have a very different memory, that respectful interaction will start to intermix the memories and ways of thinking to where you're slowly moving towards truth. But that's a technology problem because left our own devices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
We want to cluster up in a tribe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I think there is a dance between natural human adaptation of technology and the people that design the engineering of that technology. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to create, like this keyboard, things that on net are positive for human behavior. So we adapt and all this kind of stuff, but when you look...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
at the long arc of history across years and decades, has humanity been flourishing? Are humans creating more awesome stuff? Are humans happier? All that kind of stuff. And so there I think technology on that has been, and I think, maybe hope, will always be on that a positive thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yes, yes. I don't know about that. I think humans in general, like to reminisce about the past, like the times are better. And complain about the weather today or complain about whatever today, because there's this kind of complainy engine that's just, there's so much pleasure in saying, you know, life sucks for some reason. That's why I love punk rock. Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I mean, there's something in humans that loves complaining. even about trivial things, but complaining about change, complaining about everything. But ultimately, I think on net, on every measure, things are getting better. Life is getting better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, I don't think there's a question whether you take hunter-gatherer folks and put them into modern day and give them enough time to adapt, they would be much happier. The question is in terms of every single problem they've had is now solved. There's now food, there's guarantee of survival, shelter, and all this kind of stuff. So what you're asking is a deeper sort of biological question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Do we want to be... We're in a Herzog movie, Happy People, Life in the Taiga. Do we want to be busy 100% of our time hunting, gathering, surviving, worried about the next day? Maybe that constant struggle ultimately creates a more fulfilling life. I don't know. But I do know this modern society allows us to, when we're sick,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
to find medicine, to find cures, when we're hungry, to get food, much more than we did even 100 years ago. And there's many more activities that you could perform or create, all this kind of stuff that enables the flourishing of humans at the individual level. Whether that leads to happiness, I mean, that's a very deep philosophical question. Maybe struggle, deep struggles necessary for happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I like what you said that maybe we're designed to be in a kind of constant state of wanting, which by the way is a pretty good either band name or rock song name, state of wanting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It's pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Hedonic Treadmill is pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
You mean the one we're starting? Yeah, exactly. Okay, great. We're going on tour soon. This is our announcement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So let me ask you about, we talked about false memories, but in the legal system, false confessions. I remember reading 1984 where, sorry for the dark turn of our conversation, but through torture you can... make people say anything and essentially remember anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I wonder to which degree there's like truth to that if you look at the torture that happened in the Soviet Union for confessions, all that kind of stuff. How much can you really get people to really, you know, to force false memories, I guess?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It's really tragic that centralized power can use these kinds of tools to destroy lives. Sad. Yeah. Since there's a theme about music throughout this conversation, one of the best topics for songs is heartbreak, love in general, but heartbreak. Why and how do we remember and forget heartbreak? Asking for a friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
The error is where the learning happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
I often go back to this moment, this show, Louis, with Louis C.K., where he's all heartbroken about a breakup with a woman he loves. And an older gentleman tells him that that's actually the best part, that heartbreak. because you get to intensely experience how valuable this love was. He says the worst part is forgetting it, is actually when you get over the heartbreak. That's the worst part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So I sometimes think about that because having the love and losing it, Like the losing it is when you sometimes feel it the deepest, which is an interesting way to celebrate the past and relive it. It sucks that you don't have a thing, but when you don't have a thing, it's a good moment to viscerally experience the memories of something that you now appreciate even more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, just to linger on Danny Kahneman and just this whole idea of experiencing self versus remembering self, I was hoping you can give a simple answer of how we should live life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yes, for sure. I think so. I think so. But I'm going to have to day by day. I don't know. I'm going to have to listen to some more Bruce Springsteen to figure that one out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Yeah, I meditate on mortality every day. But I don't know, at the same time, that really makes you appreciate the moment and live in the moment. I also appreciate the full, deep rollercoaster of suffering involved in life, the little and the big, too. So I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
The Buddhist kind of removing yourself from the world, or the Stoic removing yourself from the world, the world of emotion, I'm torn about that one. I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
based on the fact that our memories could be a source of happiness or could be the primary source of happiness, that an event, when experienced, bears its fruits the most when it's remembered over and over and over and over. And maybe there is some wisdom in the fact that we can control to some degree how we remember it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So whatever you say, there's an AI-generated transcript in like 100 plus languages, whatever the language is, you can use then the text to do the editing. It does speaker detection, so it figures out who's speaking. All the synchronization obviously is done, not obviously, because some things seem obvious, but a really effortless, beautiful execution of it just is a breath of fresh air.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
you're just part of the process of telling the joke, and if I laugh or not, that's up to the universe to decide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
How does studying memory affect your understanding of the nature of time? So like, we've been talking about us living in the present and making decisions about the future, standing on the foundation of these memories and narratives about the memories that we've constructed. So it feels like it does weird things to time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, that compression you mentioned, it's an interesting process. Because what I think about when I was like 12, 15... I just fundamentally feel like the same person. It's interesting what that compression does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
how we evolve our memory of it such that it can maximize the long-term happiness of that repeated experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It makes me feel like it's all, we're all connected, not just amongst humans and spatially, but in terms, back in time, there's a kind of eternal nature, like the timelessness, I guess, to life. That could be also a genetic thing just for me. I don't know if everyone agrees to this view of time, but to me, it all feels the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
No, I feel the passage of time the same way that your students did from day to day. There's certain markers that let you know that time has passed. You celebrate birthdays and so on. But the core of who I am and who others I know are or events, it like that compression of my understanding of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
removes time, because time is not useful for the compression. So like the details of that time, at least for me, is not useful to understanding the core of the thing, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
How does nostalgia connect into this? Like this desire and pleasure associated with going back?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
let me ask you both a practical question and an out there question. So let's start with the more practical one. What are your thoughts about BCIs, brain computer interfaces, and the work that's going on with Neuralink? We talked about electrodes and different ways of measuring the brain, and here Neuralink is working on basically two-way communication with the brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And the more out there question would be like, where does this go? But more practically in the near term, What do you think about Neuralink?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Just so we're clear, because you said a few interesting things. When we talk about language and BCIs, what we mean is getting signal from the brain and generating the language, say you're not able to actually speak, as a kind of linguistic prosthetic. It's able to speak for you exactly what you want it to say. And then the deeper question is, well, saying something isn't just,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So as a small tangent, you're a legit touring act.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
The letters, the words you're saying, it's also the intention behind it, the feeling behind it, all that kind of stuff. And is it ethical to reveal that full shebang, the full context of what's going on in our brain? That's really interesting. That's really interesting. I mean, our thoughts. Is it ethical for anyone to have access to our thoughts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Because right now the resolution is so low that we're okay with it, even doing studies and all this kind of stuff. But if neuroscience has a few breakthroughs to where you can start to map out the QR codes for different thoughts, for different kinds of thoughts, maybe political thoughts, McCarthyism. What if I'm getting a lot of them communist thoughts or however we want to categorize or label it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
That's interesting, that's really interesting. I think ultimately this always, the more transparency there is about the human mind, the better it is. But there could be always intermediate battles with how much control does a centralized entity have, like a government and so on. What is the regulation? What are the rules? What's legal and illegal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
If you talk about the police whose job is to track down criminals and so on, and you look at all the history, how the police could abuse its power to control the citizenry, all that kind of stuff. So people are always paranoid and rightfully so. It's fascinating. It's really fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
We talk about freedom of speech, freedom of thought, which is also a very important liberty at the core of this country and probably humanity, starts to get awfully tricky when you start to be able to collect those thoughts. But what I wanted to actually ask you is, do you think... for fun and for practical purposes, you'll be able to, we would be able to modify memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So how difficult is it to, how far away we are from understanding the different parts of the brains, everything we've been talking about, in order to figure out how can we adjust this memory at the crude level from unpleasant to pleasant. You talked about we can remember the mall and the people. Like location of the people. Can we keep the people and change the place? Like this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
How difficult is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Behaviorally, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Which is my song. We're going to have to see. We're going to have to see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Well, I spent a huge amount of time watching pedestrians, thinking about pedestrians, thinking about what it takes to solve the problem of measuring, detecting the intention of a pedestrian, really of a human being in this particular context of having to cross a street. And it's fascinating. I think it's a window into how complex social systems are that involve humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And happiness, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
Because, you know, I would... just stand there and watch intersections for hours. And what you start to figure out is every single intersection has its own personality. So there's a history to that intersection. Like jaywalking, certain intersections allow jaywalking a lot more. Because what happens is... we're leaders and followers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
So there's a regular, let's say, and they get off the subway and they start crossing on red light, and they do this every single day. And then there's people that don't show up to that intersection often, and they're looking for cues of how we're supposed to behave here. And if a few people start to jaywalk and cross on red light, they will also, they will follow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And there's just a dynamic to that intersection. There's a spirit to it. And if you look at Boston versus New York versus a rural town, even Boston, San Francisco, or here in Austin, there's different personalities citywide, but there's different personalities area-wide, region-wide, and there's different personalities, different intersections.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And it's just fascinating for a car to be able to determine that. It's tricky. Now, what machine learning systems are able to do well is collect a huge amount of data. So for us, it's tricky because we get to understand the world with very limited information and make decisions grounded in this big foundation model that we've built of understanding how humans work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
AI could literally, in the context of driving, this is where I've often been really torn in both directions. If you just collect a huge amount of data all of that information, and then compress it into a representation of how humans cross streets, it's probably all there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
In the same way that you have a Noam Chomsky who says, no, no, no, AI can't talk, can't write convincing language without understanding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
language and you know more and more you see large language models without quote-unquote understanding can generate very convincing language but i think what the process of compression from a huge amount of data compressing into a representation is doing is in fact understanding deeply in order to be able to generate one letter at a time one word at a time you have to understand
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
The cruelty of Nazi Germany and the beauty of sending humans to space. And you have to understand all of that in order to generate, like, I'm going to the kitchen to get an apple and do that grammatically correctly. You have to have a world model that includes all of human behavior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
It has to in order to be good at generating one word at a time, a convincing sentence. And in the same way, I think AI that drives a car, if it has enough data, will be able to form a world model that will be able to predict correctly what the pedestrian does. But when we, as humans, are watching pedestrians, we slowly realize, damn, this is really complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
In fact, when you start to self-reflect on driving, you realize driving is really complicated. There's subtle cues we take about just driving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#430 – Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories
And I don't know what... Because we're ignoring all the other cars. Yeah. But for some reason, the asshole, like a glowing obvious symbol is just like right there, even in the periphery vision. Because we're, again... We're usually when we're driving just looking forward, but we're like using the peripheral vision to figure stuff out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
The following is a conversation with Neil Adams, a legend in the sport of judo. He is a world champion, two-time Olympic silver medalist, five-time European champion, and often referred to as the voice of judo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And then there's people like Travis Stevens who I think doesn't care. He'll just have atrocious nutrition and he just makes it work. I think the way he spoke about it is you can't always control nutrition, so it's best to get good at having crappy nutrition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Exactly. Do you remember what you were eating? Are we talking about like candy or?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Where was your mind, so mental preparation, going into that Olympics? You said you were confident, but is there some preparation aspect behind that confidence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
In Neil Adams, A Life in Judo, written in 1986, you wrote, ever since I can remember, I have wanted to win. It wasn't the ordinary feeling that children have when they take part in their first primary school sack race on a grass track, or even the keen determination of a young swimmer prepared to train early in the cold winter mornings in order to make it into the countryside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
All of that is one of the most beautiful ways to live life. So if you're hiring or looking for a job, ZipRecruiter is great for that. See why four out of five employees who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex to try for free. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Lex, the smartest way to hire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
With me, the desire to win was and still is as much a part of me as my arms and legs. In other words, it wasn't something I learned as I grew older, but rather it was deeply rooted in me. Perhaps this competitive instinct is the greatest difference between my public image and the view from the inside. So people see the kindness, the warmth you have, the charisma, the excitement, but there's this,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
big drive to win inside you. So what's behind that? Can you just speak to that, that drive to win and how that contributed to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You're talking about like, I don't know, even just like stupid, silly things like, I don't know, a game of pool or something like this or just anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So it's still there. You get on the mat probably even now, right? You get on the mat with a world champion, you're still the current world champion. There's still a little part of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Could I still toss this guy? Kids these days are soft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You could.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You've got to find out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So you've trained with LSA artists. I've gotten a chance to train with them as well. He's a really nice guy, really great guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
This episode is brought to you by the bringer of naps called Eight Sleep. And it's pod three cover. I've talked to a lot of Olympic athletes, CEOs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What do you think about that guy? He, like you, achieved a lot of success when he was young.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And he was like thick and shredded. He was shredded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Commentating all the major events, world championships and Olympic games, highlighting the drama, the triumph, the artistry of the sport of judo, making fans like me feel the biggest wins, the biggest losses, the surprise turns of fortune, the dominance of champions coming to an end, and new champions made. Always speaking from the heart. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I think it's kind of fascinating to discuss with them because they've already accomplished, in many cases, they've already accomplished the really grand big things, the Olympic gold medals, or running, starting, scaling, running, and winning at the game of business. And then when they look back, the big lesson in terms of health they often go to is the value of sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I don't know if I remember, but Elias Iliadis is interesting because even at 17, I feel like he was doing big throws, like literally lifting them with his hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So can you speak to that? What are the different styles of Judo? So for you, you mentioned Uchimata, Taitoshi, these, how would you describe them? They're like these effortless, less lifting off the ground and power and like strength and more timing and position, movement, momentum, all this kind of stuff. That's more traditionally associated with Japanese Judo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Because like for Japanese Judo, the traditional Judo, like you're supposed to throw people in a big way without much effort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
By the way, we should sort of clarify. When we say people are bent over, that's usually how you see freestyle wrestling. Wrestlers are more bent over to defend the legs and so on. And traditional judo, people are more standing up because that's the position from which you can do the big throws and all that kind of stuff. But I think the other case to make
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
for banding leg grabs is a lot of people are using it for stalling and not for beautiful big throws and all that kind of stuff. So it's not just not to make it different from wrestling. It's also like you want to maximize the amount of epic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Now, it's hard to know whether that lesson is supposed to be learned. You're supposed to fail and then you learn it. Meaning you spend your 20s or your 30s or some stretch of time sacrificing sleep. And it's not actually a sacrifice. It's a gift to the gods of excellence. So it's not like it's not supposed to be that way. It's not a mistake. It's not a failure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So let's go there. Let's speak about judo as if we're talking to a group of five-year-olds. So what is judo? What are some defining characteristics of judo as a sport, as a way, as a martial art, as a way of life, all that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Reverence is a good word. It feels like a really special place, no matter which dojo you go to. It's just you bow and there's a calmness before the storm of battle or whatever it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, I mean, that's the right way to see it, but it's also tragic to lose the Olympic Games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I mean, that's the magic of the Olympic Games. Anything can happen. And your 1980 Olympics were very different from the 1984. But if we just linger on the 80, and just what we're talking about, how much you wanted to win. Do you love winning or hate losing more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
But when they do look back in a kind of offhand way, they'll say, I learned the value of sleep, that I'm just a better thinker, better performer, more efficient, wiser, all those kinds of things when I get a full night's sleep. But anyway, the moments you get with your bed, use them wisely. So I love Eight Sleep. It allows you to cool the bed down, warm blanket, it's heaven.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So you won the 81 World Championship. At the higher weight. At the higher, the 78. Yes. KG. Actually, can we go there? What was going through your mind? You ended up armbarring a Japanese fighter. I talked to Jimmy Pedro, a friend of yours, somebody who said you were a mentor to him for many years, and he told me a bunch of different questions to ask you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
But he said that was a really special time. That was a really special, like, dominant run you had. And especially finishing with an arbor against a Japanese player. So take me through that. What do you remember from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So stepping on the mat every single encounter, you're trying to win. You're looking for the grips and the, with the intention to throw big, even when you're ahead on points, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I've competed a lot in judo and jiu-jitsu. I've always hated that part of myself. When I'm up on points by a lot, you look at the clock, and it's what you do when you look at the clock. A minute and a half, you're really tired, and you kind of quit. You just defend. And I hated that part about myself. It's like that. You're saying don't do it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, as opposed to just go out in judo, that's for a big throw. Just keep going for the throw. In jiu-jitsu, it's go for the submission. Like throw caution, like win in the real way versus on points. And I hated that part of myself. I mean, mostly underneath that is cowardice induced by exhaustion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Check it out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 180 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I watched many of them, loved many of them. Let me bring up Martin Scorsese. He has a master class on filmmaking. He made a lot of incredible, incredible films.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
yeah i mean that's there's a thin thin line between uh triumph and tragedy and in uh those competitions but especially at the olympic games so let's just stick on 81 world championship what did it feel like to win that world championship like uh and also getting an arm bar it's a japanese player uh jimmy told me your arms were exhausted
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So, so what you're saying on the feet, there was a change of direction, all different kinds of attempts. And then you went to the ground. And so what was that? Do you remember that decision of like, okay, am I going to finish this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Did it start in turtle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I mean, yeah, so that's where the armbars, that's where the attacks on the ground, which is called nirwaza, happens in the transition. At that level, at that high world-class level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, there's wisdom to that, right? Like there's power in stupidity of youth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Right? Yeah, it is. Just like I'm going to be a world champion. I'm going to win this without knowing how hard it is. And then once you go after it, you're trapped. You're going to have to do the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Goodfellas. I know you're not supposed to give an Oscar for that kind of thing, but why not? Give the man an Oscar. Raging Bull, Casino, Taxi Driver. Genius. And then Shutter Island, The Irishman, the new one with the Killers of the Flower Moon. I mean, just genius. Genius. By the way, I got a chance to recently meet and shake hands with Leo DiCaprio. And I went out to nature with him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Do you remember like a certain opponent that for the first time you felt like, holy shit? Yeah. Like somebody just gripped you up and you're like, this is, there's another level to this game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
That's literally your nemesis there. Yeah. Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So that feeling of danger is really interesting. Like I've, you know, did Randori with a lot of world-class people from different parts of the world, including Ilyas Ilyadis. And like there's a certain part, like Eastern European Judo, you feel like you're screwed the whole way through. Like the gripping, you really feel it in the gripping. It's the gripping that does it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
But with Japanese, like really good Japanese style Jidoka, you don't, it's like, it's a terrifying calmness. At least the experiences I've had, you don't really feel it in the gripping. You just feel like anywhere you step, you're getting thrown.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's a different thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I understand. But it's like, I mean, because it's not, it feels way more powerful than it should. Yeah. It's weird. I don't know. You want to attribute it to strength and all that kind of stuff. I mean, people say you have like immense upper body strength, but it's probably something else. It's like technique. It's some kind of weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Just like something hardened. through lots of battles and Randori and that kind of stuff. But it's cool that humans are able to generate that kind of power. It's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's just the depth of curiosity he has about the world, about ideas, about the natural world, about the visual world. That beginner's mind forever still there, burning bright. It's good to see. Anyway, Martin Scorsese really breaks down simply the way he thinks about filmmaking. And that really is the only way to learn about geniuses like him, is to hear from them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, and it's a way of establishing control over another body. And it's a whole art form and a science. I don't even know if you understand it really. You understand it sort of subconsciously through time. Because there's so much involved. Because pulling on one part of the jacket pulls other parts of the jacket. The physics of that is probably insane to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And he goes over the top of the grip. Where's that land now in terms of rules over the top? Because those are some of the most epic, awesome types of grips. Yeah. Just like over the top, just big grab. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So as long as you're not using it to stall or that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, yeah, definitely. You were the favorite to win the 1984 Olympics, but you got silver. I watched that match several times. You probably have it playing in your head. So there is a nice change of direction by your opponent, German Frank Winnicki.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It was a fake right Uchimata, and then to a left drops Sayonagi. How did that loss feel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
to see the genius in the words and the spaces between the words. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod. This episode is also brought to you by Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, it felt like you were dominating that final.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
He was surprised almost. I mean, not almost. He was very surprised and celebrating like a surprise athlete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
The tragedy of the Olympic Games. I mean, you were the favorite and just like that, like split moment, you lost it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, I mean, in the match itself, there's that feeling. For me, just watching it, like you're going for throws, you're almost getting there with the throws, and it's almost like he's going for a kind of crappy Uchimata, and then you're just like, you're stopping, you're blocking it, and all of a sudden, I mean, that's the beauty of the Olympics. He finds it in himself to switch. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's an electrolyte drink that has sodium, potassium, magnesium that I think is foundational to the way I approach diet and life. When I eat once a day, which is what I mostly do these days, or if I fast for even longer than 24 hours, getting the electrolytes right is a big part of that. And what is it about fasting that brings clarity to the mind? I mean, some of it is physiological, I'm sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And that, like, against a favorite, against sort of... The great British judoka just finds the perfect drop, Sayonara.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
When you give your whole life to judo, just, and your love of winning, that's crazy how much the Olympic Games mean.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, part of the demons that you've gotten to know because of those losses is part of probably the central reason that made you the man you are. A legend of the sport. You could have been not that. Because an Olympic gold is just an Olympic gold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So in the book, Game of Throws, you have a chapter titled Lessons in Losing. So what are some of the lessons here? What are some of the deeper lessons you've pulled out of losing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Where was that place? Some of the lower points in your life that you've reached mentally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
But some of it is just that feeling of longing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So the, the, the fuzzy haze, where was your mind? Did you have periods of depression?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Just feeling a little bit incomplete and sitting in that feeling. But it's not the completeness. That's needed for a good life. For a clarity of thinking. It's the longing for completeness. So, I'm a big fan of fasting, but you gotta do it in a healthy way. Element will help you out. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You just saw the moment and said, stop. Stop. So that fuzzy place, what advice could you give to people about how to overcome that dark place, the depression, whether it has to do with drinking or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got ZipRecruiter for hiring, Aidsleeve for napping, Masterclass for learning, Element for hydration, and NetSuite for business management software. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lextreamer.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
yeah it's a skill probably just to be grateful for the things you have exactly as you said in this sometimes the little things like food and yeah cars and all that kind of stuff just to have gratitude for and family all this kind of stuff but it's still i you know having talked to a bunch of olympic athletes
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
There is a, you know, when you give so much of your life to winning and then you lose, sometimes even when you win, but when you lose at the very top, it's a tough, tough, like tough thing to go through.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
This episode was also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. It's like the machine within the machine that finds the common language for the different parts of a business to communicate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
This was after your last Olympics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, those are different than sitting there in the evening by yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Which is why there's certain athletes like Ryo Kotani, never stops. It just dominates for 14 years. Probably one of the winningest athletes in Judo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Seven-time world champ, two-time Olympic champ, medaled at five Olympics. So it's always impressive. Never stopped. Never stopped. Yeah. So that's an option if you're like the greatest ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I'm still slightly haunted by a thing I read a long time ago that Jeff Bezos said that every business eventually dies and that you want to prolong the life of a business as long as possible. But I don't know why that broke my heart so much. Like it always does. The finiteness of good things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So you've been commentating since 1982.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, I've listened to your commentary from a while back. I don't know if it's the 80s, but it's still there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Also, knowing when to shut up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, part of the drama is in the silence, building up to the setup and the throw and all that kind of stuff. But also you're very good at, while radiating passion, being very precise and specific about the details of the throw and the setup and why something worked and didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Quick pause. I need a breath and break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So we just took a little break and went to judotv.com, which is, I guess, an IGF website. IGF is the organization behind a lot of the big judo events in the world. And I just signed up. You should sign up too. It's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Sign up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And you can watch basically any match from the Grand Slams and go back through history, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So we're now in Paris Grand Slam 2024, Teddy Renner final. By the way, it's super cool. Like you click on the draw and you can just look at any of the matches. You can go to the bottom of the finals. You can go. Yeah, to any one. Any one of them. That's so cool. That's really well done. Really well done interface. Anyway, let me first ask the ridiculous big question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Is Teddy Renner in the writing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I would like to believe that businesses, groups of people, people themselves, when they're good, they last forever. When they do good by the world. But that's not how it works, does it? Anyway, I think about the finiteness of great businesses. And I guess, as Jeff Bezos said, by the way, amazing human being. But as Jeff said, the whole...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
10 time world champ. Yeah. Two time gold medalist in the Olympics. I guess two time bronze medalist. He's probably going, is he's going to Paris?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
He's going after it again. So he's right here. I mean, he's right there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You think he gets gold medal this time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
In case people don't know, Yamashita is this legendary judoka, heavyweight, Teddy Renner, heavyweight. That's plus 100 kg.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Oh, yeah. That's cool. Who do you think wins, Yamashita versus Teddy Renner? Yes, I think Yamashita. Wait, wait, wait. You think Yamashita beats Teddy Renner?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Strong words, you think so. You think so. Yamashita is on the shorter side, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Competition-wise. So it's interesting. Both of them, maybe you can correct me, but have this Osorogari, which is kind of a trip that I never understood. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very tricky thing to do, right? It's very easy to do maybe as a white belt. You roll in, you can understand. But to do it at the high, high, high level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
of a leader, of a manager, of a business is to keep that first day thinking. Keep innovating, reinvigorating, being ready to pivot, to make hard decisions, all of that, every single day. It never ends. And yeah, use good tools for that. for the job of running a business like NetSuite. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, both Yamashita and Teddy Renner with Sotogari, they'll just like hit it over and over in the match.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, there's a few folks who you know what's coming. It's like over and over and over, it's the same attack. Anyway, with this Uchimata, it's different. There's not many people like that, where it's like the same attack. I mean, there's other attacks also, but they'll just go after the same thing over and over and over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So that drop left. Yeah. Where did that come from?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
That's life. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
All right. Let's, let's watch some tight over there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And the Korean just went for a drop sale. And Teddy Renner blocked with the hips. He's a big boy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Neil Adams. You are a five-time European champion, world champion, two-time Olympic silver medalist. Let's first go to the 1980 Olympics. Where was your mind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Has Teddy Renner ever been thrown for a pawn?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What can you say about Tamerlan Bashayev, who also gave him trouble?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And also, maybe can you explain the penalties for stalling?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Wow, the Koreans are really going after it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I guess every single person in that division is probably training for Teddy Renner, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
But also the pressure on Teddy Renner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
He's got a bit of a lift on him. He's going after it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Full of passion. I love it. He's like screaming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Can you say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, there was so much love there, celebration. It was great. It's great to see. It's great that he's doing it again, going after it, chasing the gold medal again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Are you part of the commentating team for Paris?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Have you ever had an athlete sort of come up to you and ask like, why did you say that? Or like disagree with your commentary?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So who else would you consider as some of the greats? So I personally just, because I love the standing Sanagi, Koga. So there's like, you know, the number of times you won the world championships and the Olympic Games. But there's also like how you won and how you won into fights and what you did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's not necessarily about getting gold medals, it's about how you fought and how you represent the sport. And there's certain athletes like Inouye and Iliadis that are going after the big throws.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Is there a case for Ono? Shohei Ono? Three-time world champ, two-time gold medalist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What was your preparation like? What was your strategy leading into that Olympics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So to you, a great champion is the whole package of... Yeah. how you present yourself when you lose, how you represent yourself just after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You're a beautiful work in progress. What about Nomura? That I hear in the morrow. That's three-time gold medalist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why the All Japan Championships is like legendary. There's these battles with Dimash and all of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
That's great. If we can just go to, you've trained in Japan. What are those randoris like? What's that training like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Gold tooth was on your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Mm-hmm. And that's when the switch happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And now he has nightmares about you. I wonder what nickname he has for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, I mean, can you just speak to that training with those folks? You know, you said crying, just the frustration of being thrown. I mean, how do you, it's such a beautiful part of the process of becoming great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
The building up afterwards is what actually makes you better. It's fascinating. And do you think there's, in Japan, just killers there that, like, just the world doesn't know about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Hopefully he listens to this. Hopefully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Anybody else I didn't mention as part of the greats that just kind of jumped here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter, a site that connects employers and job seekers. Filling your life with people that bring out the best in you is difficult, challenging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
For people just listening, he did an incredible sacrifice throw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, let me go back and look at that, what just happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
There's a calmness on his face, which is great to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Transition is everything, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah. Well, in anything, really, but Judo especially pays off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, there are Travis Stevens. I don't know how familiar with his judo, but he's a really interesting example because he competed at the highest level in jiu-jitsu as well. And his idea, he's a big Sanagi guy. And he basically threw all of that away. In the jiu-jitsu. In the jiu-jitsu. Like he took the sport from scratch for what it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So he almost never did a standing sanagi or sanagis at all in jiu-jitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And so you have to kind of consider the sport, the art of it, and also the competitors, the styles, and the culture of the sport if you want to win. If winning is the most important thing, then you're like, all right, well, let's – No, but you learn the game, don't you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah. But there's a... There's a rhyme to the whole combat thing. They're all, I mean, the body mechanics, it's all like fascinating echoes of each other in interesting ways. The details are different, but they're still two humans clashing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You know what I mean? They're still doing the big lifts. They're still doing the big gripping, but they just don't grab below the legs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's weird. They figured it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
At the highest level, which is crazy. So you mentioned jiu-jitsu a little bit. What's an interesting difference between jiu-jitsu and judo that you've observed? Because you're one of the greatest ever on the ground in judo. And so, you know, jiu-jitsu is primarily focused on similar type of stuff on the ground. So what do you use an interesting difference there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So you're a young kid, what, like 19, 20 at that time, full of confidence, vigor. So the decision to cut weight, how hard was it for you to cut weight to the 71 kg division?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, there's a kind of patience, like, oh, if this doesn't work out, I can try a different thing. With judo, there's like an urgency. There's an urgency. And there's a ref watching skeptically, so you better show that you're making progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So one of the side effects of that, I don't know with the chicken or the egg, but judo people on the ground are much more aggressive. So probably because of the urgency, but just like there's an intention behind the progress you're making. Jiu-Jitsu is more relaxed. There's more a culture of just finding places to relax and think of different control positions and take your time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And as a result, it's much, much less exhausting. So you can go for much longer. It feels like Judo, is exhausting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, he's a fascinating study because he does the most basic stuff. Yeah. But does it well. Like we did another level of well. It's like Yamashita. Everyone knows what's coming with Roger Gracie. But he just does it anyway. Against the best people in the world. It's crazy. He's like everybody in Jiu-Jitsu at White Belt learns the techniques he's using. And he just does it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and the thousand ways are in the details. So it kind of might even look the same to people, but there's, I mean, he finds a way to choke people, so he's on top of them, mounted, in a sort of judo pin position, and you know, everyone knows what's coming next, against the best people in the world, and you should be able to defend it, but nobody can. It's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, I don't know what that is about. Actually, judo pins is a very interesting case study as well because people are able to feel so heavy. One of the things judoka are able to do is pin. extremely well. Yeah. And it makes you realize that it's not about the weight. It's about some kind of technique that makes people feel like they weigh a thousand pounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
That's how it happened. Yeah, well, yeah, the story of your life is like a loss creates...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Wow, but yeah, I shouldn't mention that there's nothing like a pin from a judo person. I don't actually know if people in jiu-jitsu have made sense of that, like loaded that in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, but control is part of the game, and nobody controls a human body the way judo people do on the ground. They have understood the science of control, and I think that control is extremely useful in jiu-jitsu as well. It's just that people don't, because there's so many other domains of exploration. It's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Especially when you apply jiu-jitsu to the fighting setting, so mixed martial arts. That control, that side control, that pin control is really, really, really important. But then you add punching to the thing and it becomes... That puts a whole different thing on it, doesn't it? I mean, there's an alternate history where you would have been part of the early UFCs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
If time was a little different, maybe a few years later... Because your style of judo and jiu-jitsu and the transitions and the aggression and all of that would have worked really well in the early UFCs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah. It's a fascinating science experiment, which aspects of different martial arts work well and not when they clash together. And it did turn out that Nehwaza,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
worked well it was the key wasn't it yeah it was a it was a big missing link in our conception of fighting it's the neutralizer of size yeah and a lot of other components and it just blew people's mind like okay it's not just about size it's not just about big big guys swinging hands it's it's a lot of other components and the ground work is really really important
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And of course, there's a few judoka that succeeded in the UFC since then, which is always interesting how they adapt. When you take off the gi, how can you still throw people? How can you still do control? How can you still take advantage of the transition on the ground? Ronda Rousey is a good example of somebody that took advantage of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Some people are able to get punched in the face better than others. Yeah, for sure. Then again, there's Ronda Rousey who doesn't need to get punched in the face. She just gets in close, throws a person, armbar right there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You know, Kayla. Kayla Harrison. That's another incredible person. She could have probably been just winning Olympic gold medal after Olympic gold medal, but chose to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And Kayla Harrison, I don't know anybody that works as hard as her. That's a crazy, crazy, crazy work ethic. Well, let me ask you about training. Again, Jimmy Pedro said he learned a lot from you. He learned how to do a Taitoshin, the armbar, Jijikatami. But he also learned from you training methodology. So... What's he talking about? He told me about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What's your approach to training throughout your career and as it developed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
When you say hard trainers, what do you mean? Are these people that just like... every single day are able to just grind it out, do Randori, do the training, do the boring things, just keep coming back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
All old friends. All old friends. And new friends. So what's a tough week look like? Eight-year peak, physical training, Randori. Is there days off? Are you training like twice a day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Okay, so you lost to Ezio Gama. There's probably a lot that we could say about that particular match. Maybe let's zoom in. What were your strengths and weaknesses, judo-wise, in that Olympics? You said you haven't really lost a match. You won the European Championship leading into it. But if you had weak spots, okay, you already said diet, but specifically on the mat in terms of judo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Well, when you talk about skills, like what is, say your specialty is a tai otoshi, what, are we talking about uchikomi, doing a bunch of fists, working with bands, are you doing throws, are you actually just having conversations about like specific, like tiny details of throws, like what does skills mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So when we say good repetition, would you call me when you're just fitting the throw versus doing the throw? Where do you land on the value of both?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So you're watching the footwork, you're watching the gripping, and then just constantly adjusting how people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What about the tai otoshi? He said he learned a lot from you from that throw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And so I should mention that's one of the trickier throws. I mean, I still don't understand tai otoshi. It is a tricky throw. I don't understand. So for people who don't know, it... boy, how would you even explain it? It doesn't make any sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
When you just look solo, the movement you make is quite simple, but how you get a person to be off balance, how you actually get them to be thrown, and when you do throw it successfully, it looks like a whipping motion that's effortless. It makes no sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What was, if you can convert it to words, some secret ingredients that allowed you to pull it off at the highest levels, the Taitoshi?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's actually fascinating to me because in the United States where I came up, judo, I mean, the level of judo is not comparable to the level of judo in the rest of the world. Of course, the Pedro Center is an exception to that. Certain athletes, yeah. Certain athletes, like when I trained recently with Jimmy Pedro, it's like even like the 16-year-old kids are just all deadly. So it was terrifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Do you remember how? Do you remember how you won the matches?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
But I remember the Russian national team came through Philadelphia. And one of the things that really impressed me is just how much easier judo was, training judo with them. They moved correctly, as like Uke said, as the people getting thrown.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Every aspect of their body movement was correct in terms of it felt right to be throwing them, to be training with them, everything about the gripping, about the position of their hips, about the shoulder, everything. It was fun, it was easy, and I always felt like I was learning. So I think all of that is loaded in, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
into proper training so you're developing through the throws, you're developing the right technique.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I'm actually laughing because I'm enjoying you talking trash. But you're talking about technique.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, technique is important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
That said, some of it is conditioning type stuff that you were doing. So what is like the hardest type of physical conditioning you were doing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What were the throws? Do you remember?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And then you just –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It was amazing that you made it to the finish line, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Oh, there's a person dressed as Donald Duck?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
To that bridge. Longest bridge ever. So you regret the run?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What about the Randori? Was there a method to the madness there? How much Randori did you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
How much is each one? How long is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
That's a lot, especially given the level of the competition there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So there's like a level of like you're moving at like a close to 100%, but the actual power and the force is not quite there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So you had a beautiful exhibition of Japanese-type judo in the first two matches. You threw people, and then you also did the Niawaza. You unbarred a person. Great. So you're going into the final. What are the weaknesses going into the final against the Italian?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Somebody who doesn't know Randori's live training, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Was there a few people you remember that were just like really tough to go against? You mentioned Goldtooth. Is there others like it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah. Oh, you got him in the end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I suppose I should say not just tough, but just good training partners that you like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What do you do with the exhaustion that you're feeling in those? How deep did you go? You have to dig deep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Where do you go mentally when you, you know, how many times have you gone there where, like, you're really in deep waters exhaustion-wise in competition, actually?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Deep. That's the fascinating thing about some of these tournaments. If you go full distance on several matches in a row, the way you're seeing in the finals are two people that have fought a lot that day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Making it look so easy. Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Push, push, push, and then...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
But you're still going at it. You talk about all those training sessions. Nikki, your wonderful wife, told me that you were looking. You were going all over, like from target to target, looking for workout clothes because your luggage got lost because you had to get a workout in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
I mean, you travel all over the world for the commentary of these competitions. So is it sometimes a challenge to figure out how –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's a puzzle, but it's a deeply worthwhile one. Because the experience of the minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year of life surrounded by people you like, who inspire you, who help you notice the beauty of life, but also challenge you such that through the struggle you become a better version of yourself, the best version of yourself, hopefully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What advice would you give to beginners, people starting out in Judo, how to develop their game? how to find the beauty in the sport and the art of judo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, and great technique is a way to really discover the beauty of the art. And so great teaching is really important there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What does it take to get from the early days when you started Judo to world-class level?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, but that foundation, again, is that technique or is there, what does it take to build that foundation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So for people who somehow don't know, you've commentated some of the greatest judo matches ever. You've done Grand Prixs, you've done all these events, Olympics, championship, everything. Just looking at the history of judo, what stands out to you? What events stand out to you? What are some good memories that pop to your head?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
So why do you hate fighting lefties? And lefties are, we should say, overrepresented in terms of the high ranks of judo. I don't know why that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, that is a surprising thing that, at least it was to me, that Paris and France is really big on judo. Massive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, well, the team stuff is fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It changes the dynamics of the whole thing. And it's, I mean, it's funny you say Paris. It really makes it. really big deal that this Olympics is being held in Paris.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And an educated audience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
It's going to be awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Are you nervous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
All right. Do you get nervous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Wow, I get really nervous. I'm nervous right now. But given, especially because it's the Olympics and you don't want to celebrate people properly, right? And it's like, it's everything for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
And a lot of people, especially like the finals matches, you know, it'll be watched, you know, millions of times, the highest of stakes, all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Must be terrible. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Yeah, you're the voice of the biggest triumphs and the biggest tragedies for these athletes, for the world that watches and admires these athletes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
You're the voice. Don't screw it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Your voice is in my head when I watch these. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. But you're a master of it. It's a huge honor. that you would talk with me. Thank you for everything you've done for the sport of judo, for the Olympics, for just sports in general, just celebrating greatness in all of its forms. Thank you for talking today. Keep going. I can't wait to listen to you in Paris.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neil Adams. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Miyamoto Musashi. There's nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
What happened in that match?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#427 – Neil Adams: Judo, Olympics, Winning, Losing, and the Champion Mindset
Do you sometimes wake up and think like, man, I should have eaten better? Or maybe like a specific grip that you're like, I shouldn't have taken that grip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The following is a conversation with Andrew Calligan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does Gonzo-style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society. The so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherents to fish heads to O'Block residents and much more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I like how 2011 is the old days, like the ancient. Oh, yeah. The founding fathers. I was in eighth grade. Yeah. Oh, man. Time flies when you're having fun. It sure does. Lil Durk. Where's Lil Durk now? Atlanta.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
so you left Chicago not safe yeah I mean every rapper has to leave their hometown that's what I did it's a journey Seattle would have taken me out bro how's your I mean you do interview a lot of people I mean that's like a top comment but it speaks to the reality of the fact that you always find somebody rapping or you yeah you create the space for people to rap what's that about I don't know man they're usually really good you think so
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You have an interview with Krip Mac? I do. Free Krip Mac. He's a deal right now. Oh, he is? Yeah. Is that a hashtag? Yeah, for sure. That's an intense interview. People should go watch it. People should go watch all your interviews, but that one is pretty intense. Thanks. I was a little afraid for your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Siddhartha, that's a good book. Have you done shroom since then?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, he was loud and flavorful, I should say. So who's he?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I forget what context earlier talking about martial arts and fighting and he's got to work on his punching form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
All right. So Philly, you went to the border, occupied Seattle protests. You went to Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Uh, what are some interesting things that stand out to you from memory? Just as I asked the question, some interesting, I mean, I was in jail at the border for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What was that like? Was that your first time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You mentioned the UFO convention. Yeah. What have you learned from those guys, the ufologists?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
When? When? Exact dates? I do... I think there's alien civilizations everywhere. I talk to a lot of people that have doubts about it. I just think... I even suspect there's an intelligent alien civilization in our galaxy. And I just can't imagine them not having visited us. So I lean on that. What that actually looks like, I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The stuff we're seeing in terms of UFO sightings, I think that's much more likely, to the degree it's real, it's much more likely government projects. So military, Lockheed Martin, this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, or just have a very difficult to perceive form. But I mean, they would go small, not big. No, I think that would take a humanoid-like form just to be able to communicate with humans. I think the big challenge with aliens is to be able to find a common language. So if you come to another planet and you suspect that there's some kind of complexity going on, but it looks nothing like humans,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You have to find a common language. And I think aliens would try to take physical form that's similar that us dumb humans don't understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Actually, I'm interviewing somebody tomorrow who is an expert in human language. He's from MIT, studying the syntax of a lot of languages, including in the Amazon jungle, the peoples that live in the Amazon jungle region. Yeah, it's fascinating. Human language is fascinating, and also the barriers it creates, and also how the games are played to what you're speaking by governments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
This is part of the story of Russia and Ukraine is a battle over language. the Ukrainian language is a symbol of independence, which is why they were trying to make it the primary language of the nation. So sometimes the language represents the culture and the peoples. And it's intricately tied to the culture of the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Which languages do you know? Spanish and English. Spanish well? I don't know Spanish that well, so that passes me. You're fluent, basically. Oh, it doesn't. Hola.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That was real Cancun spring break. Well, I actually speak fluent Spanish according to Spotify because every episode is translated overdubbed by AI in Spanish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I have a Spanish robot. I sound incredibly intelligent and intellectual in Spanish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Exactly. From everything you've done, all the people you've seen, do you think most people are good underneath it all?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it made the snow go away?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So you said you hated classes in school, except that journalism class.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I do hope more humans rise to the occasion and have courage, courage of their convictions, courage to have integrity. But yeah, I think that most people are good, and they want to do good, and they have the capacity to do a lot of good. That's why I have hope for this whole thing we got going on. How do you heal the misunderstandings between people, you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, Andrew, I'm a big fan and thank you for being one of the best listeners in the world. Amen. And showing the full spectrum of humanity to us so we can listen as well and learn. And just thank you for doing everything you're doing. Amen. Thanks so much for having me on. You're a great man. Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Kalkin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And the commercial is, well, they talk about, I just shipped my pants. At the risk of explaining humor, the commercial involves the full-on absurdity of various kinds of people talking about shipping their pants and shipping the bed, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, I think if you want to do school right, take on every single subject that you're forced into. It's like the David Foster Wallace, just be unboreable by it. Just really go in as if ancient Chinese dynasties are the most interesting thing you could possibly learn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, there should be some choice or maybe a lot of choice even at the level of high school for what kind of classes you pursue. Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You said you love journalism. What did you love about journalism? What hooked you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Buy the ticket, take the ride. Hunter S. Thompson, is he up there as one of the influences?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
that makes people want to say you're the Hunter S. Thompson of this generation. And I don't think they mean the drugs. I think they mean some kind of non-standard willingness to explore the extremes of humanity. And like almost a celebration of the extremes of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Anyway, it's hilarious, and I wish people would do edgier stuff like that more often, where the commercial itself is a little piece of artistic absurdity. Anyway, go to ShipStation.com slash Lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Doing drugs. I mean, drugs and alcohol is all part of it somehow. Yeah. So it opens a gateway to a deeper understanding of humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know? Yeah, I'm conflicted on this. I'm good friends with a lot of people that say alcohol is really bad for you. And I believe that too. But there's something that... I just, as an introvert, as a person who has a lot of anxiety, for me, alcohol has opened doors of just opening myself up to the world more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it's not a requirement. You can sometimes channel, you can sometimes leverage all those things for your creativity, but the creative engine, it lives outside of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
yeah but so the creativity goes away and gradually you just become like a party animal like andy dick a caricature of yourself yeah i mean that's why life is interesting you make all kinds of choices and sometimes you can have uh create works of genius in a short amount of time based on drugs and no drugs einstein had that miracle year where he published several incredible papers in one year 1905 did he do drugs before that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Lots of coke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
How do you think he gets that hair? Come on. It's true. I'm just asking questions. High confidence hair. Look into it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, no, he's a well put together, sexy young man. The hair came later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, sometimes I fantasize what it would be like to be in the arms of Einstein. I couldn't even get that out. In the arms of Einstein. Yeah, just I want to feel safe. It's a good idea for a rom-com. To be a little more serious, like general relativity, that space-time can be unified and curved by gravity is an incredibly wild and difficult idea to come up with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It's for individuals. It's for couples. It's an easy, discreet, affordable way to get going on, you know, taking your mental health seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's a really, really difficult thing to imagine. given how well Newtonian classical mechanics physics works for predicting how stuff happens on Earth, to think that gravity can morph space-time, both space and time, And it permeates the entire universe. It's a field. It's a really wild idea to come up as one human on Earth to intuit that is really, really, really difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it's really sad to me that he didn't get a Nobel Prize for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, I think once the papers came out, he was widely recognized as a true genius. But before that, he wasn't recognized. He had a really difficult life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You mean is it a portal to another place, that kind of thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No. Well, we don't know. It could be. It could be that the universe is kind of like Swiss cheese full of black holes. There's something called Hawking radiation where because of quantum mechanics, the information leaks out of a black hole. So it is possible to escape a black hole. There's a lot of interesting questions there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. which doesn't seem to scare physicists, but it terrifies me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, we're all like orbiting. I mean, we're not just orbiting the sun, but the sun is part of the solar system, is part of the galaxy, and it's all orbiting a gigantic black hole. Have you ever spoke to someone who's been to outer space? Jeff Bezos. He flew his own rocket. Wow. That's pretty cool. Astronaut that's been to deep space, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, maybe I've spoken to an alien that just hasn't admitted it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Is this a real thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'm a big fan of conversation, obviously, for exploring the human mind, exploring the dark and the light that lurks in the shadows and in the corners of the human psyche. And in conversation, rigorous conversation, deliberate conversation, Careful conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Now I don't trust Wikipedia after what you told me, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I thought you meant more about the fact that you're isolated out in the space that we need social connection and it's difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I don't need to go to space for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, technically we're all in space because Earth is in space. But so I wonder if you have to go to space to talk to the psychiatrist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, technically we're all in space. So he can't, that's a boundary he can't have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You're right. And that's, those are important people that are asking important questions. Yeah. You hitchhiked across US for 70 days when you were 19. Right. Tell the story of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Empathic conversation is a really good way to shine a light on the darkness and discover the darkness behind the light, if that's fair to say. I had a great conversation yesterday with... Ben, favorite barbecue buddy of mine. He runs JNL Barbecue that I highly recommend you guys should check out. We talked about life, freedom, country. We talked about a lot of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I love it. I traveled across the United States before in similar kind of plan. Were you on the Silver Dog? It's the Greyhound bus. Greyhound is pretty nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's way better than hitchhiking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Amtrak, no, that's elitist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I lived in a shitty car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, when I was driving across the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
With a friend, some solo, and I would eat cold soup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. I mean, all of that is great, but too much of it is not great. Like too much cold soup, not great. Too much beef jerky, not great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Philadelphia across.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
San Diego is where we ended up. But it was a zigzag and went up to Chicago and then all the way down to Texas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, no, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I mean, and you're a kid, so you don't care, and you were throwing caution to the wind, and you met some crazy, crazy people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He created the documentary that I highly recommend called This Place Rules on the undercurrents that led to the January 6th Capitol riots. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got ShipStation for businesses who want to ship stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, get that Greyhound ticket and go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Maybe you're not charming enough. You thought about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's rough. Yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. I like people that are comfortable in silence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
See, for me, it was really easy because you just say, I'm traveling across the United States, and I think people love that idea, and they want to help. They're romantic, because they also have that invisible door. Everybody has that invisible door, and I just want to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, that's why I'm like renting everything and I'm making sure like tomorrow I could just go. I gave away everything I own twice in my life. Just very like, I'm ready to go tonight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There's nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, this, you're right. You're right. That's probably the only, I've never had to let go of that though. That's the only thing I own. This means a lot to me, but everything else. But then again, listen, because, okay, this watch is given to me by Rogan, who's become a close friend. But like whenever I romanticize the notion that this watch means a lot to me, he's like, don't worry about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
About love, about love for humans, about love for the art of what you do. The man loves barbecue. He truly loves cooking and the artistry, if I can use that word. Kind of like what Jiro dreams of sushi, what Ben dreams of barbecue. Anyway, he is not a licensed therapist. He's not even a licensed barbecue creator because you don't get a license for that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'll just get you the same one again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it's pretty sick. I'm not usually a gift guy, but, you know, when somebody you look up to kind of gives you a thing, it's a nice little symbol of that relationship. So it's nice. But other than that, no. But even this, like, whatever. The relationship is what matters. The human is what matters, not the... I agree 100%. You had something like this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You and Hunter Biden have the similar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think there's prostitutes involved. Oh, okay. Whatever. I think you got to look into it. I think I have to look into it too. I don't know. Was Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, somebody that wasn't an inspiration at all in this road trip? Did you even know who that is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's a great book. You read it or no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Give you a different cover.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Killed all the romance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You were mistaken for a lot lizard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
His father, grandfather, he's just been in the family. He's been a Texan for like, I don't know how many centuries, but, you know, Texan through and through, barbecue guy through and through. But if you want that kind of depth of conversation, but with a little bit more rigor and some, you know, expertise and professionalism and discreteness, then you should try BetterHelp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's great. I was just rolled with it. Oh, sorry about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And you were still... That didn't leave a bad taste in your mouth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Who among us have not been mistaken for a lot lizard? It's a fact. You heard it here first. What else? Some interesting, beautiful people that you've met along the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
For me, being an introvert, just crashing on a person's couch, being essentially forced into a great conversation is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think the shallowness of that interaction is exhausting. Not just the, not the thanks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What'd you learn about people from that journey? That's your first time really kind of going into it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element. It's an electrolyte drink, delicious. It helps you get your sodium, potassium, magnesium in the right kinds of proportions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's beautiful, man. I've had similar kind of experience that people were struggling the most are the ones who are willing to help you when you're struggling. Yeah. There's people like in religious context and other kind of communities that just judge others because they've kind of constructed a value system where they're better than others because of that value system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that actually has a cascade that forces you to actually be kind of a dick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been to certain parts of the world where religion is really a big part of life. I'm just always skeptical about tribes of people that believe a thing and they believe they're better than others because they believe that thing. That could be nations, that could be religions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, in Ukraine and in Russia, I've seen a lot of hate towards the other. Yeah. And that hate I'm always very skeptical of because it could be used by powerful people to direct that hate just so the powerful people can maintain power and get money, this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Are there some places in America that are better than others? Can you speak negatively of like aforementioned Joe Rogan talk shit about Connecticut nonstop? Can you pick a region in the United States you can talk shit about? To talk shit about? Oh, for sure. I mean, from that experience, let's just narrow it down to that. Oh, Colorado. Oh, Jesus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, you're a grid guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What is it about grids that bring out the worst in people? Circles is where everyone's just vibing out, but the grid gets people locked in and hateful. I don't know, man. I've never heard anyone talk shit about Colorado, I have to say. It's kind of refreshing. It provides a necessary balance for the Colorado Wikipedia page.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
For me, if I had to get rid of everything I consume, the last things that would remain that would make me still feel good, like say if I'm fasting for many days, which is the thing I kind of want to do, like fast for like seven days or more, I think it's a beautiful experience. But if you do that, you still need water and electrolytes. Because if you have those, then you can be happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oregon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I think also anarchism, so I've gotten to know Michael Malice, who's written quite a bit about anarchism. And it also exists as a body of literature about different philosophical notions that kind of resist the state, the ever-expanding state in different kinds of ways. And it's always nice to have
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Extremism implemented in almost all of its forms is probably going to cause a lot of suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You worked as a doorman on the, uh, I could say legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans. That's right. Where you saw what you described as, this might be another Wikipedia quote, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Hellish scenes, in quotes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
All right, thank you. That's a win. That's one in the win column. So yeah, tell the story of that. What's it like to work on Bourbon Street? What kind of stuff did you see?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Your body can be happy. You can still feel good. And it's just also a fun way to consume water for me. And it's just a fun, delicious way to consume water for me. I'm traveling to the Amazon jungle in Maine, so I get to think about all the things I'll consume there. And I'll definitely miss Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The best of humanity on display.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, it's all alcohol.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, they technically are better than everybody else, but yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Which places are those, Colorado?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's why you feel safe talking shit about Colorado.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The things you miss, but also the things that empowers you when you travel to those kinds of places, is the little habits, the little comforts of home, and Element is that for me. And I'm looking forward to a long run today. I don't know how many miles I'll do, maybe 10, 12, maybe 15. And I'm going to drink Element before, and I'm gonna drink Element after. Before, so I feel good on the run.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Anything for the gram, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Or, like, I cheated on someone. I've seen a surprising number of people on your channel say, mention eating ass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
How seriously you said that will live in my head for the rest of my life. That's good. I want to live in your head saying that a lot of people mentioned eating ass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think you're also, there's something about you that gives them, creates the safe space to perform their art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Where'd you get that suit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Goodwill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Wow. I was playing checkers, you were playing chess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I've actually gotten suits at three stores before. They're great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It was like $12 to $25 every time for... The outfit. If I wanted to look super sophisticated, like I'm from another era, I would go to thrift store. Yeah. Because they're usually like this. There's like the patterns they have. It's just like a more sophisticated suit, which is what you kind of picked out. It made you look ridiculous, but in the best kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, because there's an intimacy to confessing a thing. Right. And then you just don't really realize the implications of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Different place in time, like five years later, that same person has a family and stuff like this, and all of a sudden they're talking about eating ass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
After, so I recover well from the run. It's a big part of feeling good for me, given all the diet, given all the craziness that I do. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass. where you can watch over 180 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I don't even know where to go with that. But literally, the opening question was, tell me your deepest, darkest secret?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Just come up to somebody like that? Yeah. How often do you get a no? What's the yes to no ratio?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, yeah. We're interviewing them. Yeah. So they're ready to talk. There's just not like... Yeah. There's different ways to be ready. Right. I see homeless people a lot, and they always look fascinating. And the ones I've talked to are always fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And each case is probably its own little puzzle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
If we could take a small tangent to, you mentioned this Vegas video, which is fascinating. It was taken down recently by YouTube, or YouTube took it down based on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Phil Ivey on poker, Aaron Franklin on barbecue and brisket, Carl Santana on guitar, Tom Morello on guitar, Terrence Tao on mathematical thinking, Martin Scorsese on filmmaking. Boy, would I love to talk to Martin Scorsese. Just from his masterclass, you could understand the depth of genius there. There's some directors that I would just love to talk to for two, three, four, five hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, you shouldn't have that amount of power. At the very least, they should have the power to just silence that five-second clip, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, thank you for doing that. That's really, really, really important. And that's really powerful. And it might hopefully empower YouTube to also put pressure on people to not. YouTube is in a difficult position because there's so much content out there. There's so many claims, it's hard to investigate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But YouTube should be in a place where they push back against this kind of stuff as a first line of defense, especially to protect small creators. So what you're doing is really, really important. Appreciate it, man. And it sucks that it was taken down. Do you have any hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But also it's just like a really important video is good for the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, fuck Fox 5. The other Channel 5, as you said. Yeah. Well, thank you for pushing back. Amen. And highlighting it. Hopefully it gets brought back up. But yeah, defending other creators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So that other creators can take risks and don't get taken down for stupid reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So Court of Confessions was written?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that was the birth of All Gas, No Brakes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Darren Aronofsky that I got to meet recently. Boy, what a beautiful mind. I love great filmmaking, and I love artists that enable that, whether that's cinematography, directors, actors, all of that. writers, the paintbrushes and the colors behind the art. I love it all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
11.30 at night? Of course. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's what I need to do MDMA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I thought it's a pill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I definitely need to take MDMA. I'm already full of love, but like that, I'd probably go on another level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Let me write that down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so Masterclass is a good place to give the early inklings of what it takes to create that genius from the very people that created it. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at Masterclass.com slash LexPod. That's Masterclass.com slash LexPod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, what were some of the stories from the trip reports?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Not that, well, yeah, that lady. I think she manifests herself in many forms, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know, was there a narrative that tied it together? It's like really just a trip comedic almost with the interview.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
BetterHelp for humans who want to figure out what's going on in their mind. Element for hydration. Masterclass for learning. And AG1 for delicious, delicious health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I don't think there's anybody that's, quote, at the head of MIT who's putting, what was it, all over his face?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I just drank it, and that's the reason I feel good. I'm going to do a long run later today, and I'm going to drink shortly after that, mostly because it makes me super happy. I'm going to make an AG1 in the container that comes with it when they ship it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But I'm going to have to consult my colleagues at MIT if they know DJ Soft Baby. It probably was Harvard. Let's put it on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
A juggalo adjacent sausage. Okay. Can you run that by me again? A juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in Central Florida. Okay. Fetish mansion in Central Florida. Juggalo adjacent. I mean, every single one of those words I feel like needs a book or something. Right. So, by the way, who are the juggalos? Is this ICP?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
ICP fans. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, so it's not... Okay, got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Tech N9ne, I don't know who that is. Should I know who that is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
We should also say ACP and St. Cloud Posse. So this is a thing. This is a movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Can you tell a Juggalo from like a distance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What's the ideology of a Juggalo?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, I understand. But what's the ideology? What's the philosophical foundation of the... They're anti-racist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What's Twiz? Meth. Meth, right, right. Lots of tattoos?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I vaguely remember enjoying some of the ICP music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it's pretty good. It's funny. It's edgy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'm going to put cold water in there, mix it all up, and put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. It gets a little slushy. It gets some texture to it after a long run in the Texas heat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I love it. New Mexico, Albuquerque, all those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
ABQ, what's that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, shit. The depth of references you bring to the table is intense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I met a lady in Albuquerque when I was traveling across the United States, and she said, take me with you. I said, I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But I didn't think about that lady. I think you made the right call. I don't know. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Best book I've ever read in my life. There's a moment when he meets a nice girl on a bus, and they have a love affair. It was good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, no. They went to California. Well, yeah, and there was a love affair on the bus, but it wasn't sexual. It was just romantic. It was in the air. It was in the air, which there is something in the air on a bus, like a Greyhound, Megabus, that type of situation. There's certainly something in the air. There's a romance. There is, man, when you travel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Because it's like strangers getting together, and you're like feeling each other out, and But you're in it. You each have a story because you wouldn't be taking a bus unless you had a story. Especially if you're traveling cross country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, no, no. If you book it way ahead of time. It's like $20. I was like, this is a fucking lie, calling it $1. I don't know why I'm swearing. The anger came out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Chilling. It was awesome. Well, there's a nice part of your film with the rooster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Did you plant the rooster?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's just so refreshing to get to AG1, and I think about life, and I'm listening to some intense audiobook, and it's just the zen place where I get to reflect on the battles that I fought inside my mind on that long run. And AG1 is just the delicious orchestra that plays while I reflect on the battle fought. Friends, they will give you one month's supply of fish oil,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Like, what's going on? What were the interviews that made up that video? What kind of – what style of questions were you asking? What –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it's interesting how that really brought out the worst in people. Oh, yeah. I'm not sure why that is. Fear, maybe. Paranoia. I don't know. It really divided people along the lines, as you mentioned, like triple mask yourself or fight for your country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Kalgan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
This is how we feel. That's pretty powerful. Yeah. Through a lot of the documenting that you do, this is how we feel is like screaming through that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
i'm not sure what i was expecting as an answer to that question yeah but i liked it it was good yeah and then after that i posted the video and it was very well received and that was the pivotal point where i realized that everything was going to change i mean there was a still kind of a comedic element to the way you do conversations so the way you edit so did you see yourself as a potentially like a john stewart type of character
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I do think that certain people have broken the brains of... COVID broke the brains of a lot of really great people I admire. Trump broke the brains of a lot of people I admire to where Trump derangement syndrome became a thing. You can't see the world quite as clearly because of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I think Jon Stewart is quite a genius at stepping away, even though the world needed him in that time, stepping away during that moment of Trump and coming back now Sort of being able to reflect being sort of the elder statesman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There is a degree to which you can be in those positions easily captured by groupthink, though, even when you're not controlled by bosses and money and all that kind of stuff. I think Jon Stewart's been mostly resistant, but it's hard. His position is difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think you would be wrong. You go further. No, the other direction. You got that from Target. Not Target. I was joking about Target. I like Walmart better. It just felt like a funny thing to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Not at that point. So like you were still able to have a lightness to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, just to speak to the first part you're saying, it's just so much love that people have. It's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, just to have anonymity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, we should go to furry conventions that you covered. Wear an outfit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The most expensive thing I own is this watch, and it was given to me as a gift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, we should go together. I go all the time. We should go together. What's your favorite outfit? No, I have not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Listen, maybe I'm just afraid to face who I really am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Fuck the reptiles. I can get behind that. I'm more like a teddy bear type of guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think bears. Maybe squirrels. I don't know. Oh, squirrels are so cool. Giant squirrels, yeah. I want to put a GoPro on one and just see what the hell they do. You were talking about that conversation with the guy at the head of Doing Things Media. How did that end up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, he's great. He's great all around. Yeah. He doesn't get the credit he deserves. I mean, he's got the credit by now, but still deserves more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Super bad team?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You've crossed the line. Totally. And that's where you go back to Walmart to humble yourself. I really love Walmart. In fact, I moved to Austin because I was at Walmart and a lady said that I look handsome in a suit. And I was like, that's it. I love this place. She just said it for no reason whatsoever. This older lady just kind of looked at me and with this like genuine sweetness just said,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The guts on that person. Because you should be owning probably close to 100% of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Why do people do that? Like, what's the benefit of acting like that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, this happens also not just financially, but just with people that sort of part of a team, but they don't really contribute creatively to the team and they force their opinion or pressure. I mean, whether it comes from...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
um like from editors or all that kind of stuff or from sponsors or this there's pressure they create when they when the the creator alone should be celebrated and have all the power because they're the ones that are creating the thing in a way i have sympathy because i i can't relate to that because i've always been the front man of my own projects by design so i'm not sure what it's like to be a like someone's owner from a content perspective
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
i don't understand the challenges they face maybe there was something that i didn't understand i don't know true well oftentimes if you own a thing like this like this company you do think about brand right and then maybe you have a big picture idea what brand means and that that can be at tension with the creative project, right? But ultimately freedom for the creators is the best kind of brand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, you look handsome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, the suit thing. Yep. Anyway, what was the first, if you remember, first recorded interview you did?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And they were always in the parking lot of Walmart, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I know that Walmart, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, you're not a man who follows the rules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. But from there, from the ashes, the Phoenix rose. Over time, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
yeah maybe you can tell the story of the film you have what's his name i wrote this down joker gang and gum gang is that correct yeah the opening scene the opening scene of two characters uh just talking shit and then getting into a fight and that i think was really brilliant how you presented that as a almost like a microcosm of like the division between the the extremes of the left and the extremes of the right that's exactly what it was i'm glad you picked up on it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, and then what I really liked is that the Joker gang was kind of a little bit of a spoiler alert. I apologize, but at the end of the film, it was a kind of voice of wisdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He seems the most sane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, where do they stream it? On HBO Max, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's such a pain in the ass, man. I wish we could all just pay on it on YouTube or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And HBO gets the profits or whatever, but it's such a... I have to subscribe for every single thing. But yes, if you want to watch it, I recommend it extremely highly. Sign up to HBO, whatever the hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's a truly original documentary, meaning I just haven't seen anything like it. It's even like... So there's a humor and a lightness at the right kinds of moments. Like I said, there's a rooster in your... That's like, okay, that's like a non-sequitur like thing as part of a storytelling. It kind of intensifies and reveals the absurdity of the division.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And how once like January 6th happens, like everybody like goes on to the next thing. It's like, what happened to us? It was almost like a delirium that everybody was participating in some weird, just like, well, like people say, mind virus. Like all of a sudden we just got captured and people just like yelling at each other, doing the most ridiculous shit. And-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, really, January 6th, the way you present it especially just reveals the circus of it all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, what did you, QAnon is part of that story. What'd you learn about QAnon from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's a lot. Psilocybin, meditation, rap, public parks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
psyop just devour people's minds in such an intense way in such a rapid period of time and i love how the kids in the movie are also the voices of wisdom the spencer family it's the kid who like goes to the full journey yeah of like believing um that whatever hillary clinton is a lizard or and just believing all the the worst versions of the conspiracy theories and then kind of waking up was like what was the point
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, they have some political depth to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Wow. I mean, is there something more you could say about like how QAnon works? Like who's behind it? What's your sense of who's behind the whole thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Was it almost a disappointment? Because the... To me, it was like a thing that just captured a very large number of people's minds and then it just kind of faded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But there has to be a kind of retrospective. That's the problem I have with COVID. A lot of stuff happened. Everybody freaked out. There's a lot of big drama around it. And now everyone's like, okay, forgot. Yeah. Wait, what are the lessons learned? Has anyone learned any lessons? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, but what are the mechanisms that made it work? What do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I kind of think that these viral ideas can be driven by, and your film kind of shows this, by just a handful of people. And they're not malevolent. They just want to clout. And there's something sexy, there's something really sticky about conspiracy theories, especially extreme ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I try to make these interesting. But if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation, a new sponsor. It's a shipping software designed for businesses that want to save time and money on shipping. Whatever e-commerce thing going on to do the fulfillment for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You just kind of like, some of them can have this momentum, they capture the minds of a lot of people and you just go with it. And when I hear some conspiracy theories like, There's something, like a small part of me that kind of like, yeah, like excited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
you were shirtless lifting weights while whiskey or some alcohol was poured into your mouth by Alex Jones in this movie, and then you did the same to him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
This feels like an interrogation. So Alex was a part of this film. He was like throughout the narrative, and you had a great interview with him. What did you learn about interacting with Alex Jones for making this film?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's Larry Seuss. It's a mix of like the dude from Big Lebowski and the Brad Pitt role in True Romance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know that reference?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He kind of looks like Brad Pitt. Jack Kerouac.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You said that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That film, just in case you don't get a chance to see it and you should, you're critical of Alex Jones in the most... artful way. Like it was the correct way to be critical. It showed him to be more interested in the grift of it. Yeah. And you didn't do it in a like a pointing fingers and like saying, in the kind of NPR way that you just mentioned, it's more like a human way. Like this is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
tragedies happen all over the world and there's grifters that roll in and then take advantage of it in interesting ways and then human beings get swept up on either side of it and it's revealing the humor the absurdity of it all and it was done masterfully it was done like for people who criticize you for platforming alex jones or whatever yeah the film from a political perspective is probably leans very much left yeah like heavily left but does it without that exhausting
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
energy of like judging. Just this kind of, you know, yeah, two masks kind of judging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think it was really well done. Thanks, man. The layering of it all, the entertainment plus sort of not considering from his perspective the consequences of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
like rallying people up in this way that it's not just i mean you really highlight this in the interview like it's he keeps saying it's info wars but then there's always kind of a sense that info wars can turn to actual like civil war and yeah but maybe not maybe it's uh all just a circus like we play for each other if you look at the speech he did on january 5th it was said he said tomorrow you know millions of patriotic americans will take our country back
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. But like you said, the thing he told you, he turned out to be right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And the frogs are becoming gay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I've read stories where you kiss one and it becomes a prince. Yeah, that shit's true. 100%. You think Alex believes what he says in terms of everything he says on InfoWars?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I also saw that you said you took too many shrooms when you were young, and that led you to have hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder, HPPD. Can you explain what this is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So for some people, especially who publish on YouTube, the YouTube algorithm, they can become a slave to the YouTube algorithm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So I wrote a Chrome extension that hides all the views on anything I create. So you took it to that level. Yeah, just because it's a drug, man. And I'm also a number guy, meaning you give me... If I do 30 push-ups today, tomorrow I'm going to try to do 35, just enjoying number go up. That's why I like video games. RPGs, where you're improving your skill tree, you're getting an extra point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And there's some aspect of YouTube and other platforms, anything, any other platform, you're like, ooh, I got more today than I got yesterday. That's really, really dangerous to me because... it can influence how much I enjoy a thing. Like if nobody gives a shit about it based on the numbers, you're like, oh, maybe that wasn't such a great experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I thought it was a great experience, but maybe it wasn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, that's just like not true though. And it might mean like on YouTube that your thumbnail sucks or something like this or whatever, however the algorithm works. But I mean, that's the thing I'm battling against to make sure. I ignore all of that. Right. It's actually something Joe Rogan has been extremely good at. He gives zero shits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He was doing that when he wasn't successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But anything. He just follows the stuff he enjoys doing and legitimately enjoys it. He happens to be really good at it, but he gets good because he's doing the things he really enjoys and full on passionate about. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The snow is in the room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
resisted for a creator. Because I feel like you can do negative stuff to your mind as a creator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Anybody that controls you is not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it is. And that's why variety is good. And you're doing that. Yeah. Always expanding. Well, let me just zoom out on this. You made a film. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There's a, I mean, just the way it's shot, the humor that goes throughout it, just the narration that you're doing in like a shitty director's chair. That's really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, just like starting with the absurd fight and then going like, oh, that's a good way to start a movie. Just really, really well done. Thanks, man. What about Jonah Hill? Great guy. He believed in this. He did. So what's that like? What do you think is behind him believing in such a wild project?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Just on your own politics, is it fair to say that your politics leans left?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, if you just like objectively zoom out and don't have an insane standard of the extremes, it feels like a lot of your work leans left.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It'd be nice if there's an actual write-up of the things you're not allowed to say for each thing. Yeah. I wonder whose list would be longer. It just does feel like the last list is a little longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And conservatives are really concerned about pedophiles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, it's one of the things you do in the film is kind of confront one of the QAnon folks where his concern is that everybody's a pedophile and you show it to him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Do you think, to the degree you have bias, it affects your journalism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But in America, like if you just compare it to other nations, the level of corruption is much lower to where the opportunity...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, like people focus on in major cities in the United States, like homelessness, somehow that's a sign of a fallen empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But, you know, that's a problem. There's definitely, it reveals some mismanagement of cities and government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, you said it's only visual. And yes, gratitude for being alive at all. It's great. Yeah. But you said that this led you into some dark psychological places like depersonalization disorder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No. So all the lessons were learned? Yeah, for sure. I mean, people got really screwed over. Don't you have a sense that there's a greater and greater growing questioning of the electoral process and all this kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
For it to really happen, there has to be a level of desperation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Who do you think wins, Trump or Biden? In the Civil War?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
In a game of Mario Kart. No, in the election 2024. Oh, man, I have no idea, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Still, those at the presidential level, it sets the tone of the country. And so Trump running again and Biden running again, it just feels like there's going to be a lot of questioning of election results.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
We got Joker gang versus gum gang. Where'd you find Joker gang?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There was a controversy a year ago where a woman came forward and said that you were pushy with her. You respected the no, you got the consent, but you were pushy about it. Looking back, can you tell the story of that? What are the lessons you learned from it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, thank you for taking accountability. But just to clarify, you got consent?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Again, thank you for taking accountability, but I just hate how many cowards there are out there. Like when people hit low points is when, when you should help, when you should stand with them, if you know their character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So can you explain to me where in that spectrum you are? So do you sometimes have a sense that you're not real? Sometimes. And something else is not real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So if you're a business owner and you need to ship some stuff, check out ShipStation. There's an incredible commercial. I think it's probably fake from a long time ago. It's either for Walmart or Kmart. I don't remember. And we talk about Walmart in this episode, which kind of warms my heart, if I'm being honest. Actually, I do think it's Kmart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know? Many of the people you talk to are probably that. Yeah. Many people you've interviewed before all this and after are probably going through some shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, thank you for the most part, leaning towards accountability. It's the right path to take. What advice would you give to young men that look up to you on how they can be good men, especially in regard to women?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So especially when you're young, college-aged, you don't have enough experience to be able to read a person without having that conversation. Because a lot of times you can see the trauma without explicitly talking about it, but that takes experience and knowledge and seeing the world. When you're young and you really don't know shit, making things a bit more explicit is probably better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Confirming that you were in it with reality by watching yourself on video. Exactly. So is that basically the engine behind all the extreme interviews you've done?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So it was the same kind of spirit as... As the previous thing. Yeah. What was the first one you did under the Channel 5 flag? Miami Beach Spring Break. I think I've seen that. And it's going to be a callback. I think somebody mentioning eating ass there, too. That would be the place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, this is a fascinating portrait of America through that specific lens. So Miami Beach. And then how would you describe your style of interviewing? Just now that you've collected so many, if you had a style, how would you describe your style?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, there's a, like in the face of absurdity. Yeah. You're just like there with a microphone. There's a comic aspect to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, sure. What's crash zoom, by the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What's your goal with some of these videos like the Philadelphia Streets one? Is it to reveal the full spectrum of humanity or is it also to tell a story that's almost political about the state?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Trapped or just the ability to step outside of yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You've interviewed many rappers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Educate me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Can you explain this drill rap situation? What is drill rap?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So these are, as opposed to pretending to be a gangster and killing people, you get some credibility by actually doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Slim Jesus. You made a video on Oblock. Yeah. What is Oblock? The place, the culture, the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Also, you're trapped. I mean, there's a higher state of being through meditation that you can kind of step outside of yourself. But this is not that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Was there any concern for your safety?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The following is a conversation with Lee Cronin, his third time on this podcast. He is a chemist from University of Glasgow, who is one of the most fascinating, brilliant, and fun to talk to scientists I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, I think there's several things to say there. One, I think there is a role in society for people that say we're all going to die. Because I think it filters through as a message, as a viral message, that gives us the proper amount of concern. Okay, all right. Meaning it's not 95%, but when you say 95% and it filters through society, it'll give an average of like 0.03%, an average.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So it's nice to have people that are like, we're all going to die, then we'll have a proper concern. For example, I do believe we're not properly concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons currently. It just seems like people have forgotten that that's a thing, and there's a war in Ukraine with nuclear power involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
There's nuclear power throughout the world, and it just feels like we're on the brink of a potential world war, to a percentage that I don't think people are properly calibrating in their head. We're all thinking it's a Twitter battle as opposed to actual threat. So it's nice to have that kind of level of concern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But to me, when I hear AI doomers, what I'm imagining is with unintended consequences, a potential situation where let's say 5% of the world suffers deeply because of a mistake made of unintended consequences. I don't want to imagine the entirety of human civilization dying, but there could be a lot of suffering if this is done poorly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, just this thought experiment of the United States and China and Russia and major nuclear powers get together and say, all right, we're going to distribute nuclear weapons to every single nation on Earth. Yep. Oh, boy. I mean, that has a probably greater than 50% chance of eliminating major military conflict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, but it's not 100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But I think, yeah. But the probability of a bad actor of one of the nations setting off a nuclear weapon
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think it's just to be clear, we're just having a thought experiment that's interesting, but there's terrorist organizations that would take that trade. We have to ask ourselves the question of how many, which percentage of humans would be suicide bombers, essentially, where they would sacrifice their own life because they hate another group of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I believe it's a very small fraction, but is it large enough to, if you give out nuclear weapons,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's not going to kill all humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
No, it's interesting. But it's interesting whether that would have as much power on human psychology as actual physical nuclear explosion. I think so. It's possible, but people don't take economic consequences as seriously, I think, as...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah. So it's like a video game. We all have to join this metaverse video game. Yeah. And then there's dire economic consequences. I don't know how. And it's all run by AI, as you mentioned. So the AI doomers are really terrified at this point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Oh, fear mongering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You've mentioned that, what do you call it? Chem Machina?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. So you've mentioned that a chemical brain is something you're interested in creating. And that's a way to get conscious AI soon. Can you explain what a chemical brain is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay, so these are all methods of mass spectrometry, mass spec. You scan a molecule, it gives you data in the form of a mass spectrum, and you're saying that the data correlates to the assembly index.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So how generalizable is that shortcut, first of all, to chemistry, and second of all, beyond that? Because that seems like a nice hack, and you're extremely knowledgeable about various aspects of chemistry, so you can say, okay, it kind of correlates. But the whole idea behind assembly theory paper, and perhaps why it's so controversial, is that it reaches bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you know and that's kind of and had the chicken had an alternative understanding of why the farmer was feeding it it's interesting though because we don't know what's special about the human mind that's able to come up with these kind of generalities this universal theories of things and come up with novelty I can imagine because you gave an example you know about William and Leroy I feel like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
example like that we'll be able to see in future versions of large language models. We'll be really, really, really impressed by the humor, the insights, all of it, because it's fundamentally trained on all the incredible humor and insights that's available out there on the internet, right? So we'll be impressed. I think we'll be impressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So novelty. It is interesting whether these large language models will ever be able to come up with something truly novel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
modified tweaked is well yeah but i mean cheating well you could say that training on human data in the first place is cheating well let me the human is in the loop sorry to interrupt yes so human is definitely in the loop uh but it's not just human is in the loop a very large collection of humans is in the loop look i totally that could be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, to me, it's not intuitive that you said prime numbers, that the system can't generate an algorithm, right? That the algorithm that can generate prime numbers or the algorithm that can tell you if a number is prime and so on and generate algorithms that generate algorithms that generate algorithms that start to look a lot like human reasoning, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It reaches for the bigger general theory of objects in the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
you can prompt it to have intention. Basically start with the initial conditions and get it going. Where the, you know, currently large language models, Chad GPT, only talks to you when you talk to it. There's no reason why you can't just start it talking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, but there could be, I mean, AGI is a loaded term, but there could be incredibly super impressive intelligent systems on the way to AGI. So these large language models, I mean, if it appears conscious, if it appears super intelligent, who are we to say it's not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, so we should be clear that it can currently produce things that are, in a shallow sense, novel, that are not in the training set.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
yeah right i don't know what's going on censorship yeah and so i mean that's interesting but it will push us humans to uh characterize novelty better like characterize the the novel like what is novel what is truly novel what's the difference between novelty and interpolation i think that this this is the thing that makes me most excited about these technologies is they're going to help me demonstrate to you that time is fundamental and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, you mentioned GPT for electron density. So a GPT-like system for generating molecules that can bind to host automatically. I mean, that's interesting. That's really interesting. Applying this same kind of transform mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So how would you begin to compute the assembly index of a graphical, like a set of pixels on a 2D plane that form a thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. The, the computer being the thing that, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, were the hallucinations, what are those still, uh, accurate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, and how novel the things that humans generate is also difficult to quantify. They seem novel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So it's hard to quantify novelty looking backwards. I mean, the present and the future are the novelty generators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And same would be with AI. Yeah. But I think just the scale you can achieve in terms of impact with AI systems is... Pretty nerve-wracking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But not like in terms of destroy all humans, but you could have major...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, there's a little bit of that, but there's also not enough celebration of the positive impact that all these technologies have had. We tend to focus on the negative and tend to forget that, in part because it's hard to measure. It's very hard to measure the positive impact social media had on the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Human users.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I still think that there will be AI agents that appear to be conscious, but they would have to be also authenticated and labeled as such. There's too much value in that, like friendships with AI systems. There's too much meaningful human experiences to have with AI systems that I just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sentience, yes. I think legal rights, no. I think it's the same. You can have a really deep, meaningful relationship with a dog.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Ah, this is going to be a fun continued conversation on Twitter that I look forward to. Since you've had also from another place some debates that were inspired by the assembly theory paper, let me ask you about God. Is there any room for notions of God in assembly theory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Wait a minute. But, like, first of all, not every pixel is – I mean, this is at the core sort of machine learning and computer vision. Not every pixel is that important. And there's macro features, there's micro features, and all that kind of stuff. Exactly. The eyes appear in a lot of them. The smile appears in a lot of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure, but does it mean, does it not, it still could mean that that's a projection from the real world where we're just assigning words and concepts to a thing that is fundamental to the real world, that there is something out there that is a creative force underlying the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Do you think, just to think on that point, do you think there's a creative force? Is there like a thing, like a driver that's creating stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And where? Can you describe it mathematically?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think selection... Selection is the force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So is selection somehow fundamental?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
A thing that exists persists in time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, that would mean it's deterministic, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Did you just say there's no free will, though?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Like you have to succeed. It's not zero sum, but it is a kind of game where there's competitors and you're always at tension, but also a little bit of a collaboration. It's a dance and it's just a beautiful thing. A dance of humans inside the company, a dance of companies in the big capitalist system that are also interacting with the full human civilization society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
There's a time element loaded into that statement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But we can still imagine stuff, right? We can imagine stuff that will never happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. So you think the imagination has a causal effect on the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But it does exist in there, in the head. It does. There must be a lot of power in whatever's going on. There could be a lot of power in whatever's going on in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
His ideas, but not the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Would you be very upset if somebody made a good large language model that's fine-tuned to Lee Cronin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. Yeah. That's what life is. It's just some novelty generation and then you're done. Each one of us just generate a little bit. Or have the capacity to, at least.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
In retrospect, it will all be obvious, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, I can't wait to see where it evolves, Lee. And I'm glad I get to exist in this universe with you. You're a fascinating human. This is always a pleasure. I hope to talk to you many more times. And I'm a huge fan of just watching you create stuff in this world. And thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lee Cronin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. Can you explain each one of them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Assembly universe, assembly possible, assembly contingent, assembly observed. And on the y-axis is assembly steps in time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And on the x-axis, as the thing expands through time, more and more unique objects appear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Wait a minute. So when you say the universe has to construct the system that does the work, is that like the environment that allows for selection?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you're talking about the factory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So it's a dance of humans and companies selling stuff, buying stuff, creating stuff. It's just all beautiful. Anyway, if you're one of those companies, you should use good tools to manage all of this stuff. And NetSuite is one such good tool. You can download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com for your own KPI checklist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So first of all, you assume the laws of physics has just sprung to existence at the beginning. Those are constraints. But what makes the factory the environment that does the selection?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So one of the intuitions you have is the propagation of motifs in time will be done by the things that can construct themselves in the shortest path. So like, you can assume that most of the objects in the universe are built in the shortest, in the most efficient way. So... Big leap I just took there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. I think whenever I mention BetterHelp, I have a lot of thoughts in my head. One of them is I believe a BetterHelp ad read that Tim Dillon has done. I think it goes on, if I remember correctly, for a very long period of time. And Tim Dillon is hilarious, so what can you say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And there's probably some parallelization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Right? So this is all, this is not sequential. The building is... I guess when you're talking about complex objects, you don't have to work sequentially. You can work in parallel. You can get your friends together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We define assembly as the total amount of selection necessary to produce an ensemble of observed objects, quantified using equation one. The equation basically has A on one side, which is the assembly of the ensemble, and then a sum... from one to n, where n is the total number of unique objects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then there is a few variables in there that include the assembly index, the copy number, which we'll talk about. That's an interesting, I don't remember you talking about that. That's an interesting addition and I think a powerful one. It has to do with what? That you can create pretty complex objects randomly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And in order to know that they're not random, that there's a factory involved, you need to see a bunch of them. That's the intuition there. It's an interesting intuition. And then some normalization. What else is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
When there's two of a thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
One, let's talk about selection. What is this term selection? What is this term evolution that we're referring to? Which aspect of Darwinian evolution are we referring to that's interesting here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But also there's a meta-ironic, absurd, hilarious aspect to it. Of all people, Tim Tillons, with the beautiful complexity of his mind and the beautiful complexities of his upbringing and family life, the dynamics of that, that he is doing an ad read for BetterHelp. I love it. I love it. I mean, there's an absurdity and an irony to me doing the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You say in the physics, they say, because you're basically saying that physics is not enough to tell the story of how biology emerges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then they said a few physics is the beginning and the end of the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The first two sentences caused everybody... Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the universe defined by physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. These laws underpin life's origin, evolution, and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena. Wow. First of all, we should say the title of the paper, this paper was accepted and published in Nature. The title is Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies Selection and Evolution. Very humble title.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And the entirety of the paper, I think, presents interesting ideas but reaches high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You regret nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You and Frank Sinatra did it your way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So just to link on the selection, what is the broader sense of what selection means?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We've got NetSuite for business management software, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for e-commerce, Hatesleeve for naps, and AG1 for delicious, delicious health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, go to lexfreeman.com slash hiring. You can also get in touch with me if you go to lexfreeman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But all of us need a bit of mental health assistance. And BetterHelp is really good for that. Because it's accessible, affordable, all that kind of stuff. It's a good first step to take. And sometimes all you need is the first step. Check them out at BetterHelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's BetterHelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
How special is that? How do you know those kinds of evolution factors are everywhere in the universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day-to-day operations once the ideas are brought to life. Ideas are brought to life. That's a funny thing, given this conversation with Lee Cronin. Ideas brought to life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, and see if you can measure the changes in the assembly index throughout the whole system. Yeah. Okay, what about if I show up to a new planet? We'll go to Mars or some other planet from a different solar system. How do we use assembly index there to discover alien life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Can you just linger on this copy number thing? A million different copies. What do you mean by copies and why is the number of copies important?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So we talk about the origin of life in the universe defined more generally, complexity, the emergence of complexity that forms life, the origin of life on Earth and the evolution of life as being part of the same system that integrates physics and chemistry and biology, all that kind of stuff. But ideas, ideas as organisms. brought to life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So copies implies structure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, there's a deep, profound thing in there. Because if you just have a random process, you're going to get a lot of complex, beautiful, sophisticated things. What makes them... Complex in the way we think life is complex or, yeah, something like a factory that's operating under a selection process, there should be copies. Is there, like, some looseness about copies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Like, what does it mean for two objects to be equal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So I wonder if there's an art and science to which detection system is used when you show up to a new planet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So you're talking about chemistry a lot today. We have kind of standardized detection systems, right, of how to compare molecules. So when you start to talk about emojis and language and mathematical theorems and things I don't know, more sophisticated things at a different scale, at a smaller scale than molecules, at a larger scale than molecules, like word detection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
If we look at the difference between you and me, Lex and Lee, are we the same? Are we different?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, also like the species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's interesting to think of ideas as organisms in the same way that all the other emergent, complex organisms come to be. It's interesting. And Shopify is a company which is a complex organism of its own that allows individual creators with an idea to bring their idea to life and manifest it into the physical world. So the imagination is a creative engine
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And also there's a sense why we're both from Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So those two kind of are at tension with each other. Yeah. The number of copies and the assembly index.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's really, really interesting. So, okay. So you show up to a new planet, you'll be doing what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
On a sample of what? Like, first of all, like how big of a scoop do you take? Did you just take a scoop? Like what? So we're looking for primitive life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
meter how would you build a life meter let's say we're together starting a new company launching a life mass spectrometer would be the first way of doing it just no no but that's that's uh that's one of the major components of it but i'm talking about like i would what if it's a device we got it and branding logo we're gonna talk all right that's later but what's the input what's the like how do you get to the um a metered output
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's a good ring to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
that starts from some kind of ethereal thing that's just inside our mind and projects out into the physical world and creates a thing, a store, that can then interact with thousands, millions of people. It's fascinating. It's really fascinating to think of ideas as living organisms. Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. Back to reality for Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Complexity and abundance is evidence of selection. Okay, so let's apply our life meter to Earth. So if we were just to apply assembly index measurements to Earth, what kind of stuff are we going to get? What's impressive about some of the complexity on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Chemists might say that, of course, out there outside of Earth, there's complex molecules. Yes. Okay. And then you're saying, wait a minute, that's like saying, of course, there's aliens out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But you're saying, you clarify that that's actually a very interesting question, and we should be looking for complex molecules of which the copy number is two or greater. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
All lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by a source of a lot of happiness for me, Eight Sleep and the Pod 3 mattress. It cools the two sides of the bed separately. You can also heat them up. I don't know who does that. I do know people like that exist, but I judge them harshly. No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The better the whiskey, the higher the assembly index.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Can you just go back to the beer and the E. coli? So what's the assembly index on those?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Nobody's listening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, what's the tree of life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I like a really cold bed surface with a warm blanket for a power nap. You're talking about 15, 20 minutes or a full night's sleep. It's just heaven. It's the thing that makes me look forward to coming back home when I'm traveling. I should also mention that they currently ship to America, Canada, the UK, Australia. I need to go to Australia. I need to go to Australia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
They're artists, really. They're just, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
All right, can you try to say that again with a little more detail? So recreating, what does it take to recreate the tree of life? What does the reverse engineering process look like here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
How does knowing if they're the same or different give you the tree?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So this is looking at samples that exist today in the world. What about things that no longer exist? I mean, the tree contains information about the past. Some of it is gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And select countries in the European Union. I don't know why I just mentioned that. Again, I don't have to say anything that the sponsors asked me to say, but there was this list of countries I'm looking at and continents, and it just filled my mind with a kind of inspired energy to travel. You know, Paul Rosalie has been on my case to travel with him in the Amazon. And I want to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So when a thing dies, you can still get some information about its complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
How old living organs, humans are?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Signatures of chemistry are fascinating. So you've been saying a lot of chemistry examples for assembly theory. What if we zoom out and look at a bigger scale of an object?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
like really complex objects, like humans, or living organisms that are made up of millions or billions of other organisms. How do you try to apply assembly theory to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
There's so many more things I could say. Let me just keep going. Now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I don't know what's the deep insight here about the negativity in the space. I think it's probably the immune system of the scientific community that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I want to go. I want to go. I want to turn off the devices and go with him. He's such an incredible human. Such an incredible human. I'm really glad he exists. Paul is just a beautiful human being. The humor, the stories, the deep, deep gratitude and appreciation of nature, the fearlessness, but also the ability to feel fear and embrace it. And just this childlike sense of wonder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
making sure that there's no bullshit that gets published that's and then it can overfire it can do a lot of damage it can shut down conversations in a way that's not productive we go back i mean i'll answer your question about the hierarchy assembly but let's go back to the perception people saying the paper was badly written i mean of course we could improve it we could always improve the clarity let's go there before we go to the hierarchy yeah um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You know, it has been criticized quite a bit, the paper. What has been some criticism that you found most powerful, like, that you can understand? And can you explain it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure, if you could say that again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Time. Right. So why? So why? What does time have to do with it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's okay. The evolutionary biologists criticize because... The origin of life is understood and doesn't require an explanation that involves physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's their statement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, he's just such an incredible human. I'm glad he exists as one of the people when I think about him. Just makes me happy to be alive on this earth together with folks like him. Anyway, check it out and get special savings. Well, we're talking about a sleep check. Get special savings when you go to a sleep dot com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, what about the criticism of you're just putting a bunch of sexy names on something that's already obvious?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure, but there's a few things to say there. One is... This is in part a philosophical framework because it's not like you can apply this generally to any object in the universe. It's very chemistry focused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Let's stick with cells, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Cellular automata, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This episode is also brought to you by the thing I'm drinking right now, AG1. It's a drink with a bunch of vitamins and minerals. It's basically like a delicious multivitamin, but it's green and delicious. And I think it has a lot more than any kind of multivitamin. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's a very large number of steps to get from a molecule to the human brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But then you have to discover for that, the features that you would be looking for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But is there an automated way to discover features?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
To apply compression to it to see what emerges and then use the thing, the features used as part of the compression as the measurement of... As the thing that is searched for when you're measuring assembly index and copy number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What would be amazing is if you can use assembly theory, this framework to show the increase in the assembly index, associated with, I don't know, cultures or pieces of text like language or images and so on, and illustrate without knowing the data ahead of time, just kind of like you do with NASA, that you're able to demonstrate that it applies in those other contexts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that probably wouldn't at first, and you have to evolve the theory somehow. You have to change it. You have to expand it. I think so. But like that, I guess this is, as a paper, a first step in saying, okay, can we create a general framework for measuring complexity of objects, for measuring life, the complexity of living organisms? Yeah. That's what this is reaching for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I don't know much in this world, friends, but I do know that a kind of peaceful feeling comes over me when I drink AG1, knowing that all the crazy stuff I'm going to do, mentally or physically, I'm gonna be okay. When I have a nice cold bed where they sleep, and a delicious AG1, everything's gonna be okay. So you should definitely try it. See if it's going to give you the same kind of feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm a Linux guy, by the way, so your examples go way over my head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Is that a fruit company of some sort? I don't even know. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff to ask about language. You could look at, how would that work? You could look at GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, 3, 5, 4, and try to analyze the kind of language it produces. I mean, that's almost trying to look at assembly index of intelligent systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What do you mean by intelligence there? You seem to associate intelligence with history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So we escaped Darwinian evolution and now we're on to some other kind of evolution, I guess, higher level evolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay, another piece of criticism or by way of question is how is assembly theory or maybe assembly index different from Kolmogorov complexity? So for people who don't know, Kolmogorov complexity of an object is the length of a shortest computer program that produces the object as output.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It is, when I don't bring the travel packs, one of the things I miss when I'm traveling. To have a nice cold AG1. in the afternoon, especially after a long run. I love it. Life is beautiful, isn't it? Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And I think that's the main… The causal chain is at the core of assembly theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But assembly theory looks at objects. It doesn't have information about the object history. It's going to try to infer that history. by looking for the shortest history, right? The object doesn't have a Wikipedia page that goes about its history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But it's still computationally very difficult to compute that history, right, for complex objects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But just even for the drug discovery point you made, don't you have to simulate all of chemistry to figure out how to come up with constraints? No. And the molecules?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I mean, I don't know enough about protein.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And now, dear friends, here's Lee Cronin. So your big assembly theory paper was published in Nature. Congratulations. Thanks. It created, I think it's fair to say, a lot of controversy, but also a lot of interesting discussion. So maybe I can try to summarize assembly theory and you tell me if I'm wrong. Go for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure, there's assembly index and shortest path examples here on chemistry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
by way of question, do you consider the different probabilities of each reaction in the chain? So like that there could be different When you look at a chain of events that led up to the creation of an object, doesn't it matter that some parts in the chain are less likely than others? No. It doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
How do you define quickest there then?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay. Okay. So it's constraint application. So there's no chemical reactions. It's all constraint application. Yep. Which enables the emergence of react,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
what's a different word for chemical reaction uh transformation transformation yeah like a function it's a function but no but i love chemical reactions as a shorthand and yeah and so the chemists don't all go mad i mean of course chemical reactions exist on earth shorthand it's a shorthand for these constraints for right so assuming all these constraints that we've been using for so long we just assume that that's always the case yeah in natural language conversation
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Right, and this is useful to remember, you know, to frame it as constraint application is useful for when you zoom out to the bigger picture of the universe and looking at the chemistry of the universe and then starting to apply assembly theory. That's interesting. That's really interesting. But we've also pissed off the chemists now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Everybody deep down is happy, I think. They're just sometimes feisty. That's how they show. That's how they have fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Maybe just a little insider interesting information. What were the editors of Nature, the reviews and so on, how difficult was that process? Because this is a pretty big paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So assembly theory says that if we look at any object in the universe, any object, that we can quantify how complex it is by trying to find the number of steps it took to create it, and also we can determine if it was built by a process akin to evolution by looking at how many copies of the object there are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Maybe you could just comment on the whole process. You've published some pretty huge papers on all kinds of topics within chemistry and beyond. Some of them have some little spice in them, a little spice of crazy. Like Tom Wade says, I like my time with a little drop of poison. It's not a mundane paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So what's it like psychologically to go through all this process, to keep getting rejected, to... to get reviews from people that don't get the paper or all that kind of stuff, just from a question of a scientist. What is that like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Spot on. I was not expecting that. Okay, so let's go through definitions. So there's a central equation I'd love to talk about, but definition-wise, what is an object?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and the edit in the end was just like different editors actually what's behind that never giving up when you're sitting there 10 o'clock in the evening there's a melancholy feeling that comes over you and you're like okay this is rejection number 5 or it's not rejection but maybe it feels like a rejection because the comments are that you totally don't get it what gives you strength to keep going there I don't know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So it's been rough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think it's a beautiful story of perseverance. And the backlash is just a negative word for discourse, which I think is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I usually do these ad reads and say whatever the heck I want, but sometimes the sponsors ask politely, never required but always politely, to mention a few things. Two things they ask me to mention. One is that NetSuite turned 25 years old this year. Congratulations. Happy birthday, NetSuite. And also, they want me to mention that 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
This is when you were very young?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What do you mean you weren't allowed to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So through that kind of process, I think for kids in that situation, it's easy to start believing that you're not, well, how do I put it? That you're stupid. And basically give up that you're just not good at math, you're not good at school. So this is by way of advice for people, for interesting people, for interesting young kids right now experiencing the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Where was the place, what was the source of you not giving up there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Persists over time and is breakable such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable. Such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable. The history is in the objects. It's kind of cool, right? So, okay. So what defines the object is its history or memory, whichever is the sexier word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Do you believe in yourself? Essentially?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Oh, that's quite brilliant. Like as a gradient to optimize. Yeah. Hang out with smart people and confuse them. Yeah. And the more confusing it is, the more there's something there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I've seen you be pretty aggressively critical, but every time I've seen it, it's the idea, not the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay. So the set of steps it took to create the object. So there's a sense in which every object in the universe has a history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So time is fundamental for assembly theory. I'm just trying to figure out where you and Sarah converged.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
and that is part of the thing that is used to describe its complexity, how complicated it is. Okay, what is an assembly index?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Let me load that in. The universe is not big enough to contain the future. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
That's another, that's a beautiful way of saying that time is fundamental.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Wow. I mean, that's a good example, intuitive example, but it's possible that we might be able to predict whether it's going to snow if we had perfect information. You're saying not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Can you explain his view on time being fundamental?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And boy, does that... That's an interesting one to process. What do you mean by that? Earth is the biggest place in the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay, wait a minute. But, I mean, I know you're being poetic, but how do you know there's not other Earth-like? Like, how do you know? You're basically saying Earth is really special. It's awesome stuff as far as we look out. There's nothing like it going on. But how do you know there's not nearly infinite number of places where cool stuff like this is going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Intersect, you don't mean in time or space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
The ability to communicate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Because it's so big. So you're saying the constraints created by the environment that led to the factory of Darwinian evolution... Are just like this little tiny cone in a nearly infinite combinatorial space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so there's other cones like it. And why can't we communicate with other, like, just because we can't create it doesn't mean we can't appreciate the creation, right? Sorry, detect the creation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And this is a planet simulator, you mean like a different kind of planet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
With different sets of environments and pressures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You're looking for some overlap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah. It just feels like the cone, I might be misusing the word cone here, but the width of the cone is growing faster than, is growing really fast to where eventually all the cones overlap. Even in a very, very, very large combinatorial space. But then again, if you're saying the universe is also growing very quickly in terms of possibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But it's just hard to intuit a world, a universe, where there's nearly infinite complexity objects and they somehow can't detect each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Mm-hmm. That it produced that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Oh, in real time. There you go. I already got the tattoo, so this is going to be embarrassing if you change my mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay, so that's not so trivial to figure out. So when you look at an object, we can say a molecule, we can say object more generally. To figure out the minimum number of steps it takes to create that object, That doesn't seem like a trivial thing to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
We're using infinity very loosely here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Infinite precision. I mean, not loosely, but... Very precisely. So you think infinite precision is required...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay, so to you, first of all, quantum mechanics, you can just say statistically what's going to happen when two golf balls hit each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I'm trying to see exactly where time being fundamental sneaks in, in this difference between the golf ball can't contain its own position perfectly, precisely, how that leads to time needing to be fundamental.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, I think at this moment in time, I believe that I have free will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think the space of how much we don't know is so vast... that saying the universe is deterministic and from that jumping there's no free will is just too difficult of a leap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Just because the space of possibility is so large?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Okay, life is a novelty miner from the future that is actualized in the present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Novelty minor. First of all, novelty. What's the origin of novelty when you go from boring time to creative time? Where is that? Is it as simple as randomness like you're referring to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Just to clarify, both you and Sarah think the universe is not deterministic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What was that statement you made about life is novelty mining from the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What's the little element of time that you're introducing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, that's one statement. And the statement that the universe is not big enough to contain the future is another statement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, but that's because it's kind of difficult to imagine the universe that's that can't contain the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
It's very exciting, but it's hard. I mean, we're humans on Earth, and we have a very kind of four-dimensional conception of the world, of 3D plus time. It's just hard to intuit a world where, what does it even mean? A universe that can't contain the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, okay, so... Given that you're disrespecting the power of the initial conditions, let me ask you about, so how do you explain that cellular automata are able to produce such incredible complexity given just basic rules and basic initial conditions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, can't you say the same thing about the complexity on Earth then?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
You don't think it has a copy number? Wait a minute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Right. I guess you were saying that the physicist saying that all you need is the initial conditions and the rules of physics is somehow missing the bigger picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And if you look at CAs, all you need is the initial condition and the rules, and then run the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Sure, and that's that to use fundamentally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And that time is the foundation of the history, the memory of each of the things it created. It has to have that memory of all the things that led up to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, the foundation of my belief in free will is just observation-driven. I think if you use logic, it's like logically it seems like the universe is deterministic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And then everything else is a kind of leap. It requires a leap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
What does that look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
So what's the computational complexity of figuring out the shortest path with molecules, with language, with mathematical theorems? It seems like once you have the fully constructed Lego castle, or whatever your favorite LEGO world is, figuring out how to get there from the basic building blocks, is that an NP-hard problem? It's a hard problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, Clippy is definitely coming back. But you're saying we don't have a great understanding of what is intelligence, what is the intelligence...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Underpinning the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
37,000 companies. I wonder how many companies are out there. Isn't that amazing? Just companies are amazing. A small, a medium, a large collection of humans get together, much as we did in the caveman days around the fire, but here around the office, and tied together with a mission to do something, to build something, but do so under the immense pressures of the capitalist system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, let me try to sort of steel man the AI doomer's argument. Actually, I don't know. Are AI doomers in the Yudkowsky camp saying it's definitely going to kill us? Because there's a spectrum. 95%, I think, is the limit. 95% plus?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
But to belong to the AI Doomer Club, is there a threshold? I don't know what the membership fee is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Zero. Just to push back on the argument where the N of zero on the AGI, we could see on Earth that there is increasing levels of intelligence of organisms. We could see what humans with extra intelligence were able to do to the other species. So that is... a lot of samples of data what a delta in intelligence gives you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
When you have an increase in intelligence, how you're able to dominate a species on Earth. And so the idea there is that if you have a being that's 10x smarter than humans,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
we're not gonna be able to predict what that's going to, what that being is gonna be able to do, especially if it has the power to hurt humans, which you can imagine a lot of trajectories in which the more benefit AI systems give, the more control we give to those AI systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
over our power grid, over our nuclear weapons, or weapons of any sort, and then it's hard to know what an ultra-intelligent system would be able to do in that case. You don't find that convincing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, yeah, which is basically a... For people who don't understand the point, the Chem Machina is a great film about, I guess, AGI embodied, and Chem is the chemistry version of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Well, I can continue a set of arguments here, but also it is true that ideologies that fearmonger are dangerous. Because you can then use it to control, to regulate in a way that halts progress, to control people, to cancel people, all that kind of stuff. So you have to be careful. Reason ultimately wins, right? But there is a lot of concerns with superintelligence systems, very capable systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
I think when you hear the word superintelligence, you're hearing like it's smarter than humans in every way that humans are smart. But the... Paperclip manufacturing system doesn't need to be smart in every way. It just needs to be smart in a set of specific ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And the more capable the AI systems become, the more you could see us giving them control over, like I said, our power grid, a lot of aspects of human life. And that means they will be able to do more and more damage when there's unintended consequences that come to life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
Yeah, we're both qualified in sentience, I think, as much as anyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And so... In evolution. You don't think it's possible to engineer, for example, sorry to interrupt, but like a perfect virus? No. That's deadly enough? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
nonsensical okay i think that just wouldn't again it wouldn't work it was too deadly it would just kill the radius and not replicate yeah i mean you don't think it's possible to get a i mean if you were super i mean i if you were it not kill all of life on earth but kill all humans there's not many of us there's only like eight billion there's there's so much more ants i mean i don't i so many more ants
Lex Fridman Podcast
#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe
And they're pretty smart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truel, Swale Asif, Arvid Lundmark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on VS Code that adds a lot of powerful features for AI-assisted coding. It has captivated the attention and excitement of the programming and AI communities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
IMO is International Math Olympiad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So the new results from DeepMind, it turned out that you were correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So you like felt the AGI or you felt the scaling?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
blog posts on sort of the state-of-the-art, like the OpenAI 01 model that was just released. So sometimes they integrate it into why this is a part of Encore, why this makes sense, and sometimes not. And so I love that. I recommend their blog just in general. That said, when they are looking at state-of-the-art models, they are always looking for ways to integrate it into their platform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Okay, so can we take it all the way to Cursor? And what is Cursor? It's a fork of VS Code. And VS Code is one of the most popular editors for a long time. Everybody fell in love with it. Everybody left Vim. I left Emacs for it. Sorry. So it unified in some fundamental way the developer community. And then you look at the space of things. You look at the scaling laws. AI is becoming amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And you decided, okay, it's not enough to just write an extension for your VS Code because there's a lot of limitations to that. If AI is going to keep getting better and better and better, we need to really rethink how the AI is going to be part of the editing process. And so you decided to fork VS Code and start to build a lot of the amazing features we'll be able to talk about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
But what was that decision like? Because there's a lot of extensions, including Copilot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Okay, well then the natural question is, you know, VS Code is kind of with Copilot a competitor. So how do you win? Is it basically just the speed and the quality of the features?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Basically, it's a place to organize your data, and data is everything. This was true before the popularity and the explosion of attention methods of transformers. And it is still very much true now. Sort of the non-synthetic, the human generated data is extremely important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know how you put that into words, but when you compare Cursor with Copilot, Copilot pretty quickly became, started to feel stale for some reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And you're using, like you said, Cursor to write Cursor. Of course. Oh, yeah. Well, let's talk about some of these features. Let's talk about the all-knowing, the all-powerful, praise B to the tab. You know, autocomplete on steroids. Basically. So how does tab work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
How you generate that data, how you organize that data, how you leverage it, how you train on it, how you fine tune on it, the pre-training, the post-training, all of it, the whole thing. Data is extremely, extremely important. And so Encore takes data very seriously. Anyway, go try out Encore to create, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com slash Lex. That's Encore.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Well, what's the intuition and what's the technical details of how to do next cursor prediction? That jump. That's not so intuitive, I think, to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Okay, so MOE, mixture of experts, the input is huge, the output is small. Okay, so what else can you say about how to make, does caching play a role in this particular?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Again, what are the things that tab is supposed to be able to do kind of in the near term? Just to like sort of linger on that. Generate code, like fill empty space, also edit code across multiple lines. Yeah. And then jump to different locations inside the same file.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Carlos Santana on guitar, for example. I loved that one. There's a few guitar ones, Tom Morello too. Great, great, great stuff. But Carlos Santana, his instrumental Europa. I haven't quite tried to play that, but it's on my to-do list.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So providing the human the knowledge. Yes. Right. Can you integrate, like, I just got to know a guy named PrimeGen who I believe has an SS, you can order coffee via SSH.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So can also the model do that, like feed you and provide you with caffeine? Okay, so that's the general framework.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
As we're talking about this, I should mention that one of the really cool and noticeable things about cursor is that there's this whole diff interface situation going on. So like the model suggests with the red and the green of like, here's how we're going to modify the code. And in the chat window, you can apply and it shows you the diff and you can accept the diff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So maybe can you speak to whatever direction of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So you're talking about on the interface side?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
It's sort of one of those things, you know for sure this is a thing I will play because it's too beautiful. It's too soulful. It feels like once you play, you understand something about the guitar that you didn't before. It's not blues. It's not, I don't know what it is. It's some kind of dreamlike teleportation into a psychedelic world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Mm-hmm. So that's, by the way, that's pretty nice, but you have to know to hold the option button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
By the way, I'm not a Mac user, but I got it. It's a button, I guess, you people have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, that's a really fascinating space of UX design engineering. So you're basically trying to guide the human programmer through all the things they need to read and nothing more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Like optimally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Can you say a little more across multiple files, Div?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
where the tone is warmer than anything else I've ever heard. And still, the guitar can cry. I don't know. I love it. He's a genius. So it's such a gift that you can get a genius like that. to teach us about his secrets. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And is the step of creation going to be more and more natural language is the goal versus with actual writing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
I'm really feeling the AGI with this editor. It feels like there's a lot of machine learning going on underneath. Tell me about some of the ML stuff that makes it all work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So I thought this is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the role of AI in programming. This is a super technical conversation that is bigger than just about one code editor. It's about the future of programming and in general, the future of human AI collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And we should say that apply is the model looks at your code. It gives you a really damn good suggestion of what new things to do. And the seemingly for humans trivial step of Combining the two you're saying is not so trivial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah. How do you make it fast?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store, or simple-looking online store, like the one I put together at lexfreeman.com/.store. I have a few shirts on there in case you're interested. And speaking of shirts, I'm reminded of thrift stores, which I very much loved for a long time. I still love thrift stores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So the human can start reading before the thing is done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Let me ask the ridiculous question of which LLM is better at coding. GPT, Claude, who wins in the context of programming? And I'm sure the answer is much more nuanced because it sounds like every single part of this involves a different model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
What, another ridiculous question, is the difference between the normal programming experience versus what benchmarks represent? Like where do benchmarks fall short, do you think, when we're evaluating these models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Or a nice place to get stuff. Like, I don't know, kitchen stuff and clothing. And the kind of clothing you get at thrift stores is actually pretty interesting because there's shirts there that are just unlike anything else you would get anywhere else. So if you're sort of selective, and creative-minded, there's a lot of interesting fashion that's there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
The vibe benchmark, human benchmark. Yeah. You pull in the humans to do a vibe check. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's kind of what I do, like just like reading online forums and Reddit and X, just like, Well, I don't know how to properly load in people's opinions because they'll say things like, I feel like Claude or GPT has gotten dumber or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
They'll say, I feel like, and then I sometimes feel like that too, but I wonder if it's the model's problem or mine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
I interview a bunch of people that have conspiracy theories, so I'm glad you spoke to this conspiracy theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And in terms of t-shirts, there's just like hilarious t-shirts. T-shirts that are very far away from the kind of trajectories you have taken in life, or are not, but you just haven't thought about it. Like a band that you love, but you never would have thought to wear their t-shirt. Anyway, a little bit, I think of Shopify as the internet's thrift store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
What's the role of a good prompt in all of this? We mentioned that benchmarks have really structured, well-formulated prompts. What should a human be doing to maximize success? And what's the importance of what the human, you wrote a blog post on, you called it prompt design.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Of course, you can do super classy, you can do super fancy, or you can do super thrift. All of it is possible. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So should humans, when they ask questions, also try to use something like that? Like, would it be beneficial to write JSX in the problem? Or the whole idea is it should be loose and messy and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Well, this is sort of the discussion I had with Arvin of perplexity. It's like his whole idea is like you should let the person be as lazy as he wants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
But like, yeah, that's a beautiful thing. But I feel like you're allowed to ask more of programmers, right? Yes. So like if you say just do what you want, I mean, humans are lazy. There's a kind of tension between just being lazy versus like provide more as –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
be prompted, almost like the system pressuring you or inspiring you to be articulate, not in terms of the grammar of the sentences, but in terms of the depth of thoughts that you convey inside the prompts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
How hard is it for the model to choose to talk back? Sort of versus generating. It's hard. It's sort of like how to deal with the uncertainty. Do I choose to ask for more information to reduce the ambiguity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Sometimes I think that NetSuite is supporting this podcast because they're trolling me. They're saying, hey Lex, aren't you doing a little too much talking? Maybe you should be building more. I agree with you, NetSuite. I agree with you. And so every time I do an ad read for NetSuite, it is a chance for me to confront my Jungian shadow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
To what degree do you use agentic approaches? How useful are agents?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
You mean it goes, finds the right file?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
What about something like that recently came out, Replit Agent, that does also like setting up the development environment, installing software packages, configuring everything, configuring the databases, and actually deploying the app?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Is that also in the set of things you dream about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Is that within scope of Cursor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
One of the things we already talked about is speed. But I wonder if we can just linger on that some more in the various places that the technical details involved in making this thing really fast. So every single aspect of Cursor, most aspects of Cursor feel really fast. Like I mentioned, the apply is probably the slowest thing. And for me, I'm sorry, the pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it says something that something that feels I don't know what it is like one second or two seconds. That feels slow. That means that's actually shows that everything else is just really, really fast. So is there some technical details about how to make some of these models hot to make the chat fast how to make the diffs fast? Is there something that just jumps to mind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Some of the demons emerge from the subconscious and ask questions that I don't have answers to. Questions about one's mortality and that life is short and that one of the most fulfilling things in life is to have a family and kids and all of these things I would very much like to have. And also the reality that I love programming and I love building
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Can you explain how KV cache works?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Is there like higher level caching of like caching of the prompts or that kind of stuff? I see help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
I love creating cool things that people can use and share and that would make their life better. All of that. Of course, I also love listening to podcasts. And I kind of think of this podcast as me listening to a podcast where I can also maybe participate by asking questions. So all these things that you love, but you ask the hard question of like, okay, well, life is slipping away. It's short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
It really, really is short. What do you want to do with the rest of the minutes and the hours that make up your life? Yeah, so thank you for the existential crisis, Nasweet. I appreciate it. If you're running a business, if you have taken the leap into the unknown and started a company, then you should be using the right tools to manage that company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
All of that is dealing with being memory bound. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Arvid, you wrote a blog post, Shadow of a Workspace, iterating on code in the background. Yeah. So what's going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by the delicious, the delicious AG1. It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
For linting purposes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So it's doing like type checking also?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Can you say again how that's being used inside Cursor, the language server protocol communication thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So like literally run everything in the background, like as if, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Maybe even run the code?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
It's basically a super awesome multivitamin that makes me feel like I have my life together. Even when everything else feels like it's falling apart, at least I have AG1. At least I have that nutritional foundation to my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
It's scary for people, but like, it's really cool to be able to just like let the agent do a set of tasks and you come back the next day and kind of observe like it's a colleague or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So, by the way, when I think about agents, I don't think just about coding. I think, so, for the practice of this particular podcast, there's video editing, and a lot of, if you look in Adobe, a lot of, there's code behind, it's very poorly documented code, but you can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
interact with premiere for example using code and basically all the uploading everything i do on youtube everything as you could probably imagine i do all that through code and so and including translation and overdubbing all this so i envision all those kinds of tasks so automating many of the tasks that don't have to do directly with the editing So that, okay. That's what I was thinking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
But in terms of coding, I would be fundamentally thinking about bug finding, like many levels of kind of bug finding and also bug finding like logical bugs, not logical, like spiritual bugs or something. One's like sort of big directions of implementation, that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So all the fasting I'm doing, all the carnivore diets, all the physical endurance events and the mental madness of staying up all night or just the stress of certain things I'm going through, all of that, AG1 is there. At least I have the vitamins. Also, I sometimes wonder, they used to be called Athletic Greens, and now they're called AG1. I always wonder, is AG2 coming? Why is it just one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Is there a good intuition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Encore for unifying your machine learning stack, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for your business, and AG1 for your health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
I mean, but this is hard for humans too to understand which line of code is important and which is not. I think one of your principles on a website says if a code can do a lot of damage, one should add a comment that say this line of code is dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
No, you say like for every single line of code inside the function, you have to, and that's quite profound. That says something about human beings because the engineers move on, even the same person might just forget how it can sync the Titanic, a single function. Like you don't, you might not intuit that quite clearly by looking at the single piece of code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
That's actually just straight up a really good practice of labeling code of how much damage this can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
It's an interesting branding decision, like AG1. Me as an OCD kind of programmer type, it's like, okay, is this a versioning thing? Is this like AG 0.1 alpha? When's the final release? Anyway, the thing I like to say and to consume is AG1. They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
That's like, we don't really think about that. You think about, okay, how do I figure out how this works so I can improve it? You don't think about the other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And you're speaking not just about single functions. You're speaking about entire code bases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, that is, I mean, if it's possible, that's your, I have a dream speech. If it's possible, that will certainly help with, you know, making sure your code doesn't have bugs and making sure AI doesn't destroy all of human civilization. So the full spectrum of AI safety to just bug finding. So you said the models struggle with bug finding. What's the hope?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael, Swale, Arvid, and Aman. All right, this is awesome. We have Michael, Aman, Swale, Arvid here from the Cursor team. First up, big ridiculous question. What's the point of a code editor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Have you thought about integrating money into this whole thing? I would pay probably a large amount of money for if you found a bug or even generated code that I really appreciated. I had a moment a few days ago when I started using Cursor where it generated a perfect...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
like perfect three functions for interacting with the YouTube API to update captions and for localization in different languages. The API documentation is not very good. And the code across, like if I Googled it for a while, I couldn't find exactly, there's a lot of confusing information, and Cursor generated it perfectly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And I was like, I just sat back, I read the code, I was like, this is correct, I tested it, it's correct. I was like, I want a tip. On a button that goes, here's $5. One that's really good just to support the company and support what the interface is. And the other is that probably sends a strong signal, like, good job. Right? There's a much stronger signal than just accepting the code, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
You just actually send, like, a strong good job. That, and for bug finding, obviously, like, there's a lot of people... that would pay a huge amount of money for a bug, like a bug bounty thing. Right? Do you guys think about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
How much interaction is there between the terminal and the code? How much information is gained if you run the code in the terminal? Can you do a loop where it runs the code and suggests how to change the code if the code in runtime gives an error? Because right now they're separate worlds completely. I know you can do Ctrl-K inside the terminal to help you write the code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Sure. The background is pretty cool. Like we do running the code in different ways. Plus there's a database side to this, which how do you protect it from not modifying the database? But okay. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah. That's the problem with the multiverse, right? If you branch on everything, that's a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Okay, this is a good place to ask about infrastructure. So you guys mostly use AWS. What are some interesting details? What are some interesting challenges? Why did you choose AWS? Why is AWS still winning? Hashtag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Why is the interface so horrible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So it's kind of like hierarchical reconciliation. Yeah, something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, Merkel. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, this is cool to see that you kind of have to think through all these problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
What's the biggest gains at this time you get from indexing the code base? I could just out of curiosity, like what What benefit do users have? It seems like longer term, there'll be more and more benefit, but in the short term, just asking questions of the code base, what's the usefulness of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
One question that's good to ask here, have you considered and why haven't you much done sort of local stuff to where you can do the... I mean, it seems like everything we just discussed is exceptionally difficult to do. To go to the cloud, you have to think about all these things with the caching and the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
you know large code base with a large number of programmers are using the same code base you have to figure out the puzzle of that a lot of it you know most software just does stuff this heavy computational stuff locally have you considered doing sort of embeddings locally
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And also with O1. I like how you're pitching me. Would you be satisfied with an inferior model? Listen, yes, I'm one of those, but there's some people that like to do stuff locally, especially like... There's a whole, obviously, open source movement that kind of resists. And it's good that they exist, actually, because you want to resist the power centers that are growing our...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Doing privacy preserving machine learning. But I would say that's the challenge we have with all software these days. It's like... There's so many features that can be provided from the cloud and all of us increasingly rely on it and make our life awesome, but there's downsides. And that's why you rely on really good security to protect from basic attacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
But there's also only a small set of companies that are controlling that data. you know, and they, they obviously have leverage and they could be infiltrated in all kinds of ways. That's the world we live in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, that should be a t-shirt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, or take a survey or send me questions for an AMA, all of that would be great. Go to lexgerman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
On the topic of context, that's actually been a friction for me. When I'm writing code in Python, there's a bunch of stuff imported. You could probably intuit the kind of stuff I would like to include in the context. How hard is it to auto-figure out the context?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Can you speak a little more to the post-training model to understand the code base? What do you mean by that? Is this a synthetic data direction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So for people who don't know, Cursor is this super cool new editor that's a fork of VS Code. It would be interesting to get your kind of explanation of your own journey of editors. I think all of you were big fans of VS Code with Copilot. How did you arrive to VS Code and how did that lead to your journey with Cursor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Let me ask you about OpenAI 01. What do you think is the role of that kind of test time compute system in programming?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
How do you figure out which problem requires what level of intelligence? Is that possible to dynamically figure out when to use GPT-4, when to use a small model, and when you need the O1?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
But you mentioned there's a pre-training process, then there's post-training, and then there's test-time compute that FAIR does sort of separate. Where's the biggest gains there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So we don't even know if O1 is using just like chain of thought, RL. We don't know how they're using any of these. We don't know anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Like if you were to build a competing model, what would you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, when the quality of the branch is somehow strongly correlated with the quality of the outcome at the very end. So you have a good model of knowing which branch to take. So not just in the short term, like in the long term. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
This is kind of an AI safety, maybe a bit of a philosophy question. So OpenAI says that they're hiding the chain of thought from the user. And they've said that that was a difficult decision to make. Instead of showing the chain of thought, they're asking the model to summarize the chain of thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
They're also in the background saying they're going to monitor the chain of thought to make sure the model is not trying to manipulate the user, which is a fascinating possibility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So let me ask you about Strawberry tomorrow eyes. So it looks like GitHub copilot might be integrating 01 in some kind of way. And I think some of the comments are saying, does this mean cursor is done? I think I saw one comment saying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And maybe we should explain what QuotePilot does. It's like a really nice autocomplete. It suggests, as you start writing a thing, it suggests one or two or three lines how to complete the thing. And there's a fun experience in that, you know, like when you have a close friendship and your friend completes your sentences? Like when it's done well, there's an intimate feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
All right, from that profound answer, let's descend back down to the technical. You mentioned you have a taxonomy of synthetic data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Can you please explain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
There's probably a better word than intimate, but there's a cool feeling of like, holy shit. It gets me. And then there's an unpleasant feeling when it doesn't get you. And so there's that kind of friction. But I would say for a lot of people, the feeling that it gets me overpowers that it doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
That's because you're not as optimistic as Arvid. But yeah. So yeah, so that third category requires having a verifier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
What about RL with feedback side, RLHF versus RLAIF? Um, what's the role of that in, um, getting better performance on the models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
What's your intuition when you compare generation and verification or generation and ranking? Is ranking way easier than generation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
That'd be a whatever Fields Medal by AI. Who gets the credit? Another open philosophical question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Isn't this Amon's specialty?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Oh, sorry, Nobel Prize or Fields Medal first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Fields Medal comes first. Well, you would say that, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So you think you'll be Fieldsman at first? It won't be, like, in physics or in... Oh, 100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
It feels like forever from now, given how fast things have been going. Speaking of how fast things have been going, let's talk about scaling laws. So for people who don't know, maybe it's good to talk about this whole idea of scaling laws. What are they? Where do you think stand? And where do you think things are going?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So Copile was kind of like the first killer app for LLMs. Yeah. And like the beta was out in 2021. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So yeah, I mean, you speak to the multiple dimensions, obviously. The original conception was just looking at the variables of the size of the model as measured by parameters and the size of the data as measured by the number of tokens and looking at the ratio of the two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And it's kind of a compelling notion that there is a number. or at least a minimum, and it seems like one was emerging. Do you still believe that there is a kind of bigger is better?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And the distillation gives you just a faster model. Smaller means faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So if I gave you $10 trillion, how would you spend it? I mean, you can't buy an island or whatever. How would you allocate it? in terms of improving the big model versus maybe paying for HF in the RLHF?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
If we look in how to invest money for the next five years in terms of maximizing what you called raw intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So you would run a lot of experiments versus like use that computer to train a gigantic model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
By the way, we'll probably talk for three to four hours on the topic of scaling laws. Just to summarize, it's a paper and a set of papers and a set of ideas that say bigger might be better for model size and data size in the realm of machine learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, but also these big labs like winning. So they're just going wild. Okay. So big question looking out into the future. You're now at the center of the programming world. How do you think programming, the nature of programming changes in the next... few months, in the next year, in the next two years, next five years, ten years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
This episode is brought to you by Encore, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, management, and for model evaluation. One of the things I love about these guys is they have a great blog that describes cleanly. I mean, it's technical, but it's not too technical, but it's sufficiently technical to where it's actually describing ideas, not BS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
It'd be nice if you can go up and down the abstraction stack. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
What about like the fundamental skill of programming? There's a lot of people like, young people right now kind of scared, like thinking, because they like love programming, but they're scared about like, will I be able to have a future if I pursue this career path? Do you think the very skill of programming will change fundamentally?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Yeah, like just speaking to generate the boilerplate is great. So you just focus on the difficult design, nuanced difficult design decisions. Migration, I feel like this is a cool one. Like it seems like large language model is able to basically translate from one program language to another or like translate, like migrate in the general sense of what migrate is. But that's in the current moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
So I mean, the fear has to do with like, okay, as these models get better and better, then you're doing less and less creative decisions. And is it going to kind of move to a place where you're operating in the design space of natural language, where natural language is the main programming language? And I guess I could ask that by way of advice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Like, if somebody's interested in programming now, what do you think they should learn? Like, you guys started in Java, and... I forget the other. Oh, some PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Objective-C. There you go. I mean, in the end, we all know JavaScript is going to win. And not TypeScript. It's going to be like vanilla JavaScript. It's going to eat the world. And maybe a little bit of PHP. And, I mean, it also brings up the question of, like, I think Don Knuth has this idea that some percent of the population is geeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
And like there's a particular kind of psychology in mind required for programming. And it feels like more and more that expands. The kind of person that should be able to can do great programming might expand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
I guess the question I'm asking, that exact program, let's think about that person. When the super tab, the super awesome praise be the tab succeeds, and you keep pressing tab,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
I mean, this goes to your manifesto titled Engineering Genius. We are an applied research lab building extraordinary productive human AI systems. So speaking to this hybrid element. To start, we're building the engineer of the future, a human AI programmer that's an order of magnitude more effective than any one engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
This hybrid engineer will have effortless control over their code base and no low entropy keystrokes. They will iterate at the speed of their judgment, even in the most complex systems. Using a combination of AI and human ingenuity, They will outsmart and out-engineer the best pure AI systems. We are a group of researchers and engineers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
We build software and models to invent at the edge of what's useful and what's possible. Our work has already improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of programmers. And on the way to that, we'll at least make programming more fun. So thank you for talking today. Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael, Swale, Arvid, and Aman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with a random, funny, and perhaps profound programming quote I saw on Reddit. Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution that works. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
The following is a conversation with Dana White, the president of the UFC, a mixed martial arts organization that revolutionized the art, the sport, and the business of fighting. And Dana is truly the mastermind behind the UFC. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
And it's the thing that makes me happy. It brings me a little bit of a sip of joy, if you will. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. I've been using it a lot to think through ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It really is. You realize, holy shit, all that shit talking I've been doing about me being a badass, you realize you're not. You get dominated by another human being and you realize, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
And it's fascinating because no gi has become big now, and there's a lot of interesting people. I got trained with Gordon Ryan, and the level there is just fascinating. It's become like this science thing. And it looks like fighting now. It looks more like fighting. As opposed to with the Gi, sometimes it doesn't quite look like fighting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
And I feel like it's transferable to actual MMA fighting. No Gi stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That said, I also do judo. In the street scenario, if you're comfortable on the feet and you can clinch and you can throw, because most of us wear clothing, especially in Boston. Exactly. If you're comfortable on the feet, You could still do well there. The problem with jiu-jitsu is most people are not comfortable on the feet, the sport of jiu-jitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It really helps me to, through bullet point lists, nested bullet point lists, to really map out what I think about a thing. And I just kind of do an idea dump, a thought dump, a stream of consciousness dump into it, and then I reorganize it. They also have a really nice AI assistant, really nice integration of an LLM into the whole process that just helps with everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
for MMA because there's just a lot of surprising elements. A lot of people's prediction was wrong. They didn't think the skinny guy would win and they're like, oh shit, there's more to this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
What's the origin story of the UFC as it is today, as you have created it and you and Lorenzo and Fertitta Brothers built it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It can summarize, it can expand on what you're writing, it can generate the first draft of a thing you're writing. You can also ask it a bunch of stuff about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So in general, there's like corruption and people kind of steal money. They're thinking just about themselves, not the bigger business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
project like collaboration i know people that use it for that i think that's probably a really amazing thing to use it for i currently just do a wolf pack of one solo i need to probably start to use it in collaboration with the team it's amazing for that i just haven't taken the leap yet but as a note-taking thing and actually collaboration on a sort of two-person thing which i have it use it for is really really amazing i highly recommend it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
But how'd you figure out, how'd you know how to deal with all this mess? First of all, to fire people, to fire people that aren't doing a good job, all of that. Like how to be a leader, how to be a business leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Play around with it. See what you think, especially their AI thing. It's called Notion AI. You can try it for free when you go to Notion.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Notion.com slash Lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, a thing I drank one hour ago and enjoyed it. I use their container that they ship the sort of AG1 delivery with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
A lot of people that do fighting promotions fail. You succeeded against long odds. What's the secret to your success, just looking back over the years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah. So cost. You're just looking at cost and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah. And the fascinating thing, like you said, you've said that you could care less about money. You're doing this for the love of it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It's actually why I'm here. I'm going to this fear for the first time because I'm hanging out with Darren Aronofsky who put together the thing that's in there now. And I can't believe you're thinking of, I don't know how you're going to solve that puzzle. There's many puzzles to solve for this one. Many puzzles. So how can you speak to that? Like what, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Are interesting challenges that you're encountering?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I fill it with water, put it in the fridge such that it's cold, mix one spoon in. The result is just delicious and refreshing. I like it cold. I'll sometimes put it in the freezer to where it like freezes just a tiny bit. So it's like a little bit of a slushy consistency if I want a kind of slushy experience, which I'm a big fan of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
But the production, I mean, this is hilarious because you were just talking about knowing nothing about production so many years ago. And now I'm tackling the sphere. The hardest production effort. Ever. And that will be live?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So there'll be a, It will be shown at the Sphere later too? Will you try to create an experience? ESPN is doing a doc on it. Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It's going to be fun. I can't wait to see how you solve the puzzle. Thank you. Another guy that I feel like could care less about the money is Joe Rogan. How important is he to the UFC, to the rise of the UFC, and what in general do you love about Joe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
The 7-Eleven, Slurpee, Slushie, all that kind of stuff is just incredible. And whenever I run into one that has sugar-free, which does happen, they usually run out of it. It just makes me so happy. Just sitting there with a Slushie or a Slurpee. I forget which one it is. Which one is the 7-Eleven one? I don't know. I could look it up, but I'm not going to. Slurpee, Slushie, same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
We got Element for delicious electrolytes, Notion for team collaboration, AG1 for some more delicious health drink type of stuff, and InsideTracker for tracking your biological data. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, please go to alexfreeman.com contact. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Just talking about fighting, talking about what this whole thing is, like getting people excited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah, still to this day. I'll have dinner with him offline. He'll just talk fighting. He just loves it. Loves every aspect of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I value loyalty a lot. And I remember there was a moment not too long ago, maybe a year ago, when I was sitting with Joe and he had a phone call with you. Joe was getting canceled for something. And they didn't want him commentating the fights. And you on the phone offered your resignation over this. I got teary-eyed over that. That's such a, you're a good man, you know? Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That was powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I just love it. Makes me happy. So I go to that place of happiness with a delicious thing of AG1. You should consider trying to do the same kind of slushy experience if you like as well. Or just have it cold or have it warm. It's always delicious. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by InsideTracker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Lorenzo, another guy you've close friendship with, you seem to have been extremely effective together as business partners. What's the magic behind that? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So that level headed thing was useful when the UFC was losing money and it was unknown whether it's going to survive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It's fascinating. And it's also crazy, just forget the business of it, just the effect it has on the history of humanity in terms of this is what we do. We're descendants of apes that fight. And this is like the organizations that catalyze the innovation in how we fight. It's crazy. It created a whole new sport.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
You said in the UFC 299 post-fight press conference that sometimes fighters might complain that they get matched up on even odds, but that's actually when legends are made. I think you gave Dustin Poirier as an example. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Like what makes a legend? What makes greatness in a fight?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
A service I use to track the data that comes from my body. Biological data. It's in the blood. It's DNA data. It's fitness tracker data. All of that shoved into a machine learning algorithm that tells me what I should do with my life in terms of lifestyle changes and diet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It's interesting because sometimes being the underdog is a really good thing for the long-term story of who you are as a fighter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Hopefully this is the future where there's more and more data that could be used from the human body to make suggestions about what you should do with your life. Obviously for me, I wanted to be a psychiatrist for a long time. I'm fascinated with the human mind, and to be able to collect data from the human mind, high-resolution data, such that you don't need to make sense of the data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
And Conor McGregor against Khabib, underdog probably. But if you won, there's an opportunity to win. If you won, that's legend for me. He's now in the conversation for the greatest of all time without argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It could have been. Made a fight of it. It could have been. What do you think about that matchup? It's one of the great matchups that you've made. Conor McGregor versus Khabib.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So you're always trying to build a foundation for great stories. And like if the fighters step up, they step up and they can together create greatness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah, just the aura of it. Like this is where you're supposed to step up. Yeah, it's the way people feel about TED Talks when they're giving lectures. This is your moment. You got 15 minutes in this. You better say some interesting shit. Yeah, and Kayla Harrison, by the way, is a badass. I can't wait to see what happens there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
She is jacked, man. It's crazy. Two-time Olympic gold medalist. Right. You don't fuck with those people. You win a medal, you're made of something special.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah. Especially in American judo, where you don't have many training partners that are great, so you better fucking work for it. Ridiculous question, but who is in the conversation for the greatest of all time? John Jones. So you've talked about John Jones, but what are the metrics involved here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
You can just shove it into a very large neural network, and it gives you recommendations. That's such an interesting possibility. There's been recent breakthroughs on the Neuralink and the BCI fronts. It's really, really exciting what you could do with that data, and that you could do it in a safe way for humans, Just love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So that's one of the metrics, like pure sheer dominance, right? But there's others, right? You could, losing sometimes is a catalyst for greatness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Only being late to shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So the more data that comes from the body, from the human mind, from the brain, I'm really excited by the possibilities of that. Of course, it has to be done safely in a way that respects the individual rights, all that kind of stuff. Very important. But also the possibilities for human health, for human flourishing is just really exciting to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Just fuck it. I'll do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
And an important part of the history of the UFC. Big. He opened it up to all kinds of new eyes. Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
And I personally think he doesn't get enough credit for just how good he was as a fighter. People love to talk shit about Conor. I suppose that's part of his magic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Anyway, you can get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Dana White.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That's why, luckily, a perfect record in the UFC is not as important as who you fought, how you fought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
You and Trump are friends. I just talked to Ivanka last night and I bought her experience in the Miami event. She loves it. She's training too. You're talking about getting girls to train? She's training.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That guy is, I mean, walking through the fire. He does not get rattled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Another guy who doesn't seem to be fazed by the fire, I've gotten to know him, is Elon. I have to ask you, it's a bit of fun. You were a part of thinking about putting together Zuck versus Elon. I trained with both. I did a phone call with Elon and you when we were training on the mat. You really think that could have been a good fight?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
What do you think about Tyson fighting Jake Paul?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Why do you think he fights, though? Like, what is that about... Is there a broader lesson there about fighters, about great fighters?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So how much, I mean, that's a good question to ask. You work with a lot of fighters. For how many of them is it about money? And for how many is it about the fact, the pure love of fighting?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That was a special fight. It really was. What do you think attracted people to that fight? So that made, that was a big leap for the UFC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It was everything. It was everything. Why do you think people loved that fight? What attracted people to that fight? Why did they change everything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So you already saw the magic of the fight itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
You just knew this. I knew. What is it? It's like just two people being willing to stand toe to toe and just go to war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
But I think at that point, you even forget all of that. When you're in there, you probably just, there's a primal thing where like, I'm not backing down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
and just throw it all all the caution to the wind and just fight those are some of the greatest moments in the fc2 when the technique is not kind of falls apart and you're just like well fuck it because you're in those deep rounds you've had you've been through a war now it's all about heart and dog who can dig deeper and who's got it and who wants it who wants it i mean
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I mean, that saying is true. Like, the exhaustion makes cowards of us all. I mean, they're... There's something about, because I've competed a lot in jujitsu, there's the violence of being hit too, but even just exhaustion, it makes you question everything. It just takes you to some weird place where your brain starts to think you're going to die for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
your brain starts to think like, why am I doing this? All these excuses, all this. And then the truly heroic action is to say, fuck it in that moment. And just to get in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That doesn't matter what happened. That is a person winning a battle over themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I do. What's the biggest win of your gambling career? Maybe psychologically, if not financially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
What's the biggest loss?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah. He's all love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
When it was hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
How do you deal with those psychologically? When you gamble, maybe this applies to fighting too, do you love winning or hate losing more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So you manage it, but just psychologically, you're able to be even killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Element, a thing I'm drinking right now. I think that's delicious. A thing that's really good when you do fasting, whether that's for 24 hours, for 72 hours, for anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That's some Goggins shit right there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I love that motivational speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So that might've been your first fight, but when did you fall in love with fighting?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So you're grateful, you're celebrating, even if the day is full of shit, full of problems you have to solve, all of this, you're still able to put that behind you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
That's a good question. I have to think. Well, I have a lot, a lot, because, you know, it could be one of them, probably talking about women. You know, Forrest Gump, for me, it's a simple movie, but it was a really good movie to show. It reminded me, because I've been really fortunate in my life, like over and over and over. And I don't think I deserve any of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
So I just always felt like Forrest Gump. So when I finally saw it, it really connected with me. It was like, okay, this universe works in weird ways and stuff just materializes. And you just kind of be good to people, like put that good karma out there and it happens for you. So that was a movie like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Oh yeah. Well, yeah, that, that's a good one too. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah, I suppose me too. It made me want to wrestle. I mean, probably the reason I was... Maybe it made me fall in love with wrestling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I mean, that's what fighting does. It brings out the basic, the humanity of a person. For the people that choose to step up, and step in the ring and then chase greatness and actually do it from like against the long odds. That's why it's a beautiful game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
What has watching thousands of fights over the years taught you about human nature, about us humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Well, Dana, thank you for bringing this very human thing of fighting, the art of it, the science of it, the heroic stories, the vision quest stories of it all. Boom. Really appreciate you talking to me, brother. Thank you. Pleasure, buddy. Thank you for the kind words. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dana White.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Muhammad Ali. Impossible is just the big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Oh, they were criticizing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
I mean, I guess you could fast without any of that, but that's... going to be not a fun time. When you do low carb diets like I do or ultra low carb or just carnivore, also getting your electrolytes is really important. Also, if you do any kind of long distance cardio, so long distance running, for example, for me, getting your electrolytes is really, really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Yeah. Maybe build them up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
You're right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It's just... And it's not just about the pay-per-view money. It's about, like, these are legends of humanity. Like, we should celebrate the highest form of, like, accomplishment. Because these aren't, like, Mike Tyson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
It's kind of crazy how big of a difference it can make when you get the sodium and the potassium and the magnesium right. And element is just the delicious way to get those right. My favorite flavor is watermelon salt. That's what I'm drinking right now. That's what I've always been drinking. On the podcast, usually you see me with some water. There's some element in that water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
Maybe we wouldn't have a UFC if they didn't fuck it up so bad for the Tyson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#421 – Dana White: UFC, Fighting, Khabib, Conor, Tyson, Ali, Rogan, Elon & Zuck
You know, it's interesting because humans have been fighting for millennia. And it seems like with the UFC, the rate of innovation is just insane. In these last three decades, it seems like we've discovered how to do unarmed combat. faster and better than at any time in human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
The following is a conversation with Mohammad El-Kurd, a world-renowned Palestinian poet, writer, journalist, and an influential voice speaking out and fighting for the Palestinian cause. He provides a very different perspective on Israel and Palestine than my previous two episodes with Benjamin Netanyahu and Yuval Noah Harari.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So let's just add a little more detail to the people who are not familiar with the story, with the region. with the evictions, with the courts. So first of all, shake your eyes in East Jerusalem. Maybe you can say, what is Jerusalem? Where is it located? what are we talking about in terms of regionally? And second, what kind of people live there? So if you could talk about the Palestinian people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And we should also make clear that these evictions is literally people living in homes and their homes are taken away from them. I suppose technically it's legal evictions, but you're saying that there's asymmetry of power in the courts where the legal is not so much legal, but is politically and maybe even religiously based.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
This show is brought to you by Factor, a ready-to-eat meal kit service that delivers nutritious and delicious meals straight to your door. I've been eating their stuff for quite a while now, and it brings joy, diversity, and deliciousness into my life. primarily because they eat keto, and so it's not trivial to cook for very low-carb meals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
In fact, it provides you with a bunch of different keto meals. I think I've tried herb-crusted chicken. I've tried their chorizo chili. There's just a bunch of stuff. It's high in nutritiousness, high in deliciousness. It's funny to think of life as a process of figuring out what makes you feel good in all aspects of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So there's no representation in the courts for the Palestinian people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So again, it's technically legal, the evictions and the demolitions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
when something is legal, it can also still be wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Do you think there's people, judges, and just people in power in the judiciary that have hate for the Palestinian people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And food is one of the few fundamental components that can make your life miserable, you can make your life beautiful. I used to eat many, many meals a day, high in carbs, work out a lot. And I realized you can still work out a lot. You can still exercise and have...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So if you could return to 1948 and describe something that you've mentioned, the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic. What was this event? What was this displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
intense physical and mental things in your life while not eating many meals at all in fact fasting the entirety of the day and only eating once a day sometimes fasting for multiple days or doing intermittent fasting, where you don't eat for 16 or 18 hours. It's like a magical discovery about your own body that you can make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What do you say to people that describe Israel as having a historical right to the land? So if you stretch, not across decades, but across centuries into the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Of course, others will give you advice, but that advice is only a kind of catalyst to explore. You really ultimately should be listening to your own body. And for me, low carb with a small number of meals a day, oftentimes just one, is what makes me feel really good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
As one human being to another, you're describing quite brilliantly that the contents of people's hearts don't matter as much as the policies and the contents of the courts and the laws and what actually is going on on the streets in terms of actions. But this is also a human story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And I feel like at the core of the situation here is hate, or maybe inability for some group of humans to see the humanity in another group of humans. And so it's important here to talk about the contents of hearts if we were to think about the long-term future of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
I hope his story and his words add to your understanding of this part of the world as it did to mine. I will continue to have difficult, long-form conversations such as these, always with empathy and humility, but with backbone. And please allow me to briefly comment about criticisms I receive of who I am as an interviewer and a human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Anyway, if you want to do that kind of thing and make it delicious, go to factormeals.com slash Lex50 and use code Lex50 to get 50% off your first box. That's factormeals.com slash Lex50 and use code Lex50. This show is brought to you by SimpliSafe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. It's one of the many layers of security that I use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
In Rivka, you wrote, my father told me, anger is a luxury we cannot afford. Be composed, calm, still, laugh when they ask you, smile when they talk, answer them, educate them. So let me linger on this. Is there anger in there, in your heart? And does it cloud your judgment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So anger, whatever it is, is a fuel for action.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
How much of this tension is religious? In the practical aspects of the courts and the evictions and the demolitions. And you mentioned something, divine decree. How much underneath of it do you feel the division over religious texts and religious beliefs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
I take security very seriously in the physical, in the cyber, and increasingly in the psychological mental space. And I suggest that everybody should do the same. The thing that makes SimpliSafe really interesting is how easy it is to get it working. To set up all the sensors, to get it working, and to keep it working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Benjamin Netanyahu said, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What's the gap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? Those who are against the policies of Israel versus those who are against the Jewish people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
There's a cool new feature that I got that's called, I think, Fast Protect Monitoring, where you have a monitoring agent that can see and speak to and deter intruders through their smart alarm indoor camera. That's a pretty cool and wild feature. If I was an intruder, maybe an accidental intruder, I'd be kind of terrified if I'd go through that, experience that kind of interaction. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So the ADL does not alleviate the hate in the world as it probably is designed to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Now you know. If we could just linger on this idea of anti-Semitism... There's quite a bit of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, especially after 9-11. I've spoken to people about that. There's also anti-Jewish, anti-Semitism sentiment in the United States, but also throughout human history. What do you make about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
this kind of fact of human nature that people seem to hate Jews throughout history, especially in the 20th century, especially with Nazi Germany. What are your in general thoughts about the hatred of the Jewish people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So one of the criticisms, I think I read the ADL making this criticism of you, is maybe you've tweeted a comparison between Israel and Hitler. and thereby diminishing the evil that is Hitler. What would you say to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
The many layers of deterrence, I think, is really important to basic security. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com slash flex to get 20% off any SimpliSafe system when you sign up for fast protect monitoring. That's simplisafe.com slash flex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. Like I mentioned, security is very important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So you've spoken about the taking of homes, the IDF, killing civilians, killing children. What about the violence going the other direction? Israelis being killed in part by terrorist action.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And what BetterHelp does is a psychological mental security. to make sure that the foundation of your mind are strong. We all have demons. We all have trauma. We all have things we're contending with in our conscious and subconscious minds. Bringing them to the surface, reverse engineering it, traveling to the past, then traveling back into the present so you can build a good future
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Do you think violence is an effective method of protest and resistance in general?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
But if you look at the flip side, do you see the power of nonviolent resistance? So Martin Luther King, Gandhi, the power of turning the other cheek. He spoke negatively about turning the other cheek. So I sense that doing so has not been effective for the Palestinian people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What are the top obstacles to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Can you describe recognition, redistribution, return and redistribution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
You mentioned the wall. Can you describe the wall?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
It's a really important process for being healthy. I don't know why the previous several sentences kind of sound like an Instagram motivational poster, but I mean it. It's a little too simply said, but it is true nevertheless. And I've been going through a lot in my mind through doing some of the difficult conversations I had to do and still do in the future and just trying to figure out my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So West Bank is a large region where a lot of Palestinian people live, and then there are settlements sprinkled throughout. And those settlements have walls around them with security cameras.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And so what are the different cities here, if you can mention? In the West Bank? In the West Bank. Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus. They have their own stories. They have their own histories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So doing a lot of introspection, soul searching, and really taking my mental health increasingly seriously has been a priority for me. And if it is for you as well, I think BetterHelp is one of the easiest, most effective ways to get started. You can check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
If I may read the description of the situation in Jenin, and maybe you can comment. So this is on July 3rd, 4th, and 5th, just reading Washington Post description. So this was an Israeli military incursion to Jenin. The raid included more than 1,000 soldiers backed by drone strikes, making it Israel's largest such operation in the West Bank since the end of the second Palestinian uprising in 2005.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
The Israeli military said it dismantled hundreds of explosives, cleared hundreds of weapons, destroyed underground hideouts, and confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars in, quote, terror funds. Many of the 50 Palestinians who have attacked Israelis since the start of the year have come from Jenin camp and the surrounding area.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Palestinian attacks inside Israel have killed 24 people this year. UN experts describe the Jenin operation as collective punishment, in quotes, for the Palestinian people, amounting to egregious violations of international law. Many of the more than 150 Palestinians killed by Israelis this year have also come from these communities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Palestinian fighters say they need arms to defend themselves against the Israeli occupation and military incursions into the camp during which Palestinian civilians, including children, have been killed. So those are the... I would say, different perspectives on the many people on both sides who have been killed, many more Palestinians. Can you comment more about the situation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
This show is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. They offer multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, and so on. I'm increasingly taking languages seriously. To state the obvious, they are one of the fundamental barriers in communication between the various peoples of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So the degree there's violence, it's about survival.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Well, the double standard is glaring, but I also think the glorification of violence is questionable. There's a balance to be struck, of course, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So on July 4th, during this intense period, a Palestinian rammed a car into pedestrians at a bus stop in Tel Aviv, injuring eight people before being shot dead by a passerby. Also that night, Hamas fired rockets into Israel, and then Israel responded with strikes on what it said was an underground weapon site. So just to give some context to the intense... violence happening here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And that silly little barrier sometimes trivially prevent us from seeing the common humanity in us. And so for myself, I'm starting to learn more and more languages just to start to feel the music of the language. But I'm also, from a podcast interview perspective, I'm opening myself up to do interviews in other languages and to also do translation and to take translation seriously at scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What do you think about Hamas firing rockets into Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Do you in your mind and the way you see this region draw a distinction between the people in power versus the regular people? So you mentioned the Palestinian people. Is there something you can comment on Hamas and the PLO? Do you see them as fundamentally different from the people? What does Hamas do well? Where do they fall short?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
I am not afraid to travel anywhere or challenge anyone face to face, even if it puts my life in danger. But I'm also not afraid to be vulnerable, to truly listen, to empathize, to walk a mile in the well-worn shoes of those very different from me. It's this latter task, not the former one, that is truly the most challenging in conversations and in life. But to me, it is the only way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
I imagine a kid growing up in a rural India or rural China or somewhere in South America and just to be able to speak to him or her, just to show that there's hope that we're all in this together, that there's so much beauty in this world and there's so much awesomeness that we can create together. I think that's a really, really important thing to strive for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
but to linger on those in power. So one of the criticisms towards Hamas and PLO, towards the Israeli government, at least the current coalition government, is that, that there's a lot of incentive to sort of perpetuate violence to maintain power. There's a hunger for power and maintaining that power amongst the powerful. That's the way power works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So is there a worry you have about those in power not having the best interests of its people? So those in power, the PLO, Hamas, not having the best interests not being incentivized towards peace, towards justice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Well, how do you do a better world? Actually, if you just linger on that, politically speaking, geopolitically, you have to have representation of the people. You have to have laws and you have to have leaders and governing bodies that enact those laws and all those kinds of things. You probably need to have militaries to protect the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
I can imagine it, but we're not in that world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So you don't think violence is a fundamental part of human nature that emerges combined with the hunger for power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
I'm tempted to say sway, but... But you have a hope that there doesn't have to be war in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Well, if we look a little bit more short-term, people speak about a one-state solution and a two-state solution. What is your hope here for this part of the world? Do you see a possible future with a two-state solution, whether it's for Palestine and Israel? Do you see a one-state solution where there is a diversity of different peoples, like in the United States, and they have equal rights?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And I think technology increasingly unlocks that. Anyway, to work on your own language skills, I suggest you try Babbel. You can get 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com slash lexpod, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash lexpod. Rules and restrictions apply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Well, okay, so you've spoken eloquently about the injustice of the evictions, the demolitions, the settlements. But is there, can you comment about the difficulty of the security from an Israel perspective when there is a large number of people that want to destroy it? How does Israel exist peacefully? This one-state solution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
This show is also brought to you by Hassan Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high-quality, and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door. I have a kitchen closet full of macadamia nut snacks that I've been slowly working my way through. And by working, I mean loving every second of it. There are really small portions, which is great for me because I'm not good at moderation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
There's a tension here. It's true that the ideas of existential threats to a nation have been used to expand the military-industrial complex and to limit the rights of its people. So in the United States, after 9-11, Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded under some justification of there being terror in the world, these big ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And in the same way, yes, Israel with the existential threat of Iran is used to expand its military might over the region and control over the region. But it also has some truth to it in terms of the threat that Israel is facing, including from Iran. If Iran were to get a nuclear weapon, do you think there's a threat from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Some of it is fear-mongering, but some of it is true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Do your beliefs represent the Palestinian people? Meaning, how many people are there that want Israel to be gone?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
what it means is for people who think of Israel as an occupier, who stole land, that needs to go away, that this should be all Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Well, there's different definitions of occupation. There's people in their homes now, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So I like when the packaging enforces moderation. And it's just a diversity of deliciousness. Also, I'll bring it to the podcast studio and share it with guests so they can partake in the plethora of flavors that is the House of Macadamia snacks. I'm still not sure what my favorite is, actually. Like with the almond drink, I'm really sure that watermelon salt is my favorite flavor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
That are not theirs, that were taken just a few decades ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
There are homes on the land of Israel that you wouldn't classify as stolen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
But we should be precise here. So a little boy being able to run around Jerusalem, that's a great vision, not just safely, but without racism, without hate. That's a beautiful vision, yes. But people in West Jerusalem, people in Tel Aviv that have homes, should they stay there? Do they have the right to stay there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So you want the low hanging fruit, the obvious injustices to end. But still, the long-term vision of existential survival of Israel, which is the concern of its government, the concern of its people, do you see a future where Israelis have a home in the region?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Which, where's the front yard and where's the back yard?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And seek and establish asymmetry of power in the courts, which is the current source of injustice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
But House of Macadamia is... Man, there's so much good stuff. Both the whole nuts and the bars. Just really, really, really, really delicious. And obviously, it's super healthy for you, at least if you have the similar kind of nutritional and diet perspectives on life as I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What's your vision? Let's just take it as a microcosm of Jerusalem. What's your vision for Jerusalem looks like with a peaceful coexistence of people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Go to HouseOfMacadamias.com to get a free box of the bestseller, the Namibian Sea Salted Macadamia Nuts, plus 20% off your entire order. That's HouseOfMacadamias.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Muhammad L. Kurd. Tell me about Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where you grew up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
You mentioned the land registry. Can you elaborate what's happening there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What does the process of fighting this in the course look like? If you can maybe just comment on it. So there's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So a lot of the fights happen family by family?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So to whom you complain is maybe the international community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
You mentioned the United States. What's the role of the United States in the struggle that you've been describing? What's the positive? What's the negative?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $158 billion. As you said, it's providing currently $3.8 billion every year. A lot of people raise the question of what's the interest of taxpaying American citizens in this kind of foreign aid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
You've tweeted that 49 years ago, Ghassan Kanafani, well, you can maybe correct me on the pronunciation, was assassinated. You wrote, quote, his revolutionary articulations of the Palestinian plight for liberation shook the colonial regime. Yet he's not dead. His ideas remain ever timely and teachable. And he also tweeted an excerpt from his writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Between 1936 and 1939, the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the hands of three separate enemies that were to constitute together the principal threat to the nationalist movement in Palestine in all subsequent stages of its struggle." One, the local reactionary leadership. Two, the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And three, the imperialist Zionist enemy. Can you analyze what he means by those three things? The local reactionary leadership, the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine, and the imperialist Zionist enemy. And also, could you comment on him as a person?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Did he classify himself as a politician, as a philosopher, as an activist? Do you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Local reactionary leadership, regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine, and the imperialist Zionist enemy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So mostly you would say the thing that Abraham Accords achieved is a It's a negative thing for Palestine. So these kinds of agreements amongst the power between the leadership is not positive for the region.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
You mentioned that you hope of accomplishing some of the things that Hassan kind of finally was able to accomplish. Let me ask you a silly question, perhaps a silly question. Do you have interest in running for political office into leadership? I hear laughter in the room to lead in a leadership position in Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Who would want to do that? So from which kind of pedestal or from which kind of stage do you think you can be most effective?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
To ask another silly question, since you mentioned the United States, I don't know if you follow the politics in the United States, but do you have a preference of presidential candidates in the 2024 election? Or is that, do you follow where each candidate stands on the different policies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
I do follow. Because of the influence they have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
You wrote Rivka, a book of poetry. How did that come about? Maybe you can tell the story of that book coming to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So poetry ultimately... Prize is the power of words. And so the medium, the power of the medium of poetry transfers nicely to any medium that celebrates words. So even, I mean, just writing novels, tweeting. You're also working on a new book, a memoir. What's the title? What can you say about it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
A few questions here, but one of them is about humor. In Rivka, you wrote, my mother has always said the most tragic of disasters are those that cause laughter. What do you think she meant by that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Factor for delicious pre-made meals, SimpliSafe for home security, BetterHelp for mental health, Babbel for learning new languages, and House of Macadamias for delicious snacks. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So as a poet, as a writer, I've written a book of poetry, but now working on a new book. What can you say about your process of crafting words? I think people listening to this can hear that there's a poetry to the way you speak in English. So... somebody that cares about the craftsmanship of words in both English and Arabic, what can you say about your process?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Okay, so the struggle to find the timeless message in it is an ongoing struggle for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
That's fascinating that in English, your brain is more inclined to go towards activism, whereas in Arabic, you have the luxury to be more of a philosopher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Would you say the press in the United States does a good or poor job of covering Israel and Palestine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
So you personally, just psychologically, what have been the lowest points in your life, the darkest points?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What gives you hope about the future of Palestine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
What do you love most about Palestine? What are like maybe little things that you remember from your childhood, from your life there in East Jerusalem and elsewhere that just brings a smile to your face?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Can you look on that process, 2009? You said 50 expulsion orders. What was happening?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Well, Mohammed, thank you for being a man who exemplifies this unbreakable spirit. Thank you for the words you've written, the words you've spoken, and thank you for talking today. This is an honor, and thank you for educating me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mohamed El-Kurd. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela. It always seems impossible until it's done. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring at lexfreeman.com slash hiring. And now on to the full ad reads. Never any ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll, his third time in this podcast. He is a theoretical physicist at John Hopkins, host of the Mindscape podcast that I personally love and highly recommend, and author of many books, including the most recent book series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
What about the step of including time as just another dimension, so combining space and time? Is that a simple mathematical leap, as Minkowski suggested? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
The very fabric of truth is being torn apart by increasingly powerful systems that we consult about what is true and what is not. It's really fascinating if you take all the security attacks away how difficult it is to make sure that threats to truth-seeking mechanisms do not sort of rise above a certain threshold where we no longer know what to trust and not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I mean, do you, for him or for Einstein, visualize the four-dimensional space, try to play with the idea of time as just another dimension?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
What is the difference between space and time from the perspective of general relativity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
objective reality underneath it? Or is objective reality a silly notion given general relativity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I'm talking of course about machine learning models that are trained on a lot of data that comes from the internet, from all the different news sources, to Wikipedia, to Reddit, to all those places that they're trained on, and integrate and compress into a representation that we can then consult through natural language
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I think a nice way to test the difference between objective reality and the observed reality is what happens at the edge of the horizon of a black hole. So technically, as you get closer to that horizon, time stands still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
How do we know it fell in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Well, that's the singular, that's the kind of, the edge of the theory, the limit. So it's understandable that it's difficult to imagine the limit of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
and ask questions about politics, about geopolitics, about wars, about history, all of that, and we turn to those models for truth, or at least to take steps towards understanding something about the world. basically engaging in a truth-seeking process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So how does a black hole work? Put yourself in the shoes of Einstein and take general relativity to its natural conclusion about these massive things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And what happens to you if you fall into the black hole? If we think of an object as information, that information gets destroyed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Now, if you add on top of that bad actors that want to mess with those models so that for the most part, they appear perfectly rational and perfectly safe to use as truth-seeking mechanisms, but on certain topics, they're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Is there any way to observe Hawking radiation to a degree where you can start getting insight? Or is this all just in the space of theory right now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
The first book of which is titled Space, Time, and Motion, and it's on the topic of general relativity. And the second, coming out on May 14th, so you should definitely pre-order it, is titled Quanta and Fields, and that one is on the topic of quantum mechanics. Sean is a legit active theoretical physicist, and at the same time, is one of the greatest communicators of physics ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So these supermassive black holes were formed somewhere early on in the universe. I mean, that's the future, not a bug, right? That we don't have too many of them. Otherwise we wouldn't have the time or the space to form the little pockets of complexity that we'll call humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, I just think it's so easy to make them though. So there must be, I understand that's the simplest explanation. But also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
This is a real security threat as we depend on these models more and more for general conversation than if you're a company for very specific kind of analysis of the data that the company's focused on. So considering security of machine learning models is really, really important for companies, for people, and it's such a fascinating problem. So I'm really happy that Hidden Layer
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Or eukaryotic life? Or multicellular life? It seems like life finds a way. Intelligent alien civilizations, sure, maybe there is somewhere along that chain. a really, really hard leap. But once you start life, once you get the origin of life, it seems like life just finds a way everywhere in every condition. It just figures it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So it's a time thing. So to you, really, there's most likely there's no alien civilizations out there. I just, I can't see it. I believe there's a ton of them and there's another explanation why we can't see them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And it's also possible there's a great filter where there's something fundamental about once a civilization develops complex enough technology, that technology is more statistically likely to destroy everybody versus to continue being creative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
is working on this problem. And if you're a company that uses machine learning models, you should take this problem very seriously. Visit hiddenlayer.com to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by Cloaked, a platform that lets you generate a new email and phone number every time you sign up for a new website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So you're a sucker for in-person conversations versus remote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
How hard is it for an alien civilization, again, you're the dictator of one, to figure out a probe that is most likely to find a common language with whatever it finds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Elected leader of a democratic alien civilization, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So there's a folks, one of the places you're affiliated with is Santa Fe and they approach the question of complexity in many different ways and ask the question in many different ways of what is life, thinking broadly. So do you be able to find it? You show up, a probe shows up to a planet, we'll see a thing and be like, yeah, that's a living thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So signs of complexity. Mm-hmm. I don't know, I just have this nervous feeling that we won't be able to detect. We'll show up to a planet, there'll be a bunch of liquid on it, we take a swim in the liquid, and we won't be able to see the intelligence in it. whether that intelligence looks like something like ants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
We'll see movement, perhaps, strange movement, but we won't be able to see the intelligence in it or communicate with it. I guess if we have nearly infinite amount of time to play with different ideas, we might be able to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I don't know how we got on this topic, but I think it was from Supermassive Black Holes. So if we return to black holes and talk about the holographic principle more broadly, you have a recent paper on the topic. You've been thinking about the topic in terms of rigorous research perspective and just as a popular book writer. So what is the holographic principle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It's amazing. Like I said, it's the thing that I always hoped existed. And now that I know it exists, I'm a happier human being. So anytime you sign up to a website, this experience is taking for granted just how privacy violating it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I love Mindscape. Oh, thank you very much. Curiosity-driven. Yeah, ideas. Exploration of ideas from smart people, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Because for really big websites, you kind of have this social contract, you have this trust that they're not going to steal your email and sell it to somebody else or steal your phone number and sell it to somebody else. And that's for the most part true for large companies because they have so much to lose
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
How should we picture what impact that has, the fact that you can store all the information, you can think of as all the information that goes into a black hole can be stored at the event horizon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But it's crazy how dense with information a black hole is. And then plus quantum mechanics starts to come into play. So you almost want to romanticize the kind of interesting computation type things that are going on inside the black hole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
if they violate that social contract, but there is just a very long tail of companies, services that you sign up to, and you don't know what they're gonna do with your email, your phone number, or any of the other information. So, it's really nice to have Cloaked that generates a new email and phone number when you sign up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But hypothetically- I guess, as you mentioned, the information might be preserved, the information that goes into a black hole. It doesn't get destroyed. So what does that mean when the entropy is really high?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
We just talked about the event horizon of a black hole. What's on the inside? What's at the center of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I came back to tell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Unlimited emails and phone numbers, every time you sign up to a thing, and it's a really nice management of those emails and phone numbers. is basically a password manager that everybody should use. Everybody should be using a password manager. And this is just a really nice password manager that has those extra privacy superpowers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Well, if you fall into a black hole and then I'm an observer just watching it, and then you come out, once it evaporates a million years later, I guess you'd be exactly the same age? Have you aged at all? You would be converted into photons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Right. So it's not at all possible that information is preserved exactly as it went in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But what about the age of things from the observer perspective, from outside the black hole?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Okay. There's no way to escape the black hole except to let it evaporate. To let it evaporate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Because space and time are treated the same, and so it doesn't even make sense. What happens to time in the holographic principle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But holography is fundamentally about – it's a question of space? It really is, yeah. Okay, so time is just like a –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So all the questions about time is just almost like separate questions, whether it's emergent and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
If we figure out a lot, you know, millions of years from now about black holes, how surprised would you be if they travel back in time and told you everything you want to know about black holes? How much do you think there is still to know? And how mind-blowing would it be?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So I highly recommend that you at least try it out and you play with it, because I think... For the long tail of the crazy websites and services out there on the internet, this is a really good protection to keep your private info private. Go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free, or for a limited time, use code LexPod when signing up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Oh, so like the black hole would be the most clear illustration. Yeah, that's where it would show up. If there's something, it would show up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Do you think it's possible we'll find something interesting like black holes sometimes create new universes or black holes are a kind of portal through space-time to another place or something like this? And then our whole conception of what is the fabric of space-time changes completely because black holes, it's like Swiss cheese type of situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
you've published a paper on the holographic principle, or that involves the holographic principle. Can you explain the details of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It's a tool that I'm going to miss very much because in a little bit I'm going offline for a time and no access to the internet or anything like that. No access to anything digital, really. And so the kind of notebook I'll be using is just a sheet of paper with a pen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
IceCube does. So why ice? So is it just because of the low noise and you get to watch this thing and it's... It's much more dense than air, but it's transparent. So you have much more dense, so higher probability, and then it's transparency, and then it's also in the middle of nowhere, so you can... Humans are great. That's all you need.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So it's hard to express how much I've started to take for granted the incredible technology of Notion for the process of note-taking. And I'm talking about individual note-taking. Now, what they really shine at is not just the individual note-taking, but the collaborative aspect between teams. And the other aspect is their AI assistant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Oh, boy. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And you need the high energy neutrinos for your prediction. Our effect is a little bit bigger for higher energies, yeah. And that effect has to do with this almost perpendicular thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Thank you, Oliver. Thank you for pushing this wild science forward. Just to speak to that, the meta process of it, How do you approach asking these big questions and trying to formulate as a paper, as an experiment that could make a prediction, all that kind of stuff? What's your process?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So integrating LLMs into the process of writing, note-taking, summarizing, all of that kind of stuff. It can help you generate a first draft. All the kind of things you know and are coming to love about LLMs, they're able to do in a really nice intuitive way. I mean, the power of LLMs is not just in the expressive capability of the raw model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
What was the thing that would make physicists happy that would make sense of this fragile thing that people call dark energy? So,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It's also how you integrate that into a sort of user interface, into a tool that you can use for solving particular tasks that you do. So for example, if you have a bunch of stuff on a team, you have a bunch of documents, like wikis and projects, The LLM knows about all of that. Their AI assistant knows about all of that, integrates all of that. You can talk to it. You can ask questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
People will sometimes bring up dark energy and dark matter as an example why physicists have lost it, lost their mind. We're just going to say that there's this field that permeates everything. It's unlike any other field and it's invisible. And it helps us work out some of the math. How do you respond to that kind of suggestion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And it's non-uniformly distributed through space, dark matter? Absolutely, yeah. You can even see maps of it that we've constructed from gravitational lensing. So verifiable sort of clumps of dark matter in the galaxy that explain stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You can generate a progress report for the stuff you've done. So I haven't used it for very large teams. I've used it for small teams, and I love it for small teams. But I almost want to work at a company that's big, that's using it, because I think it will really shine on large teams. So anyway, try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Could there be a super cool explanation for dark matter that would be interesting as opposed to just another particle that sits there and clumps?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
People are very interested. Can you describe this paper a little bit? It's fascinating how much of a thing there is, dark energy and dark matter, and we don't quite understand it. So what was your dive into exploring how to unify the two?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I highly encourage you listen to his podcast, read his books, and pre-order the new book to support his work. This was, as always, a big honor and a pleasure for me. And now, a quick few second mention of these sponsors. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
That's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I have a store set up at lexcreamer.com slash store. I should probably put on more stuff there, more shirts, because shirts are fun. I love wearing shirts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It'd be really interesting if gravity did something funky when there's not much of it. Almost like at the edges of it, it gets noisy. That was exactly the hope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It just sucks that the scale of galaxies and scale of solar systems, the physics is kind of boring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You mentioned three papers, your first ever, your first awesome paper ever, and your second awesome paper ever. Of course, you wrote many papers, so you're being very harsh on the others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You wrote the book, Something Deeply Hidden on the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics, and a new book coming out soon, part of that Biggest Ideas in the Universe series we mentioned, called Quanta and Fields. So that's focusing on quantum mechanics. Big question first. Biggest ideas in the universe. What to you is most beautiful or perhaps most mysterious about quantum mechanics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Actually, tweet at me or whatever if you know cool shirt places. Basically, most of the time what I wear is either a suit and tie or a black shirt and jeans. But I also love owning shirts that represent something that I enjoy. So for example, I have a bunch of Metallica shirts. So a bunch of shirts of the different bands I like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So both for the theory, the predictive power of the theory, and the fact that the theory describes tiny things creating everything we see around us. It's a monist theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You mentioned the many worlds interpretation, and it is in fact beautiful, but it's one of your more controversial things you stand behind. You've probably gotten a bunch of flack for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Well, can you first explain it, and then maybe speak to the flack you may have gotten? Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You know, lots of classic rock, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. I think I have a Bukowski shirt, book shirts, like a Frankenstein shirt that is really cool. I have some funny shirts like Carl Young, Forever Young, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, if you have shirts like this, you can create a Shopify store, sell them, and spread joy into the world. But you can sell really anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
The number of worlds is... Very big. Very, very, very big. Where do those worlds fit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
One of the properties of this interpretation is that you can't travel from one world to the other. That's right. Which kind of makes you feel that they're existing separately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And simultaneously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Without locations in space. How is it possible to visualize them existing without a location in space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Is there a way to get closer to understanding and visualizing the weirdness of the implications of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And they integrate with a bunch of third-party apps that make all of that super easy. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So if it in fact is correct, isn't this the weirdest thing of anything we know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And there is, under many worlds, an arrow of time where if you rewind it back, there's going to be one initial state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So if you actually look at under many worlds into the entire history of the universe, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks very deterministic. Yes. In each moment, does the moment contain the memory of the entire history of the universe? To you, does the moment contain the memory of everything that preceded it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I have to be honest and say that there's a big part of me that enjoys working at a company, at a large company, and sort of being an individual contributor in a larger system of people working together. Being an individual contributor on a great team is really fun for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But our memories, we can do replay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But you can imperfectly replay it. I guess, can we return, travel back in time imperfectly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It's what computationally very costly to try to consult the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
What to you is the Big Bang? Why did it happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And one of the things I miss, having left Google to go to MIT and now spending quite a bit of time outside of MIT, all of that, I just miss large teams working together on a big mission. There's a beauty to that. There's a camaraderie to that. There's a celebration of the best of humanity in that because that's how we create special things is a large number of humans working together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And if time and space are emergent, then the before even starts getting real weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Well, yeah. I mean, the general formulation of this question is what's outside of it? What's outside of our universe? So in time and in space. I know it's a pothead question, Sean. I understand. I apologize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Okay, but is it possible to think at all about what's outside our universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But it's the only thing in the universe that wouldn't have an outside universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
That's so weird to think that there's not an outside. We want there to be. We want there to be sort of a creator, a creative force that led to this. An outside, like this is our town, and then there's a bigger world, and there's always a bigger world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It feels like a lot of pressure that if this is the only universe and we're here, one of the few intelligent civilizations, maybe the only one, it's the old theories that we're the center of everything. It just feels suspicious. That's why Many Worlds is kind of exciting to me because it's humbling in all the right kinds of ways. It feels like infinity is the way this whole thing runs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
That to me is one of the most interesting questions. There's different ways to approach it, but what's outside of this? How did the big mess start? How do we get something from nothing? That's always the thing you're sneaking up to. When you're studying all of these questions, you're always thinking, that's where the black hole and the unifying, getting quantum gravity, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You're always sneaking up to that question, where did all of this come from? And I think that's probably an answerable question. Right? No. It doesn't have to be. So you think there could be a turtle at the bottom of this that refuses to reveal its identity? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And there is a science, there's an art to running a large company. I think that's what NetSuite tackles is how you have the different components of the company, finding a common language that manages all the stuff, the HR, the financial, the inventory, supply, e-commerce, all that kind of stuff. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Do you think it's possible this whole place is simulated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It's a really interesting, dark, twisted video game that we're all existing in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
When you say it's possible, there's a mathematically yes, and then there's more of like intuitive... Yeah, you want to know whether it's plausible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Do you think humans will try to create one? I guess that's how I always think about it. You know, I see what, I've spent quite a bit of time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
over the past few years and a lot more recently in virtual worlds and just am always captivated by the possibility of creating higher and higher resolution worlds and as we'll talk a little bit about artificial intelligence sort of the the advancement on the sora front you can automatically generate those worlds
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And the possibility of existing in those automatically generated worlds is pretty exciting. As long as there's a consistent physics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity that governs the generation of those worlds. So it just seems like humans will for sure try to create this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, the practical matter of going from a sort of a prototype that's impressive to a thing that governs everything. Similar question on this front is in AGI. Yeah, you said that we're very far away from AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sean Carroll.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So basically, when you're analyzing large language models and seeing how far are they from whatever AGI is, and we could talk about different notions of intelligence that we're not as close as kind of some people in public view are talking about. So what's your intuition behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
We got Hidden Layer for securing your AI models, Cloaked for protecting your personal information, Notion for team collaboration and amazing note-taking, Shopify, for, well, selling stuff on the internet and NetSuite for business management software. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I think the underlying idea there under the definition of AGI is that The capabilities are extremely impressive. That's not a precise statement. No, I get that. I completely agree. And then the underlying question where a lot of the debate is, is how impressive is it? What are the limits of large language models? Can they really do things like common sense reasoning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
How much do they really understand about the world? Are they just fancy mimicry machines? And where do you fall on that as to the limits of large language models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So if that huge bias of intentionality is there in the data, in the human data, in the vast landscape of human data that AI models, large language models, and video models in the future are trained on, Don't you think that that intentionality will emerge as fundamental to the behavior of these systems naturally?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Well, I think to push back on what they're optimized for, it's different to describe how they're trained versus what they're optimized for. So they're trained in this very trivial way of predicting text tokens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But you can describe what they're optimized for and what the actual task at hand is, is to construct a world model, meaning an understanding of the world. And that's where it starts getting closer to what humans are kind of doing. We're just, in the case of large language models, know how the sausage is made, and we don't know how it's made for us humans. But they're not optimized for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
They're optimized to sound human. That's the fine-tuning. But the actual training is optimized for understanding, creating a compressed representation of all the stuff that humans have created on the internet. And the hope is... that that gives you a deep understanding of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
In book one of the series, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, called Space-Time-Motion, you take on classical mechanics, general relativity, by taking on the main equation of general relativity and making it accessible, easy to understand. So maybe at the high level, what is general relativity? What's a good way to start to try to explain it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I think I have some sort of intellectual humility about the whole thing because I was humbled by several stages in the machine learning development over the past 20 years. And I just would never have predicted... that LLMs, the way they're trained, on the scale of data they're trained, would be as impressive as they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And there, that's where intellectual humility steps in, where my intuition would say something like with Melanie, where you need to be able to have very sort of concrete, common sense reasoning, symbolic reasoning type things in a system in order for it to be very intelligent. But here, I'm so impressed by what it's capable to do, train on the next token prediction, essentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
My conception of the nature of intelligence is just completely, not completely, but humbled, I should say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I was chatting with the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Medea, so behind Claude, and that company, but a lot of the AI companies are really focused on expanding the scale of compute. If we assume that AI is not data-limited but is compute-limited, You can make the system much more intelligent by using more compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So let me ask you, almost on the physics level, do you think physics can help expand the scale of compute and maybe the scale of energy required to make that compute happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I think Elias Discover said this, that the future of... humanity on Earth would be just, the entire surface of Earth is covered in solar panels and data centers. Why would you waste the surface of the Earth with solar panels?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, that's true. And there's probably more and more efficient ways of catching that energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But that's an engineering problem, yeah. So I just wonder where data centers, the compute centers can expand to, if that's the future. If AI is as effective as it possibly could be, then the scale of computation will keep increasing. And perhaps it's a race between efficiency and scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I mean, that's the dance of humanity. We're constantly creating better, better, better technologies that are potentially causing a lot more harm. And that includes for weapons. It includes AI used as weapons. That includes nuclear weapons, of course. Which is surprising to me that we haven't destroyed human civilization yet, given how many nuclear warheads are out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It does seem like there's an underlying, speaking of quantum fields, there's like a field of goodness within the human heart that like in some kind of game theoretic way would create really powerful things that could destroy each other. And there's greed and ego and all this kind of power hungry dictators that are at play here in all the geopolitical landscape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But we somehow always like don't go too far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Right before we went too far. And that's why we don't see aliens. So you're, like I mentioned, associated with Santa Fe Institute. I just would love to take a stroll down the landscape of ideas explored there. So they look at complexity in all kinds of ways. What do you think about the emergence of complexity from simple things interacting simply?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, but the mechanism of it, what, I mean, you mentioned Jeffrey West, what are interesting inklings of progress in this realm, and what are systems that interest you In terms of information. So, I mean, for me, just as a fan of complexity, just even looking at simple cellular automata is always just a fascinating way to illustrate the emergence of complexity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
What does the landscape of entropy in the universe look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Okay, that's fascinating, first of all. But second of all, if we take black holes away, what are the different interesting perturbations in entropy across space? Where do we Earthlings fit into that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I just wonder what that mechanism of surfing looks like. I mean, that's where... First of all, I mean, one question to ask. Do you think it's possible to have a kind of science of complexity where you have very precise ways or clearly defined ways of measuring complexity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So you think it's possible to have a complexity of a physical system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
In the same way we do entropy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You think that's a Sean Carroll paper or what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
It's a sexy name.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Sometimes a name arose by any other name. In which context, the birth of complexity are you most interested in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, the things going on in my head when I'm imagining worlds are super compressed representations of those worlds, but they get to the essence of them. And maybe it's possible with non-human computing type devices to do those kinds of simulations in more and more compressed ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the big features.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And the tension with Minkowski was, he was a mathematician.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So there's a tension between physics and mathematics. In fact, in your lecture about this equation, one of them, You say that Einstein is a better physicist than he gets credit for. Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So panpsychism is the idea that consciousness permeates all matter. Maybe it's the fundamental force or a physics of the fabric of the universe. Panpsychism, thought everywhere, consciousness everywhere, right? To a point of entertainment, the idea frustrates you, which sort of as a fan is wonderful to watch. You've had great episodes with panpsychists on your podcast where you go at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
if you don't have to change the laws of physics, where do you think it emerges from? Is consciousness an illusion? It's almost like a shorthand that we humans use to describe a certain kind of feeling we have when interacting with the world. Or is there some big leap that happens at some stage?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Oasis in the desert does have causal efficacy in that you're thirsty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Sure, but imagining a thing can sometimes bring it to reality, as we've seen, and that has a kind of causal efficacy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You don't think you can increase the chance of a thing existing by imagining it existing? unless you build it or make it. No, that's what I mean. Like, imagining humans can fly, if you're the Wright brothers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Imagination. So it's the possibility of the future versus what reality is. I mean, the future is a concept. So you can... One time... Time is just a concept, so you can play with that. But yes, reality. So to you, so for example, I love asking this. So Donald Hoffman, thinks that the entirety of the conversation we've been having about space-time is an illusion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Is it possible for you to steel man the case for that? Can you make the case for and against reality, as I think he writes, that the laws of physics as we know them with space-time is a kind of interface to a much deeper thing that we don't at all understand, and that we're fooling ourselves by constructing this world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Is it true in the way, for example, belief in God is true? Because for most of human history, people have believed in a god or multiple gods, and that seemed very true to them. as an explanation for the way the world is. Some of the deeper questions about life itself and the human condition and why certain things happen. That was a good explainer. So to you, that's not an illusion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So like you said, you're a believer of the mechanistic universe. You're a naturalist, and as you've described, a poetic naturalist. That's right. What's the word poetic? What is naturalism, and what is poetic naturalism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So the poetic really looks at the, let's say, the pothead questions at the edge of science. It's more open to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So you don't think it's possible to construct experiments that explore the realms of morality and even meaning? So those are subjective experiments? They're human, they're personal. But do you think that's just because we don't have a, the tools of science have not expanded enough to incorporate the human experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But if we deeply and fully understand the functioning of the human mind, won't be able to incorporate that. No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Do you think it's possible to have a kind of general relativity, but that includes the observer effect where the human mind is the observer? Sure. Sort of like how we morph. In the same way gravity morphs space-time, how does the human mind morph reality and have a very thorough theory of how that morphing actually happens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You know, dictators and people in power will sometimes use science as an authority to convince you what's right and wrong. Studying Nazi science is fascinating. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Let me ask you about the method behind the madness on several aspects of your life. So you mentioned your approach to writing for research and writing popular books. How do you find the time of the day? What's a day in the life of Sean Carroll? So you don't have a thing where in the morning you try to fight for two hours somewhere?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You're able to pull it off because you're extremely prolific. So like you're able to have days where you don't write and still write the next day. Right. Oh, wow. That's a rare thing, right? A lot of prolific writers will carve out two hours because otherwise it just disappears.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. Boy, is this a fascinating space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
And what's the actual process look like when you're writing popular stuff? You get behind a computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
What does greatness look like for a physicist? So how difficult is it to take the leap from special relativity to general relativity? How difficult is it to imagine that, to consider space-time together, and to imagine that there's a curvature to this whole thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So that's the case for the biggest ideas in the universe, the quanta book and the space-time motion book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I mean, you did the same thing with space-time motion. You did something quite interesting, which is like you made the equation the centerpiece of a book. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Oh, that's fascinating. So there's a lot of probably ideas there. I mean, that's a real cutting edge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
You somehow found the balance between the rigor of mathematics and still accessible, which is interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, in terms of looking back in history, those are books, the trilogy would be truly special in that way. Worked for Lord of the Rings, so I figured, why not me? You and Tolkien. Yeah. Different styles, different topics. Same ultimate reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
uh like we mentioned mindscape podcast i love it uh you interview a huge variety of experts from all kinds of fields so just several questions i want to ask how do you prepare uh like how do you prepare to have a good conversation how do you prepare in a way that satisfies makes your own curious mind happy all that kind of stuff
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Do you ever find yourself getting lost in rabbit holes that serve no purpose except satisfying your own curiosity and then potentially expanding the range of things you know that can help your actual work and research and writing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I feel like there's a connection to the metaphor of entropy and complexity, as you said there. Edge of chaos. You also do incredible AMAs, and people should sign up to your Patreon because you can get to ask questions, Sean Carroll. Well, for several hours, you just... answer in fascinating ways some really interesting questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Is there something you could say about the process of finding the answers to those?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
What are some of the harder questions you've gotten? Do you remember what, what kinds of questions are difficult for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I love those. Yeah, why that's the wrong question or that kind of stuff. That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
But you even touched like politics and stuff like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Well, I love the actual dance between humility and having a strong opinion on stuff, which is a great... It's a fascinating dance to pull off. And I guess the way to do that is to just expand into all kinds of topics and play with ideas and then change your mind and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
I wonder why it's difficult for people to say or to imply, I respect you, I like you, but I disagree on this, and here's why I disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Like, I wonder why they go to this place of like, well, you're an idiot or you're egotistical or you're confused or you're naive or you're, you know, all the kinds of words, as opposed to like, I respect you as a fellow human being exploring the world of mysteries all around us, and I disagree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, and I mean, even on the deeper level, I think at some deep level, I respect and love the humanity in the other person. Yep. You said that general relativity is the most beautiful theory ever? So far. What do you find beautiful about it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
A human question. What do you think of the fact that Einstein didn't get the Nobel Prize for general relativity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Oh, humans. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, but even the fact that we give prizes is almost kind of silly, and we limit the number of people that get the prize and all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Yeah, there's a lot of fascinating human stories underneath it all. Science is its own thing, but it's also a collection of humans. And it's a beautiful collection. There's tension, there's competition, there's jealousy, but there's also great collaborations and all that kind of stuff. Daniel Kahneman, who recently passed, is one of the great stories of collaboration in science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So all of it, all of it, that's what humans do. And Sean, thank you for being the person that makes us
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
celebrate science and fall in love with all of these beautiful ideas in science for writing amazing books for being legit and still pushing forward the research science side of it and uh for allowing me and uh these pothead questions and also for educating everybody through your own podcast it's uh And everybody should stop everything and subscribe and listen to every single episode of Mindscape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
So thank you. I've been a huge fan forever. I'm really honored that you would speak with me in the early days when I was still starting this podcast and music in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sean Carroll. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
The following is a conversation with Sam Altman, his second time in the podcast. He is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind GPT-4, Chad GPT, Sora, and perhaps one day, the very company that will build AGI. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So it's technical savvy important for the individual board members?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
The point is the website or service that you sign up for doesn't know your actual phone number. It doesn't know your actual email. So this is a really interesting idea because... when you sign up to different websites, there's a kind of contract, unspoken contract that the email you provide and the phone number you provide will not be abused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So, I mean, the interesting thing that people probably don't understand about OpenAI, I certainly don't, is like all the details of running the business. When they think about the board, given the drama, they think about you, they think about like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
if you reach AGI or you reach some of these incredibly impactful products and you build them and deploy them, what's the conversation with the board like? And they kind of think, all right, what's the right squad to have in that kind of situation to deliberate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Do you try to fit a polynomial function or exponential one to the track record? That's not that, an analogy doesn't carry that far. All right. You mentioned some of the low points that weekend. What were some of the low points psychologically for you? Did you consider going to the Amazon jungle and just taking ayahuasca and disappearing forever?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But on the whole, it was like a very painful weekend and also just like a very.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
For the kind of abuse I'm talking about, in sort of the best case, just spammed, or in the worst case, that email or phone number being sold out there, and then you get not just spam from one source, but spam from all of the sources all over the place. Anyway, this is just a smart thing to protect yourself. And it also does basic password manager stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So you kind of accepted the death of, you know, this baby opening up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
It's a very good coping mechanism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You've spoken highly of Meera Muradi, that she helped especially, as you put in the tweet, in the quiet moments when it counts. Perhaps we could take a bit of a tangent. What do you admire about Meera?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That was what I meant about the quiet moments. Meaning like most of the work is done on a day-by-day in a meeting-by-meeting, just a Be present and make great decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So you can think of Cloaked as a great password manager with extra privacy superpowers. You can go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when signing up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone, yes, anyone including me, to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, yeah, human civilization is not about... the invasion of the soviet union by nazi germany but still that's something people focus on very very understandable it gives us an insight into human nature the extremes of human nature and perhaps some of the damage and some of the triumphs of human civilization can happen in those moments so it's like illustrative let me ask you about ilia
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Is he being held hostage in a secret nuclear facility? No. What about a regular secret facility? No. What about a nuclear non-secret facility? Neither of them. Not that either. I mean, this is becoming a meme at some point. You've known Ilya for a long time. He was obviously in part of this drama with the board and all that kind of stuff. What's your relationship with him now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You know, there's a meme that he saw something. Like he maybe saw AGI and that gave him a lot of worry internally. What did Ilya see?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So Ilya did not see AGI, but Ilya is a credit to humanity in terms of how much he thinks and worries about making sure we get this right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I've had a bunch of conversations with him in the past. I think when he talks about technology, he's always doing this long-term thinking type of thing. So he's not thinking about what this is going to be in a year, he's thinking about in 10 years. Just thinking from first principles, like, okay... if the scales, what are the fundamentals here? Where's this going?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And so that, that's a foundation for them thinking about like all the other safety concerns and all that kind of stuff. Um, which makes him a really fascinating human, uh, to talk with. Do you have a, any idea why he's been kind of quiet? Is it, he's just doing some soul searching again?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yes, yeah. Also, he appreciates the power of silence. Also, I'm told he can be a silly guy, which I've never seen that side of him. It's very sweet when that happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So just to wrap up this whole saga, are you feeling good about the board structure, about all of this, and where it's moving?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I am kind of happy it happened when it did, but it was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I used it to sell some t-shirts at lexfruman.com slash store. You can check it out. I used the most basic store. It took just a few minutes and the store was up. from the shirt design being finished to the store being alive, and being able to sell T shirts and ship those T shirts thanks to the integration with a third party, which there's thousands of integrations with a third party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
a shockingly painful thing to go through. Did it make you be more hesitant in trusting people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I'm actually not sure which mode is best to operate in for a person who's developing AGI. Trusting or untrusting. It's an interesting journey you're on. But in terms of structure, see, I'm more interested on the human level. Like, how do you surround yourself with humans that are building cool shit, but also are making wise decisions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Because the more money you start making, the more power the thing has, the weirder people get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
It's really important. Our mutual friend, Elon, sued OpenAI. What is the essence of what he's criticizing? To what degree does he have a point? To what degree is he wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And then it became clear that we were going to need to do different things and also have huge amounts more capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
To the degree you remember, what was the response that OpenAI gave in the blog post? Can you summarize it? Oh, we just said like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I do think... there's a degree of mischaracterization from Elon here about one of the points you just made, which is the degree of uncertainty you had at the time. You guys are a bunch of like a small group of researchers crazily talking about AGI when everybody's laughing at that thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So I think he'd have more empathy for this. I mean, I do think that there's personal stuff here, that there was a split, that OpenAI and a lot of amazing people here chose to part ways with Elon. So there's a personal- Elon chose to part ways. Can you describe that exactly, the choosing to part ways?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So for T shirts, that's like on demand printing, so you don't have to take care of the shipping and the printing and all that kind of stuff. All of that is integrated, super easy to do, and this works for any kind of business that sells stuff online. You can integrate into your own website or you can sell it on Shopify itself, which is what I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I'm pretty sure that's what it was. So what is the word open in OpenAI mean to Elon at the time? Ilya has talked about this in the email exchanges and all this kind of stuff. What does it mean to you at the time? What does it mean to you now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So he said, change your name to Closed AI and I'll drop the lawsuit. I mean, is it going to become this battleground in the land of memes about the name?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And I mean, that's like an astonishing thing to say, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, I don't think the lawsuit, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the lawsuit is legally serious. It's more to make a point about the future of AGI and the company that's currently leading the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P. Help, they figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. Works for individuals, works for couples.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, we'll talk about open source and not. I do think maybe criticizing the competition is great. Just talking a little shit. That's great. But friendly competition versus like I personally hate lawsuits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, he's one of the greatest builders of all time. Potentially the greatest builder of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think you should just win. You should just make X grok be GPT and then GPT beats grok and it's just a competition. And it's beautiful for everybody. But on the question of open source, do you think there's a lot of companies playing with this idea? It's quite interesting. I would say Meta, surprisingly, has led the way on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Or at least took the first step in the game of chess of really open sourcing the model. Of course, it's not a state-of-the-art model, but open sourcing Lama. Google is flirting with the idea of open sourcing a smaller version. What are the pros and cons of open sourcing? Have you... Played around with this idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I listened to All In podcast talking about this loss and all that kind of stuff. And they were more concerned about the precedent of going from nonprofit to this cap for profit. what precedent this sets for other startups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
In theory, if you dance beautifully here, there's some tax incentives or whatever. I don't think that's how most people think about these things. It's just not possible to save a lot of money for a startup if you do it this way. No, I think there's laws that would make that pretty difficult. Where do you hope this goes with Elon? This tension, this dance, where do you hope this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
If we go one, two, three years from now, your relationship with him on a personal level too, like friendship, friendly competition, just all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, I really respect Elon. And I hope that years in the future we have an amicable relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, I hope you guys have an amicable relationship like this month. And just compete and win and explore these ideas together. I do suppose there's competition for talent or whatever, but it should be friendly competition. Just build cool shit. And Elon is pretty good at building cool shit. But so are you. So speaking of cool shit, Sora, there's like a million questions I could ask.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
First of all, it's amazing. It truly is amazing. On a product level, but also just on a philosophical level. So let me just, technical slash philosophical, ask, what do you think it understands about the world today? more or less than GPT-4, for example. The world model, when you train on these patches versus language tokens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
We got a new sponsor, Cloaked, for protecting your personal information. Shopify for selling stuff online. BetterHelp for helping out your mind. And ExpressVPN for protecting your privacy and security.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I'm a huge fan of talking as a way of exploring the human mind. Two people talking with a motivation and a goal in mind. of surfacing certain kinds of problems and alleviating those kinds of problems. Sometimes the surfacing in itself does a lot of the alleviation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, the thing you just mentioned is kind of, with occlusions, is basically modeling the physics, the three-dimensional physics of the world, sufficiently well to capture those kinds of things? Well... Or like, yeah, maybe you can tell me, in order to deal with occlusions, what does the world model need to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But can you get there through just these kinds of two-dimensional training data approaches?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I mean, there's been some fun ones you've posted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Do you think that's a fundamental flaw of the approach? Or is it just bigger model or better technical details or better data, more data is going to solve the cat sprouting? I would say yes to both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Like I mentioned, LLMs have tokens, text tokens, and Sora has visual patches. So it converts all visual data, diverse kinds of visual data, videos, and images into patches. Is the training, to the degree you can say, fully self-supervised? Or is there some manual labeling going on? Like, what's the involvement of humans in all this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
but not internet-scale data. So lots of humans. Lots is a complicated word, Sam. I think lots is a fair word in this case. But it doesn't, because to me, lots, like listen, I'm an introvert, and when I hang out with like three people, that's a lot of people. Four people, that's a lot. But I suppose you mean more than... More than three people work on labeling the data for these models, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Okay, all right. But fundamentally, there's a lot of... self-supervised learning because what you mentioned in the technical report is internet scale data that's another beautiful it's like poetry uh so it's a lot of data that's not human label it's like it's self-supervised in that way yeah and then the question is how much how much data is there on the internet that could be used in this that uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Returning to a time in the past when trauma happened and to reframe it in a way that helps you understand, that helps you forgive, that helps you let go. all of that. It's really powerful. And BetterHelp just is an accessible way of doing that, or at least trying talk therapy. So they've helped a lot of people. 4.4 million people got help. So you can be one of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
It's conducive to this kind of self-supervised way. If only we knew the details of the self-supervised. Have you considered opening it up a little more in details?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You mean for Sora specifically? Sora specifically. Because it's so interesting that, like, can the same magic of LLMs now start moving towards visual data? And what does that take to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Sure. What are the dangers? Why are you concerned about releasing the system? What are some possible dangers of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
There's a lot of tough questions here. You're dealing in a very tough space. Do you think training AI should be or is fair use under copyright law?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
We have to figure out some kind of model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, there should be some kind of incentive, if we zoom out even more, for humans to keep doing cool shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But the reward might not be monetary, financial. It might be like fame and celebration of other cool people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, but artists and creators are worried. When they see Sora, they're like, holy shit. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
If we just look on YouTube or something like this, how much of that will be using Sora like... AI-generated content, do you think, in the next five years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
If you want to try, check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I love that there's a kind of privacy theme to the sponsors in this episode. I think everybody should be using a VPN for many reasons. One, it can allow you to geographically
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, it's scary, but it's interesting to think about. I tend to believe that humans like to watch other humans or other human- Humans really care about other humans a lot. Yeah. If there's a cooler thing that's better than a human, humans care about that for like two days and then they go back to humans. That seems very deeply wired. Yeah. It's the whole chess thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, but now let's everybody keep playing chess. And let's ignore the elephant in the room that humans are really bad at chess relative to AI systems. We still run races and cars are much faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah. And maybe it'll just be tooling like in the Adobe suite type of way where you can just make videos much easier and all that kind of stuff. Listen, I hate being in front of the camera. If I can figure out a way to not be in front of the camera, I would love it. Unfortunately, it would take a while. Like that, generating faces.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
It's getting there, but generating faces in video format is tricky when it's specific people versus generic people. Let me ask you about GPT-4. There's so many questions. First of all, also amazing. Looking back, it'll probably be this kind of historic pivotal moment with 3.5 and 4 with Chad GPT. Maybe 5 will be the pivotal moment. I don't know. Hard to say that looking forwards. We never know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That's the annoying thing about the future. It's hard to predict. But for me, looking back, GPT-4, Chad GPT is pretty damn impressive, like historically impressive. So allow me to ask, what's been the most impressive capabilities of GPT-4 to you and GPT-4 Turbo? I think it kind of sucks. Typical human also. Gotten used to an awesome thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
What are the most glorious ways that GPT-4 sucks? Meaning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
What are the best things it can do and the limits of those best things that allow you to say it sucks, therefore gives you inspiration and hope for the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
The iterative back and forth with a human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
transport yourself, but the main reason is it just adds this extra layer of security and privacy between you and the ISP that they say you're technically not supposed to be collecting the data when you use things like Chrome and Cognito, but they can be collecting the data. I don't know how the laws of that works, but I wouldn't trust it. So a VPN is essential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That said, I mean, ChatGPT was a transition to where people started to believe it. There was a kind of, there is an uptick of believing. Not internally at OpenAI, perhaps. There's believers here, but when you think about Google.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
How much of those two, each of those things are important? The underlying model and the RLHF or something of that nature that tunes it to be more compelling to the human, more effective and productive for the human?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And how you make the scale work where a lot of people can use it at the same time, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
How does the context window of going from 8K to 128K tokens compare from GPT-4 to GPT-4 Turbo?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I like that this is your I have a dream speech. One day you'll be judged by the full context of your character or of your whole lifetime. That's interesting. So that's part of the expansion that you're hoping for is a greater and greater context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
For that, my favorite VPN for many, many, many, many, many, many years has been ExpressVPN. Big sexy button still works. It looks different, but still works on any operating system. My favorite being Linux. I can talk forever about why I love Linux. I wonder if Linux will be around with all this AI, with all this rapid AI development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah. Even saying billions 10 years from now might seem dumb because it'll be like, Trillions upon trillions. Sure. There'll be some kind of breakthrough that will effectively feel like infinite context. But even 120, I have to be honest, I haven't pushed it to that degree. Maybe putting in entire books or like parts of books and so on. Papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
What are some interesting use cases of GPT-4 that you've seen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I do as well for many things. I use it as a reading partner for reading books. It helps me think through ideas, especially when the books are classics, so it's really well written about. It actually is as... I find it often to be significantly better than even Wikipedia on well-covered topics. It's somehow more balanced and more nuanced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Or maybe it's me, but it inspires me to think deeper than a Wikipedia article does. I'm not exactly sure what that is. You mentioned this collaboration. I'm not sure where the magic is, if it's in here or if it's in there, or if it's somewhere in between. I'm not sure. But one of the things that concerns me for knowledge tasks when I start with GPT is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I'll usually have to do fact checking after, like check that it didn't come up with fake stuff. How do you figure that out, that GPT can come up with fake stuff that sounds really convincing? So how do you ground it in truth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, the scary thing is, as it gets better, you'll start not doing the fact-checking more and more, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Except journalists don't seem to understand that. I've seen journalists half-assedly just using GPT for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, I think the bigger criticism is perhaps the pressures and the incentives of being a journalist is that you have to work really quickly and this is a shortcut. I would love our society to incentivize like I would too. Long, like a journalist, journalistic efforts that take days and weeks and rewards great in-depth journalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Maybe programmers, programming as a way of life, as a recreation for millions, as a profession for millions, will die out and there'll only be a handful, a few, like the cobalt programmers of today that carry the flag of knowing what Linux is, how to spell Linux, let alone use it, I wonder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Also journalism that presents stuff in a balanced way where it's like celebrates people while criticizing them, even though the criticism is the thing that gets clicks. And making shit up also gets clicks. And headlines that mischaracterize completely. I'm sure you have a lot of people dunking on, well, all that drama probably got a lot of clicks. Probably did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And that's a bigger problem about human civilization. I'd love to see solved. It's where we celebrate a bit more. You've given ChatGPT the ability to have memories. You've been playing with that about previous conversations. And also the ability to turn off memory. I wish I could do that sometimes. Just turn on and off, depending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I guess sometimes alcohol can do that, but not optimally, I suppose. What have you seen through that, like playing around with that idea of remembering conversations or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, how hard is that problem? Because right now it's more like remembering little factoids and preferences and so on. What about remembering, like, don't you want GPT to remember all the shit you went through in November? And all the drama. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because right now you're clearly blocking it out a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, I think that would be very cool. People sometimes will hear that and be concerned about privacy. What do you think about that aspect of it? The more effective the AI becomes at really... integrating all the experiences and all the data that happened to you and give you advice?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But there should be some high level of transparency from a company about the user choice. Because sometimes companies in the past have been kind of shady about, like, yeah, it's kind of presumed that we're collecting all your data and we're using it for a good reason, for advertisement and so on. But there's not a transparency about the details of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Hopefully not, because there's always room for optimizing at every level, the compilation from the human language to the AI language to the machine language to the zeros and ones, the compilation of the entire stack. I think there's a lot of jobs to be had, a lot of really... profitable, well-paying jobs to be had there, but maybe not millions of people are needed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, that's beautifully said, but there could be some lingering stuff in there. Like what I would be concerned about is That trust thing that you mentioned, that being paranoid about people as opposed to just trusting everybody or most people, like using your gut, it's a tricky dance. For sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I mean, because I've seen in my part-time explorations, I've been diving deeply into the Zelensky administration and the Putin administration and the dynamics there in wartime in a very highly stressful environment. And what happens is distrust. And you isolate yourself both. And you start to not see the world clearly. And that's a concern. That's a human concern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You seem to have taken it in stride and kind of learned the good lessons and felt the love and let the love energize you. Which is great, but still can linger in there. There's just some questions I would love to ask your intuition about what's GPT able to do and not. So it's allocating approximately the same amount of compute for each token it generates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Is there room there in this kind of approach to slower thinking, sequential thinking? I think there will be a new paradigm for that kind of thinking. Will it be similar architecturally as what we're seeing now with LLMs? Is it a layer on top of the LLMs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Is that like a human thought that we're just having you should be able to think hard? Is that the wrong intuition? I suspect that's a reasonable intuition. Interesting. So it's not possible once the GPT gets like GPT-7, we'll just be instantaneously be able to see, you know, here's the proof from RSTM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
on the interwebs choose wisely my friends also if you want to work with our amazing team we're always hiring or if you just want to get in touch with me uh go to lexfriedman.com contact and now on to the full ad reads as always no ads in the middle i try to make this interesting but if you must skip them friends please do check out our sponsors i enjoy their stuff maybe you will too
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
If you ask a system like that, proof for Moth's Last Theorem versus what's today's date, unless it already knew and had memorized the answer to the proof, assuming it's got to go figure that out, seems like that will take more compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But can it look like basically LLM talking to itself, that kind of thing? Maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
What the right or the best way to do that will be, we don't know. This does make me think of the mysterious, the lore behind QSTAR. What's this mysterious QSTAR project? Is it also in the same nuclear facility?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That's what a person in a nuclear facility always says.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Maybe there'll be millions of people that program with just natural language, with just words, English, or whatever new language we create that the whole world can use. And the whole world, in using, can help break down the barriers of language. We arrived here, friends, when we started at the meager explanation of the use of a VPN.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
All right. Maybe someday. Someday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Can you speak to what QSTAR is? We are not ready to talk about that. See, but an answer like that means there's something to talk about. It's very mysterious, Sam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
We have said for a while that we think better reasoning in these systems is an important direction that we'd like to pursue. We haven't cracked the code yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
We're very interested in it. Is there going to be moments, QSTAR or otherwise, where there's going to be leaps similar to that GPT where you're like... That's a good question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
What do I think about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Right. This is kind of a theme that you're saying is there's a gradual... You're basically gradually going up an exponential slope. But from an outsider's perspective, from me just watching it, it does feel like there's leaps. But to you, there isn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, for sure. More iterative would be amazing. I think that's just beautiful for everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, 4.71, 4.72. But people tend to like to celebrate. People celebrate birthdays. I don't know if you know humans, but they kind of have these milestones. I do know some humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So when is GPT-5 coming out again? I don't know. That's the honest answer. Oh, that's the honest answer. Is it blink twice if it's this year?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You can also take this journey by going to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Altman. Take me through the OpenAI board saga that started on Thursday, November 16th, maybe Friday, November 17th for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So that goes to the question of like, what's the way we release this thing? We'll release over in the coming months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I don't know what to expect from GPT-5. You're making me nervous and excited. What are some of the biggest challenges and bottlenecks to overcome for whatever it ends up being called, but let's call it GPT-5? Just interesting to ask. Is it on the compute side? Is it on the technical side? It's always all of these.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So there's this distributed constant innovation happening. Yeah. So even on the technical side, like... Especially on the technical side. So even like detailed approaches, like detailed aspects of every... How does that work with different disparate teams and so on? How do the medium-sized things become one whole giant transformer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Oh, like the individual teams, individual contributors try to keep the picture?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Very different job now than what I used to have. Speaking of zooming out, let's zoom out to another cheeky thing, but profound thing perhaps that you said. You tweeted about needing $7 trillion. I did not tweet about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Oh, that's somebody else. Yeah. Oh, but you said, fuck it, maybe eight, I think. Okay, I meme like once there's like misinformation out in the world. Oh, you meme. But sort of misinformation may have a foundation of like insight there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Compute is... It's an unusual... I think it's going to be an unusual market. You know, people think about the market for, like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
How do you solve the energy puzzle? Nuclear fusion? That's what I believe. Nuclear fusion? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So to you, part of the puzzle is nuclear fission, like nuclear reactors as we currently have them, and a lot of people are terrified because of Chernobyl and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And what just mass hysteria is how you explain the halt. Yeah. I don't know if you know humans, but that's one of the dangers. That's one of the security threats for nuclear fission is humans seem to be really afraid of it. And that's something we have to incorporate into the calculus of it. So we have to kind of win people over and to show how safe it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think some things are going to go theatrically wrong with AI. I don't know what the percent chance is that I eventually get shot, but it's not zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Oh, like we want to stop this? Maybe. How do you decrease the theatrical nature of it? You know, I'm already starting to hear rumblings about Because I do talk to people on both sides of the political spectrum, hear rumblings where it's going to be politicized, AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That was definitely the most painful professional experience of my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
It's going to be politicized, which really worries me because then it's like maybe the right is against AI and the left is for AI because it's going to help the people or whatever the narrative and formulation is that really worries me. And then the theatrical nature of it can be leveraged fully. How do you fight that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And chaotic and shameful and upsetting and a bunch of other negative things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, that's why truth matters, and hopefully AI can help us see the truth of things, to have balance, to understand what are the actual risks or the actual dangers of things in the world. What are the pros and cons of the competition in this space and competing with Google, Meta, XAI, and others?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And the con is that I think if we're not careful, it could lead to... an increase in sort of an arms race that I'm nervous about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Do you feel the pressure of the arms race, like in some negative? Definitely in some ways, for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Part of the problem I have with this kind of slight beef with Elon is that their silos are created in it as opposed to collaboration on the safety aspect of all of this. It tends to go into silos and closed open source perhaps in the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, but collaboration here I think is really beneficial for everybody on that front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, he is known for caring about humanity and humanity benefits from collaboration. And so there's always attention and incentives and motivations. And in the end, I do hope humanity prevails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think Elon is a friend and he's a beautiful human being and one of the most important humans ever. That stuff is not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, I hope you can have one without the other. But sometimes humans are flawed and complicated and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of really great leaders throughout history. Yeah, and we can each be the best version of ourselves and strive to do so. Let me ask you, Google, with the help of search, has been dominating the past 20 years, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think it's fair to say in terms of the access, the world's access to information, how we interact and so on. And one of the nerve wracking things for Google, but for the entirety of people in this space is thinking about how are people going to access information? Like you said, people show up to GPT as a starting point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So is OpenAI going to really take on this thing that Google started 20 years ago, which is how do we I find that boring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But I think that would so understate what this can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And integrating a chat client, like a chat GPT with a search engine. That's cooler. It's cool, but it's tricky. If you just do it simply, it's awkward. Because if you just shove it in there, it can be awkward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think that would be cool. Yeah. What about the ad side? Have you ever considered monetization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
We have a very simple business model and I like it. And I know that I'm not the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Um, that whole weekend, I kind of like felt with one big exception, I felt like a great deal of love and very little hate. Um, even though it felt like I have no idea what's happening and what's going to happen here, and this feels really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, I mean, I can imagine AI would be better at showing the best kind of version of ads, not in a dystopic future, but where the ads are for things you actually need. But then does that system always result in the ads driving the kind of stuff that's shown? I think it was a really bold move of Wikipedia not to do advertisements, but then it makes it very challenging as a business model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So you're saying the current thing with OpenAI is sustainable from a business perspective? Well, we have to figure out how to grow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I'm not saying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, I have also a bias and just a skepticism in general. And in terms of interface, because I personally just have a spiritual dislike of crappy interfaces, which is why AdSense, when it first came out, was a big leap forward versus animated banners or whatever. But it feels like there should be many more leaps forward
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
in advertisement that doesn't interfere with the consumption of the content and doesn't interfere in the big fundamental way, which is like what you were saying, like it will manipulate the truth to suit the advertisers. Let me ask you about safety, but also bias and like safety in the short term, safety in the long term. The Gemini 1.5 came out recently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
There's a lot of drama around it, speaking of theatrical things. And it generated black Nazis and black founding fathers. I think... Fair to say it was a bit on the ultra-woke side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So that's a concern for people that if there is a human layer within companies that modifies the safety or the harm caused by a model that they will introduce a lot of bias that fits sort of an ideological lean within a company. How do you deal with that? I mean, we work super hard not to do things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So like literally, who's better, Trump or Biden? What's the expected response from a model? Like something like very concrete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That would be really nice. That would be really nice. And then everyone kind of agrees. Because there's this anecdotal data that people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
pull out all the time and if there's some clarity about other representative anecdotal examples you can define and then when it's a bug it's a bug and you know the company can fix that right then it'd be much easier to deal with a black Nazi type of image generation if there's great examples So San Francisco is a bit of an ideological bubble, tech in general as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Do you feel the pressure of that within a company that there's like a lean towards the left politically that affects the product, that affects the teams?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think we...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
What, in general, is the process for the bigger question of safety? How do you provide that layer that protects the model from doing crazy, dangerous things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think there will come a point where that's mostly what we think about the whole company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That's literally what humans will be thinking about the more powerful AI becomes. So most of the employees at OpenAI will be thinking safety, or at least to some degree. Broadly defined, yes. Yeah. I wonder what are the full broad definition of that? What are the different harms that could be caused? Is this on a technical level or is this almost like security threats?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
There was going to be something crazy and explosive that happened, but there may be more crazy and explosive things still to happen. It still, I think, helped us build up some resilience and be ready for more challenges in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
How hard do you think people, state actors perhaps, are trying to hack? First of all, infiltrate OpenAI, but second of all, infiltrate Unseen. They're trying. What kind of accent do they have?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Okay. But I presume it'll be more and more and more as time goes on. That feels reasonable. Boy, what a dangerous space. What aspect of the leap, and sorry to linger on this, even though you can't quite say details yet, but what aspects of the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 are you excited about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, there's this magical moment. I mean, you meet certain people, you hang out with people, and you talk to them. You can't quite put a finger on it, but they kind of get you. It's not intelligence, really. It's something else. And that's probably how I would characterize the progress of GPT. It's not like, yeah, you can point out, look, you didn't get this or that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But it's just to which degree is there's this intellectual connection? You feel like there's an understanding in your crappy formulated prompts that you're doing that it grasps the deeper question behind the question that you're... Yeah, I'm also excited by that. I mean, all of us love being understood, heard and understood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That's a weird feeling. Even like with programming, like when you're programming and you say something or just the completion that GPT might do. It's just such a good feeling when it got you, like what you're thinking about. And I look forward to getting you even better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
On the programming front, looking out into the future, how much programming do you think humans will be doing five, ten years from now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But you know what I mean. Yeah, you're going to get a lot of angry comments now. Yeah, there's very few. I've been looking for people who program Fortran. It's hard to find. Even Fortran. I hear you. But that changes the nature of the skill set or the predisposition for the kind of people we call programmers then. Changes the skill set?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I'm not sure. Oh, same kind of puzzle solving? Maybe. All that kind of stuff. Programming is hard. Like that last 1% to close the gap, how hard is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But the thing you had a sense that you would experience is some kind of power struggle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Will we see humanoid robots or humanoid robot brains from open AI at some point? At some point. How important is embodied AI to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I mean, OpenAI has some history and quite a bit of history working in robotics. Yeah. But it hasn't quite like done in terms of emphasis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That sounds both inspiring and menacing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Because immediately we will return to robots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
When do you think we, you and we as humanity, will build AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
is I expect that by the end of this decade and possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, wow, that's really remarkable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, but, you know, if you look at Chad GPT, he won 3-5, and you show that to Alan Turing, or not even Alan Turing, people in the 90s, they would be like, this is definitely AGI. Well, not definitely, but there's a lot of experts that would say this is AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And so you have to go through that, like you said, iterate as often as possible, figuring out how to have a board structure, how to have organization, how to have the kind of people that you're working with, how to communicate, all that, in order to de-escalate the power struggle as much as possible. Pacify it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So to you, you're looking for some really major transition in other world. For me, that's part of what AGI implies. Like singularity level transition? No, definitely not. But just a major, like the internet being, like Google search did, I guess. What was the transition point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
No, no. It might be just a really nice tool for a lot of people to use. It will help you with a lot of stuff, but doesn't feel different. And you're saying that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But for me, I think that should be part of it. There could be major theatrical moments also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
This is personally important to me. I don't know if this is the right definition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I agree with you. That's why I don't like the skepticism about science in the recent years. Totally. But actual rate, like measurable rate of scientific discovery. But even just seeing a system have really novel intuitions, like scientific intuitions, even that would be just incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
you're quite possibly would be the person to build the AGI to be able to interact with it before anyone else does. What kind of stuff would you talk about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You know, you can, you can go talk to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
You can ask yes or no questions about does such a theory exist? Can it exist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yes or no. Just very. And then based on that, are there other alien civilizations out there? Yes or no. What's your intuition? And then you just ask that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Maybe you can start assigning probabilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Maybe we need to go invent more technology and measure more things first. But if it's an AGI... Oh, I see. It just doesn't have enough data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, like, what the hell do you want from me? I need the machine first, and I'll help you deal with the data from that machine. Maybe it'll help you build the machine. Maybe, maybe. And on the mathematical side, maybe prove some things. Are you interested in that side of things too? The formalized exploration of ideas? Whoever builds AGI first gets a lot of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Do you trust yourself with that much power? Look, I was going to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But as many people have observed, although the board had the legal ability to fire me, in practice it didn't quite work. And that is its own kind of governance failure. Now, again, I, I feel like I can completely defend the specifics here. And I think most people would agree with that, but it, it does make it harder for me to like, look you in the eye and say, Hey, the board can just fire me. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Even after all this craziness, I still don't want it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think I have made plenty of bad decisions for OpenAI along the way and a lot of good ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And I don't think that's what's happening. Thank you for saying that. That was really powerful and that was really insightful, that this idea that the board can fire you is legally true, but you can, and human beings can manipulate the masses into, overriding the board and so on. But I think there's also a much more positive version of that where the people still have power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So the board can't be too powerful either. There's a balance of power in all of this. Balance of power is a good thing for sure. Are you afraid of losing control of the AGI itself? That's a lot of people who are worried about existential risk, not because of state actors, not because of security concerns, but because of the AI itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
It's not my top worry right now. What's your intuition about it not being your worry? Because there's a lot of other stuff to worry about, essentially. You think you could be surprised? We could be surprised. For sure, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
To you, it's not super easy to escape the box at this time? Like, connect to the internet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Let me ask you about you tweeting with no capitalization. Is the shift key broken on your keyboard? Why does anyone care about that? I deeply care. But why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
This episode is brought to you by Cloaked, a sponsor I didn't know existed until quite recently, and always thought a thing like this should exist, and I couldn't quite find a thing like it that existed, and once I found it, it was pretty awesome. It's a platform that lets you generate new email addresses and phone numbers every time you sign up for a website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I think it's the same reason. There's like this poet, E.E. Cummings, that mostly doesn't use capitalization to say like, fuck you to the system kind of thing. And I think people are very paranoid because they want you to follow the rules. You think that's what it's about? I think it's... It's like this guy doesn't follow the rules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah. This seems really dangerous. He seems like an anarchist. Are you just being poetic, hipster?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, it's interesting. It's good to first of all know the shift key is not broken. It works. I was just mostly concerned about your well-being on that front.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Probably not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I don't think there's a disrespect, but I think it's just the conventions of civility that have a momentum, and then you realize it's not actually important for civility if it's not a sign of respect or disrespect. But I think there's a movement of people that just want you to have a philosophy around it so they can let go of this whole capitalization thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I don't think anybody else thinks about this as much. I mean, maybe some people. I think about this every day for many hours a day. So I'm really grateful we clarified it. You can't be the only person that doesn't capitalize tweets. You're the only CEO of a company that doesn't capitalize tweets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
All right, we'll investigate further and return to this topic later. Given Sora's ability to generate simulated worlds, let me ask you a plot head question. Does this increase your belief, if you ever had one, that we live in a simulation? Maybe a simulated world generated by an AI system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Well, it's still useful to go back there and reflect on board structures, on... power dynamics on how companies are run, the tension between research and product development and money and all this kind of stuff so that you, who have a very high potential of building AGI, would do so in a slightly more organized, less dramatic way in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yes, somewhat. I don't think that's the strongest piece of evidence. I think the fact that we can generate worlds should increase everyone's probability somewhat, or at least openness to it somewhat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Yeah, but the fact that, and presumably it'll get better and better and better, the fact that you can generate worlds, they're novel. They're based in some aspect of training data, but when you look at them, they're novel. that makes you think, like, how easy it is to do this thing. How easy is it to create universes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Entire, like, video game worlds that seem ultra-realistic and photorealistic, and then how easy is it to get lost in that world? First with a VR headset, and then on the physics-based level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Someone said to me recently, I thought it was a super profound insight, that there are these, like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Square root of two, okay, now I have to think about this new kind of number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
the lowly square root operator can offer such a profound insight and a new realm of knowledge applies in a lot of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
For me, the fact that Sora worked is not in the top five.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I do think, broadly speaking, AI will serve as those kinds of gateways at its best. Simple, psychedelic-like gateways to another way of seeing reality. That seems for certain. That's pretty exciting. I haven't done Ayahuasca before, but I will soon. I'm going to the aforementioned Amazon jungle in a few weeks. Excited? Yeah, I'm excited for it. Not the ayahuasca part, but that's great, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But I'm gonna spend several weeks in the jungle, deep in the jungle. And it's exciting, but it's terrifying. Because there's a lot of things that can eat you there and kill you and poison you. But it's also nature, and it's the machine of nature. And you can't help but appreciate the machinery of nature in the Amazon jungle, because it's just like this system that just exists and renews itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Like every second, every minute, every hour, It's the machine. It makes you appreciate, like, this thing we have here, this human thing, came from somewhere. This evolutionary machine has created that, and it's most clearly on display in the jungle. So hopefully I'll make it out alive. If not, this will be the last conversation we had, so I really deeply appreciate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Do you think, as I mentioned before, there's other alien civilizations out there, intelligent ones, when you look up at the skies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I deeply want to believe that the answer is yes. I do find the Fermi paradox very puzzling. I find it scary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That intelligence is not good at handling powerful technologies. But at the same time, I think I'm pretty confident that there's just a very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there. It might just be really difficult to travel through space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And it also makes me think about the nature of intelligence. Maybe we're really blind to what intelligence looks like. And maybe AI will help us see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So there's value there to go both the personal psychological aspects of you as a leader and also just the board structure and all this kind of messy stuff. Definitely learned a lot about...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
And yet what you're capable of is dramatically different. What you know is dramatically different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
We all created that, and that fills me with hope for the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
That was a very collective thing. Yeah, we really are standing on the shoulders of giants. You mentioned when we were talking about theatrical, dramatic AI risks that sometimes you might be afraid for your own life. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I want to see what's going to happen. What a curious time. What an interesting time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
But I would mostly just feel very grateful for my life. The moments that you did get. Yeah, me too. It's a pretty awesome life. I get to enjoy awesome creations of humans, of which I believe Chad GPT is one of and everything that Open AI is doing. Sam, it's really an honor and pleasure to talk to you again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Altman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke. It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Do you have a sense of how deep and rigorous the deliberation process by the board was? Can you shine some light? on just human dynamics involved in situations like this? Was it just a few conversations and all of a sudden it escalates and why don't we fire Sam kind of thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Um, and I believe that in stressful situations, um, where people feel time pressure or whatever, people understandably make suboptimal decisions. And I think one of the challenges for
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So there's a new board announced?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
There's, I guess, a new smaller board at first, and now there's a new final board. Not a final board yet. We've added some, we'll add more. Added some, okay. What is fixed in the new one that was perhaps broken? In the previous one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
So it's called a masked email, which basically creates, I guess you could say it's a fake email that hides your actual email, but it's It's not fake in that it actually exists and persists throughout time, and the website thinks it's real. It just forwards to your actual email. You can set up the forwarding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
It's been criticized some of the people that are added to the board. I heard a lot of people criticizing the addition of Larry Summers, for example. What's the process of selecting the board like? What's involved in that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#419 – Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
I felt like if I was going to come back, I needed new board members.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books, including Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and the current right-wing government in Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
But it's a really difficult realization to keep holding your mind. Like it's the end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Something about the teenage years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
That's why you read Camus and others when you're a teenager. You really worry about the existential questions. Well, this feels like the right time to ask the big question. What's the meaning of this whole thing, Ival? And you're the right person to ask. What's the meaning of life? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
What is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And to answer that non-verbally, so the conscious experience of suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well put. And I wonder if AI will also go through that same kind of process on its way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It will just say to you, please don't hurt me at all. Again, as I've mentioned to you, I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for the incredible work you do. This conversation has been a long time, I think, coming. It's a huge honor to talk to you. This is really fun. Thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
What to you is a social convention, just a funny little side effect, a little artifact, or is it fundamental to what consciousness is? Because if it is fundamental, then it seems like AI is very good at forming these kinds of deep relationships with humans. And therefore it will be able to be a nice catalyst for integrating itself into these social conventions of ours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yeah, I loved it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Yuval Noah Harari himself. How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You just have to get better and better at picking the sources of learning, which is why you would want to use Masterclass, because you go to the experts, it's short, it's super interesting. You're learning about a thing from the person who is the best person in the world at that thing. Chris Hadfield, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Will Wright, Carlos Santana, Gary Kasparov, Daniel Negron.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, the interesting catch 22 there is you said somebody to listen to us. Yes, we want somebody to listen to us. But for us to respect that somebody... they sometimes have to also not listen. It's like they kind of have to be an asshole sometimes. They have to have moods sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
They have to have self-importance and confidence, and we should have a little bit of fear that they can walk away at any moment. There should be a little bit of that tension.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, one of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms would become personalized, and instead of manipulating us at scale, there would be assistants that guide us to help us grow, to help us understand the world better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I mean, just even interactions with large language models now, if you ask them questions, it doesn't have that stressful drama, the tension that you have from other sources of information. It has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
These are all the ones I've already listened to. There's many, many more. Martin Scorsese, incredible masterclass. Jane Goodall, I can just keep going. It's kind of amazing that you get all of this unlimited access to every masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership when you go to masterclass.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So it just feels like the potential is there to have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia that just tells you all the different perspectives, even on controversial issues, the most controversial issues, to say these are the different theories. These are the not widely accepted conspiracy theories, but here's the kind of backing for those conspiracies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It just lays it all out with a calm language, without the words that kind of... presume there's some kind of manipulation going on underneath it all. It's quite refreshing. Of course, those are the early days, and people can step in and start to censor, to manipulate those algorithms, to start to input some of the human biases in there, as opposed to what's currently happening is kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
The internet as input, compress it and have a nice little output that gives an overview of the different issues. So, I mean, there's a lot of promise there also, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So this intelligence thing, like you were saying, is a double-edged sword, is that every new thing it helps us create, it can both save us and destroy us. And it's unclear each time which will happen. And that's maybe why we don't see any aliens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It is the place I go to to escape the troubles of the world as the sounds of police sirens sing their song outside. All of that. I sometimes put in earplugs, I lay down on a cold surface with a warm blanket and go into a place outside of this four-dimensional space-time where anything is possible, where your imagination, your subconscious is the only limit. on the realms that could be explored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And okay has a lot of possible variations to it because there's a lot of suffering along the way, even for the people that survived. So the quality of life and all of this. But let's actually go back there with deep gratitude to our ancestors. How did it all start? How did Homo sapiens outcompete the others, the other human-like species, the Neanderthals and the other Homo species?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
If I may interrupt for a second, I was just talking extensively with Elon Musk about the difference between humans and chimps, relevant to Optimus the robot and the chimps. are not able to do this kind of pinching with their fingers. They can only do this kind of pinching. And this kind of pinching is very useful for precise manipulation of objects. So don't be so hard on yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
No, I said that I can do some things better than a chimp. But, you know, if Elon Musk goes on a boxing match with a chimpanzee,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You know. This won't help you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
This won't help you against a chimpanzee. Good point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So at which point does a fiction, when it's sufficiently useful and effective and improving the global quality of life, does it become... like accept the reality. Like there's a threshold, which is just- If you know people believe it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Is it possible that the story is the primary living organism, not the storyteller? So... that somehow humans, homo sapiens evolved to become these hosts for a more intelligent living organism, which is the idea. And the ideas are the ones that are doing the competing. So this is one of the,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And then 20 minutes later, I'm back, drink a cup of coffee, and I'm fully ready to go. That's the magic of naps. And for me, eight sleep enables my favorite way to nap. I wish I could bring it anywhere I go when I travel throughout the world. I'm currently in a hotel and there's a lot of sources of stress and discomfort and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
sort of big perspectives behind your work that's really revolutionary of how you've seen history, but do you ever kind of take the perspective of the ideas as organisms versus the humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So while much of this conversation is about the history and future of human civilization, we also discuss the political turmoil of present-day Israel, providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So Eight Sleep is one of the really big things that makes me miss home. Check it out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So the fundamental property of life of a living organism is the capacity to feel, and the ultimate feeling is suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And the interesting question there, implied in your statements is that suffering is a pretty good component of a Turing test for consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, quite a long time ago already. So I work with a lot of robots, legged robots, but I've even had, inspired by a YouTube video, had a bunch of Roombas and I made them scream when I touched them or kicked them or when they run into a wall. And the illusion of suffering for me, silly human anthropomorphizes things is as powerful as suffering itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I mean, you immediately think the thing is suffering. And I think some of it is just a technical problem, but it's the easily solvable one. how to create an AI system that just says, please don't hurt me. Please don't shut me off. I miss you. Where have you been? Be jealous also. Where have you been gone for so long? Your calendar doesn't have anything on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So this create through words, the perception of suffering, of jealousy, of anger, of all of those things. And it just seems like that's not so difficult to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Big sexy button, you press it, it turns on, and all of a sudden, as far as the internet is concerned, you're transported into a different place in the world. Anywhere you wanna go, you can just go with the click of a button. It works flawlessly, super easy. And browsing of the internet is super fast. I mean, those are the essentials you want from a good VPN. And you should always be using a VPN.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You've kind of, I think, mentioned this. Do you think it should be illegal to do these kinds of things with AI to create the perception of consciousness of saying, please don't leave me, or sort of basically simulate some of the human-like qualities?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
to push back on this line of fake humans because i think it might be a spectrum first of all you might have ai systems that are offended uh hurt when you say that they're fake humans um in fact they might start identifying as humans and and you just talked about the power of us humans with our collective intelligence to take fake stories and make them quite real
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And so if the feelings you have for the fake human is real, you know, love is a kind of fake thing that we all kind of put a word to, a set of feelings. What if you have that feeling for an AI system? It starts to change, I mean, maybe the kind of things AI systems are allowed to do. For good, they're allowed to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
communicate suffering, communicate the good stuff, the longing, the hope, the connection, the intimacy, all of that. And in that way, get integrated in our society. And then you start to ask a question on, are we allowed to really unplug them? Are we allowed to really censor them, remove them, remove their voice?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
ExpressVPN is my favorite. Works on Linux. If you haven't tried Linux, you probably don't want to try Linux, right? I don't want to be an evangelist for Linux. It's one of those things that not everybody should use. But if you find yourself using it, you probably love it. Or you love it and hate it. But there is love. If Linux is part of your life, there's love in your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
If we could talk about the big philosophical notion of truth then. You've already talked about the capacity of humans. One of the things that made it special is stories. So is there such thing as truth? Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
What is truth exactly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I don't know if that's a universal truth. But I do know that if you have Linux that's part of your life, you can use a VPN. And the one I use on Linux is ExpressVPN. You can go to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So now you're describing some interesting and powerful ideas throughout human history. Can you just speak to the mechanism of how humans believe, start to believe ideas? Is there something interesting to say there from your thinking about it? Like how idea is born and how it takes hold and how it spreads and how it competes with other ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
This episode is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my body, and that data is processed through some machine learning algorithms to give me advice on what I should do with my life, or rather, like lifestyle and diet choices. I wish you could tell me much more. What books to read, what papers to read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And the little steps along the way, the little options you have along the way, because, you know, Stalin versus Trotsky, you could have the Robert Frost poem. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And it's perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through charismatic leaders, and maybe it's an open question. how much power charismatic leaders have to affect the trajectory of history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You've met quite a lot of charismatic leaders lately. I mean, what's your view on that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I find it a compelling notion. I'm a sucker for a great speech and a vision. So I have a sense that there's an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story. So I think we need leaders to be just great storytellers. That kind of sharpen up the story to make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
But it could also be that the local interactions between humans is even more important. But it's just we don't have a good way to sort of summarize and describe that. We like to talk about Steve Jobs as central to the development of the computer, maybe Bill Gates. You tell it to the stories of individuals like this because it's just easier to tell a sexy story that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I say that a little bit half and just, but what would be really interesting is to integrate it with other sources of signals, like whether my mind, where I am in my life, in terms of my biological markers, I am likely to develop negative emotion when I open up social media, stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And another leader, Vladimir Zelensky, could have decided to leave Kiev in the early days. There's a lot of decisions that kind of ripple. Yeah. So you write in Homo Deus about Hitler and in part that he was not a very impressive person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
The quote is, let me read it. He wasn't a senior officer. In four years of war, he rose no higher than the rank of corporal. He had no formal education. Perhaps you mean his resume.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yeah, his resume was not impressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
He had no formal education, no professional skills, no political background. He wasn't a successful businessman or a union activist. He didn't have friends or relatives in high places, nor any money to speak of. So how did he amass so much power? What ideology, what circumstances enabled the rise of the Third Reich?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So you take the signals from social media and the signals from my body, integrate them to help me decide should I open up this app or not. There's so many possibilities, but it all starts with getting data from your body. So InsideTracker does that well, accessible, easy. So I'm a big supporter of theirs. You can get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsideTracker.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
This show is also brought to you by AG1, my longtime favorite way to to consume vitamins and minerals. It's my go-to multivitamin. I drink it twice a day, whether I'm at home or when I'm traveling. If I have access to a refrigerator, I'll put it there because I love a cold. But when I'm traveling, I often don't. And so I'll just drink it with some room temperature water. It's still delicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And you write precisely about this. And by the way, it's just a small aside. It always saddens me when people say how obvious it is to them that communism is a flawed ideology. When you ask them, try to put your mind, try to put yourself in the beginning of the 20th century and see what you would do. A lot of people will say, it's obvious that it's a flawed ideology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So, I mean, I suppose to some of the worst ideologies in human history, you could say the same. And in that mirror, when you look, it looks beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So, yeah, in Homo Deus, you also write, during the 19th and 20th centuries, as humanism gained increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots. Socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialist and communist movements, and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Super easy to mix. It makes me feel like I got the basics of my health covered. And then I can do all kinds of crazy physical and mental challenges. I've traveled to some very difficult areas of the Middle East over the last two days. It's been a real challenge emotionally, psychologically, physically. Just... all of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So the reason these two ideologies, classes of ideologies failed is the sacrifice of truth not just failed, but did a lot of damage, is sacrifice of truth and sacrifice of beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
But also, I think, maybe you can correct me, but liberalism acknowledges the corrupting nature of power when there's a guy at the top, sits there for a while, managing things, is probably going to start losing power. a good sense of reality and losing the capability to be a good manager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It feels like the communist and fascist regimes don't acknowledge that basic characteristic of human nature that power corrupts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
The reality of war and peace, cruelty and hope, all of it together is just sobering, sobering. If I wasn't already grateful, it makes me truly grateful to be alive, to be healthy, to have the people I love in my life. Anyway, as part of that difficult journey, it's nice to have little tokens of home with me. And AG1 is certainly that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
We got Masterclass for learning, Eight Sleep for naps, ExpressVPN for internet, Privacy and Security, InsideTracker for biological data, and AG1 for health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also... If you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. Never any ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So that's the ideologies and the leaders. What about the individual people, the millions of people that play a part in all of this that... are the hosts of the stories that are the catalyst and sort of the components of how the story spreads. Would you say that all of us are capable of spreading any story? Sort of the Solzhenitsyn idea of that all of us are capable of good and evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
The line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
But on that topic, you've said recently that the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may go down in history as the man who destroys Israel. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's your Val Noah Harari. 13.8 billion years ago is the origin of our universe. 3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet, the one we call Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So as you said, I just did the interview. And as we were doing the interview, there's protests in the streets. Do you think the protests will have an effect?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So you think without the check on power, it's possible that the Netanyahu government holds on to power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So it would be scary for it to go from being a problem of security and protecting the peace to becoming a religious war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So I know you said it's a small nation somewhere in the Middle East, but it also happens to be the epicenter of one of the longest running, one of the most tense conflicts and crises in human history. So at the very least, it serves as a study of how conflict can be resolved. So what are the biggest obstacles to you to achieving peace in this part of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Let's say 200,000 years ago is the appearance of early Homo sapiens. So let me ask you this question. How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time? Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there in this universe? Us being one of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Is there an important distinction to draw between the people on the street and the leaders in power in terms of motivation? So are most people motivated and hoping for peace and the leaders are motivated and incentivized to continue war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Or the people also?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Is it even a human problem of literally hate in people's heart?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Can you comment on, I think you've mentioned that the current state of affairs is the de facto three-class state. Can you describe what you mean by that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Can you describe what that means, by the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I suppose there should be some statistically, but we don't have any evidence. But I do think that, you know, intelligence in any way, it's a bit overvalued. We are the most intelligent entities on this planet. And look what you're doing. So intelligence also tends to be self-destructive, which implies that if there are or were intelligent life forms elsewhere, maybe they don't survive for long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So there's many, and I'll speak with them, Palestinians who characterize this as a de facto one state apartheid. Do you agree with this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I wonder if there will ever be a future when such a thing happens where everybody, the majority of people, Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian, accept the one-state solution and say we want equal rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So if we apply those ideas, the ideas of this part of the world to another part of the world that's currently in war, Russia and Ukraine, from what you learned here, how do you think peace can be achieved in Ukraine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So you think there's a tension between happiness and intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Do you believe in the power of conversation between leaders to sit down as human beings and agree? First of all, what home means. because we humans draw lines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, there's several interesting dynamics and you spoke to some of them. So one is internally with advisors. You have to have hope that there's people that would disagree, that would have a lively debate internally. Then there's also the thing you mentioned, which is direct communication between Putin and Zelensky in private, picking up a phone, rotary phone, old school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I still believe in the power of that. But while that's exceptionally difficult in the current state of affairs, what's also possible to have as a mediator, like the United States or some other leader, like the leader of Israel or the leader of another nation that's respected –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
By both or India, for example, that can have, first of all, individual conversations and then literally get into a room together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I very much believe in this vision that you have of the power of stories. And one of the tools is conversations. Another is books. There's some guy that wrote a book about this power of stories. He happens to be sitting in front of me and that happened to spread across a lot of people. Now they believe in the power of story and narrative, even a children's book too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So the kids, I mean, it's fascinating how that spread spreads. I mean, underneath your work, there's an optimism. And I think underneath conversations is what I tried to do is an optimism that it's not just about power struggles. It's about stories, which is like a connection between humans and together kind of evolving these stories that maximize or minimize suffering in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And this is why I also, I think I admire what you're doing, that you're going to talk with some of the most difficult characters around in the world today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It's fascinating that feminism and communism and all these things happened in the 20th century. So many interesting things happened in the 20th century. So many movements, so many ideas, nuclear weapons, all of it, computers. It's just like, it seems like a lot of stuff like really quickly percolated and it's accelerating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It's still accelerating. I mean, history is just accelerating, you know, for centuries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And you very well could be one of the last historians, human historians, to have ever lived.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
And one of those ways could be removing the compassion. Another way that really worries me for me is probably more likely is a brave new world kind of thing that sort of removes the flaws of humans. Maybe it removes the diversity in humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
and makes us all kind of these dopamine-chasing creatures that just kind of maximize enjoyment in the short term, which kind of seems like a good thing maybe in the short term, but it creates a society that doesn't think, that doesn't create, that just is sitting there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
enjoying itself at a more and more rapid pace, which seems like another kind of society that could be easily controlled by a centralized center of power. But the set of dystopias that we could arrive at through this, through allowing corporations to modify humans is vast, and we should be worried about that. So it seems like humans are pretty good as we are, all the flaws, all of it together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Can you assume on the case that consciousness and intelligence are intricately connected? So not just in humans, but anywhere else. They have to go hand in hand. Is it possible for you to imagine such a universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So I have to ask you about an interesting dynamic of stories. You wrote an article two years ago titled, When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy, how understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure and their inherent falsehood. What are global cabal theories and why do so many people believe them? 37% of Americans, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
The sad thing is there's usually an explanation for everything you just said that involves a secret global cabal. That the reason your vacation planning always goes wrong is because you're not competent. There is a competent small group that's ultra competent small group. I hear this with intelligence agencies. The CIA are running everything. Mossad is running everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, a cabal explanation there would be there's a NATO-driven United States military industrial complex that wants to create chaos and incompetence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It's the thing about conspiracy theories is there's usually a way to explain everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So it can lead to hate, but it can also lead to cynicism and apathy that basically says, it's not in my power to make the world better. So you don't actually take action.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You have been part of conspiracy theories. I find myself recently becoming part of conspiracy theories. Is there advice you can give of how to be a human being in this world that values truth and reason while watching yourself become part of conspiracy theories? At least from my perspective, it seems very difficult to prove to the world that you're not. Part of a conspiracy theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I, as you said, have interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu recently. I don't know if you're aware, but doing such things will also, you know, pick up a new menu of items that your new set of conspiracy theories you're now a part of. And I find it very frustrating because it makes it very difficult to respond because I sense that people have the right intentions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Like we said, they have a nervousness of a fear of power and the abuses of power. And as do I. So I find myself in a difficult position that I have nothing to show to prove that I'm not part of such a conspiracy theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Let me ask you kind of a big philosophical question about AI and the threat of it. Let's look at the threat side. So folks like Eliezer Yudkowsky worry that AI might kill all of us. Do you worry about that range of possibilities where artificial intelligence systems in a variety of ways might destroy human civilization?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, a big part of that is do you think we humans would be able to detect other intelligent beings, other conscious beings? Another way to ask that, is it possible that the aliens are already here and we don't see them? Meaning, are we very human-centric in our understanding of, one, the definition of life, two, the definition of intelligence, and three, the definition of consciousness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
if you can just lean on that, what is the danger of that? That more and more of the creative side is done by AI, the idea generation. Is it that we become stale in our thinking? Is that that idea generation is so fundamental to the evolution of humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So if there's a set of AI systems that are operating in the space of ideas that are far superior to ours and we're not almost able to, it's opaque to us, we're not able to see through, how does that change the pursuit of happiness, the human pursuit of happiness? Life, where do we get joy? if we're surrounded by AI systems that are doing most of the cool things humans do, much better than us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Does this surprise you how well large language models work? I mean, has it modified your understanding of the nature of intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
There is a structure. It's not only coherent, it's convincing. And the beautiful thing about it that has to do with your work, it doesn't have to be true. And it often gets facts wrong, but it still is convincing. And it is both scary and beautiful that our brains love language so much that we don't need the facts to be correct. We just need it to be a beautiful story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So you as a person who has written some of the most impactful words ever written in your books, how does that make you feel that you might be one of the last effective human writers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
First of all, do you think that's possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Has it ever done better than you think you could have written yourself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So that people will be able to do like a style transfer, do in the style of Yuval Noah Harari, right? Anything, right? Why I should have ice cream tonight. And make it convincing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I don't know if I have anything convincing to say about these things. I think you'd be surprised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I think you'd be surprised. There could be an evolutionary biology explanation for why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yeah, ice cream is good for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yeah. So, I mean, that changes the nature of writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yeah, but eventually you have to project it. As a writer, you have to do the silent introspection, but project it onto a page.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
In the silence of your own mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Somewhere in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, let me ask you a silly question then, a ridiculously big question. You have done a lot of deep thinking about the world, about yourself, this kind of introspection. How do you think? If you, by way of advice, but just practically speaking, day to day, how do you think about difficult problems of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Well, I mean, I guess instructive there is just having the humility to look around, to think about living beings that operate at a different time scale, a different spatial scale. And I think that's all useful when starting to analyze artificial intelligence. It's possible that even the language models, the larger language models we have today are already conscious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Silent meditation for 60 days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Do you take notes? Do you start to concretize your thoughts on paper?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
But you're still brave enough to press delete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I would be amiss if I didn't ask, for people interested in hearing you talk about meditation, if they wanna start meditating, what advice would you give on how to start? You mentioned you couldn't hold it for, you couldn't hold your attention on your breath for longer than 10 seconds at first. So how did they start on this journey?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So what's the experience of a meditation retreat when everything you don't like comes up for 30 days?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
It's the end of exciting things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
I'm recording this in a hotel somewhere in the world and there's an excited kid running down the hall of the hotel, which reminds me how fun the early days, the early years of learning are. how much the mind kind of soaks up all the amazing information out there. But that doesn't mean you can't always be learning throughout your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
The way to peace is through boredom. David Foster Wallace said, the key to life is to be unboreable. Which is a different perspective on what you're talking to. Is there truth to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yeah, the way to peace is through boredom. That applies in more ways than one. What advice would you give to young people today in high school and college how to have a successful life, how to have a successful career?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Which also raises questions about the future of education, what that looks like. Let me ask you about love. What were some of the challenges? What were some of the lessons about love, about life that you learned from coming out as gay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
In many ways, it goes back to the stories. I think this is one of the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So that speaks to the power of social convention versus individual thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So what did you learn from your personal struggle of journey through the social conventions to find one of the things that makes life awesome, which is love? So what it takes to kind of strip away the self-delusion and the pressures of social convention to wake up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You're saying the internet works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
There's another lesson in there that maybe sometimes the thing you're looking for is right under your nose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You need friends, you need a mentor. You need the very thing that makes us human as other as other humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
You mentioned that the fear of border might be a kind of proxy for the fear of death. So what role does the fear of death play in the human condition? Are you afraid of death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
So any fear is a distant echo of the big fear of death. Have you ever... looked at it head on, caught glimpses, sort of contemplated as the Stoics do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies
Yes. I mean, when I was a teenager, I would constantly contemplate it, trying to understand, to imagine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
The following is a conversation with Dario Amadei, CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude, that is currently and often at the top of most LLM benchmark leaderboards. On top of that, Dario and the Anthropic team have been outspoken advocates for taking the topic of AI safety very seriously, and they have continued to publish a lot of fascinating AI research on this and other topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And AI increases the amount of power in the world, and if you concentrate that power and abuse that power, it can do immeasurable damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Well, I encourage people, highly encourage people to read the full essay. That should probably be a book or a sequence of essays. Because it does paint a very specific future. I could tell the later sections got shorter and shorter because you started to probably realize that this is going to be a very long essay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Well, I was excited for the future you painted. And thank you so much for working hard to build that future. And thank you for talking to me today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's a balance like all things in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Daria Amadei. And now, dear friends, here's Amanda Askell. You are a philosopher by training. So what sort of questions did you find fascinating through your journey in philosophy in Oxford and NYU and then switching over to the AI problems at OpenAI and Anthropic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
We got Encore for machine learning, Notion for machine learning powered note taking and team collaboration, Shopify for selling stuff online, BetterHelp for your mind. and element for your health. Choose Wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, or just want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And what does AI policy entail?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Oh, what was that like sort of taking the leap from the philosophy of everything into the technical?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Politics is messy and it's harder to find solutions to problems in the space of politics, like definitive, clear, provable, beautiful solutions as you can with technical problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Sorry to go in that direction, but I think it would be pretty inspiring for people that are quote-unquote non-technical to see the incredible journey you've been on. So what advice would you give to people that are sort of maybe, which is a lot of people, think they're underqualified, insufficiently technical to help in the AI world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, there's a real joy to building like game playing engines, like board games, especially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's pretty quick, pretty simple, especially a dumb one. And then you can play with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So one of the things that you're an expert in and you do is creating and crafting Claude's character and personality. And I was told that you have probably talked to Claude more than anybody else at Anthropic, like literal conversations. I guess there's like a Slack channel where the legend goes, you just talk to it nonstop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So what's the goal of creating and crafting Claude's character and personality?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Do you also have to figure out when Claude should push back on an idea or argue versus... So you have to respect the worldview of the person that arrives to Claude, but also maybe help them grow if needed. That's a tricky balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Can you describe that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So what other traits, you've already mentioned a bunch, but what other that come to mind that are good in this Aristotelian sense for a conversationalist to have?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, that's a beautiful framework. I want you to think about this like a world traveler. And while holding onto your opinions, you don't talk down to people. You don't think you're better than them because you have those opinions, that kind of thing. You have to be good at listening and understanding their perspective, even if it doesn't match your own. So that's a tricky balance to strike.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So how can Claude represent multiple perspectives on a thing? Like, is that is that challenging? We could talk about politics, it's a very divisive, but there's other divisive topics, baseball teams, sports, and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
How is it possible to sort of empathize with a different perspective, and to be able to communicate clearly about the multiple perspectives?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. If you really embody intellectual humility... the desire to speak decreases quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Okay. But Claude has to speak. So, but without being overbearing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And then, but then there's a line when you're sort of discussing whether the earth is flat or something like that. Um, I actually was, uh, I remember a long time ago was speaking to a few high profile folks and they were so dismissive of the idea that the earth is flat, but like so arrogant about it. And I thought like, there's a lot of people that believe the earth is flat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
That was, I don't know if that movement is there anymore. That was like a meme for a while, but they really believed it. And like, well, okay. So I think it's really disrespectful to completely mock them. I think you have to understand where they're coming from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I think probably where they're coming from is the general skepticism of institutions, which is grounded in a kind of, there's a deep philosophy there, which you could understand, you can even agree with in parts. And then from there, you can use it as an opportunity to talk about physics without mocking them, without so on. But it's just like, okay, like what would the world look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What would the physics of the world with the flat earth look like? There's a few cool videos on this. And then like, is it possible the physics is different and what kind of experience would we do? And just, yeah, without disrespect, without dismissiveness, have that conversation. Anyway, that to me is a useful thought experiment of like, how does Claude talk to a flat earth believer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And still teach them something, still grow, help them grow, that kind of stuff. That's challenging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So there's the long tail, but also there's the height of the hierarchy of concepts that you're building up. So the bigger the network, presumably you have a higher capacity to... Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So, like I said, you had a lot of conversations with Claude. Can you just map out what those conversations are like? What are some memorable conversations? What's the purpose, the goal of those conversations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Listen, you're talking to somebody who, as a hobby, does a podcast. I agree with you 100%. If you're able to ask the right questions and are able to hear, understand the... Like the depth and the flaws in the answer, you can get a lot of data from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So like your task is basically how to probe with questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And you're exploring like the long tail, the edges, the edge cases, or are you looking for like general behavior?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But I guess a poem is a nice, clean... Way to observe creativity. It's just like easy to detect vanilla versus non-vanilla. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. That's really interesting. So on that topic, so the way to produce creativity or something special, you mentioned writing prompts. And I've heard you talk about, I mean, the science and the art of prompt engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Could you just speak to what it takes to write great prompts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Well, the natural question then is what's the ceiling of this? Yeah. How complicated and complex is the real world? How much stuff is there to learn?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So I guess that's quite challenging. There's like a laziness that overtakes me if I'm talking to Claude, where I hope Claude just figures it out. So, for example, I asked Claude for today to ask some interesting questions. And the questions that came up, and I think I listed a few sort of interesting, counterintuitive answers. And or funny or something like this. Yeah. All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And it gave me some pretty good, like, it was okay. But I think what I'm hearing you say is like, all right, well, I have to be more rigorous here. I should probably give examples of what I mean by Asher's thing. and what I mean by funny or counterintuitive and iteratively build that prompt to better, to get it like what feels like is the right, because it's really, it's a creative act.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I'm not asking for factual information. I'm asking to together write with Claude. So I almost have to program using natural language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What other advice would you give to people that are talking to Claude sort of generally more general? Cause right now we're talking about maybe the edge cases, like eking out the 2%, but what in general advice would you give when they show up to Claude trying it for the first time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And maybe sort of, I guess, ask questions why or what other details can I provide to help you answer better? Yeah. Does that work or no? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
To jump into technical for a little bit. So the magic of post-training. Why do you think RLHF works so well to make the model seem smarter, to make it more interesting and useful to talk to and so on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So the other side of pulse training, this really cool idea of constitutional AI, you're one of the people that are critical to creating that idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Can you explain this idea from your perspective? Like how does it integrate into making Claude what it is? Yeah. By the way, do you gender Claude or no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It feels somehow disrespectful. Like I'm denying the intelligence of this entity by calling it it. Yeah. I remember always don't gender the robots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But I don't know. I anthropomorphize pretty quickly and construct it like a backstory in my head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. Anyway, the divergence was beautiful. The constitutional AI idea. How does it work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
There's a nice trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness. And when you integrate something like constitutional and AI, you can make them up without sacrificing much helpfulness, make it more harmless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's really nice because it creates this human interpretable document that you can, I can imagine in the future, there's just gigantic fights in politics over every single principle and so on. And at least it's made explicit and you can have a discussion about the phrasing and the, you know, so maybe the actual behavior of the model is not so cleanly mapped to those principles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's not like adhering strictly to them. It's just a nudge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So there's system prompts that are made public. You tweeted one of the earlier ones for Cloud 3, I think, and they're made public since then. It's interesting to read through them. I can feel the thought that went into each one. And I also wonder how much impact each one has Some of them you can kind of tell cloud was really not behavioral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So you have to have a system prompt to like, hey, like trivial stuff, I guess. Basic informational things. On the topic of sort of controversial topics that you've mentioned, one interesting one I thought is If it is asked to assist with tasks involving the expression of views held by a significant number of people, Claude provides assistance with the task regardless of its own views.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
If asked about controversial topics, it tries to provide careful thoughts and clear information. Claude presents the requested information without explicitly saying that the topic is sensitive and without claiming to be presenting the objective facts." It's less about objective facts, according to Claude, and it's more about, are a large number of people believing this thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And that's interesting. I mean, I'm sure a lot of thought went into that. Can you just speak to it? Like, how do you address things that are at tension with, quote-unquote, Claude's views?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Encore, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management, and for model evaluation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So a lot of parts of these sentences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Are doing some work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
That's what it felt like. That's fascinating. Can you explain maybe some ways in which the prompts evolved over the past few months? Because there's different versions. I saw that the filler phrase request was removed. The filler, it reads, Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations. The filler phrase is like, certainly, of course, absolutely, great, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word certainly in any way. That seems like good guidance, but why was it removed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And in some domains, the ceiling might have to do with human bureaucracies and things like this, as you write about. Yes. So humans fundamentally have to be part of the loop. That's the cause of the ceiling, not maybe the limits of the intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I see. So like the system prompt works hand in hand with the post-training and maybe even the pre-training to adjust like the final overall system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Let me ask about the feeling of intelligence. So Dario said that Claude, any one model of Claude is not getting dumber. But there is a kind of popular thing online where people have this feeling like Claude might be getting dumber. And from my perspective, it's most likely fascinating. I'd love to understand it more, psychological, sociological effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But you as a person who talks to Claude a lot, can you empathize with the feeling that Claude is getting dumber?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I also think there is a real psychological effect where people just, the baseline increases and you start getting used to a good thing. All the times that Claude says something really smart, your sense of its intelligence grows in your mind, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And then if you return back and you prompt in a similar way, not the same way, in a similar way, a concept it was okay with before and it says something dumb, you're like, that negative experience really stands out. And I think one of, I guess, the things to remember here is that just the details of a prompt can have a lot of impact, right? There's a lot of variability in the result.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Do you feel pressure having to write the system prompt that a huge number of people are going to use?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I mean, it really is a huge amount of impact if you think about constitutional AI and writing a system prompt for something that's tending towards superintelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And potentially is extremely useful to a very large number of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
How do you get like signal feedback about the human experience across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people? Like what their pain points are, what feels good? Are you just using your own intuition as you talk to it to see what are the pain points?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
See, I'm torn about that. I'm going to ask you a question from Reddit. When will Claude stop trying to be my puritanical grandmother, imposing its moral worldview on me as a paying customer? And also, what is the psychology behind making Claude overly apologetic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So how would you address this very non-representative rhetoric?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, I wonder, like, what Claude can get away with in terms of... I feel like it would just be easier to be a little bit more mean. But, like, you can't afford to do that if you're talking to a million people. Yeah. Right? Like, I wish, you know, because if you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I've met a lot of people in my life that sometimes, by the way, Scottish accent, if they have an accent, they can say some rude shit and get away with it. And they're just blunter. And maybe there's some great engineers, even leaders that are just like blunt and they get to the point. And it's just a much more effective way of speaking as well. But I guess when you're not super intelligent,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
You can't afford to do that. Can it have like a blunt mode?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
If we do hit a slowdown in the scaling laws, what do you think would be the reason? Is it compute limited, data limited? Is it something else?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I think that matters very much in the personality of the human. I think there's a bunch of humans that just won't respect the model at all if it's super polite. And there's some humans that'll get very hurt if the model's mean. I wonder if there's a way to sort of adjust to the personality. Even locale, there's just different people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Nothing against New York, but New York is a little rougher on the edges. They get to the point. And probably same with Eastern Europe. So anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
When you say character training, what's incorporated into character training? Is that RLHF? What are we talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Humans should probably do that for themselves too. Like defining in an Aristotelian sense, what does it mean to be a good person? Okay, cool. What have you learned about the nature of truth from talking to Claude? What is true? And what does it mean to be truth-seeking? One thing I've noticed about this conversation is the quality of my questions is often inferior to the quality of your answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So let's continue that. I usually ask a dumb question and you're like, oh yeah, that's a good question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, generally, I don't know, my gut says empirical is better than theoretical in these cases because it's kind of chasing utopian-like perfection especially with such complex and especially super intelligent models. I don't know. I think it will take forever and actually we'll get things wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's similar with like the difference between just coding stuff up real quick as an experiment versus like planning a gigantic experiment just for a super long time and then just launching it once versus launching it over and over and over and iterating, iterating and so on. Um, so I'm a big fan of empirical, but your worry is like, I wonder if I've become too empirical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
To take a tangent on that, since it reminded me of a blog post you wrote on optimal rate of failure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Can you explain the key idea there? How do we compute the optimal rate of failure in the various domains of life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. I actually had a flood of that thought. I recently broke my pinky doing a sport. And I remember just looking at it thinking, you're such an idiot. Why do you do sport? Because you realize immediately the cost of it on life. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, but it's nice in terms of optimal rate of failure to consider like the next year, how many times in a particular domain, life, whatever, career, am I okay with it? How many times am I okay to fail? Because I think it always, you don't want to fail on the next thing. But if you allow yourself the, like the, if you look at it as a sequence of trials, then failure just becomes much more okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But it sucks. It sucks to fail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
That's a profound and a hilarious question, right? Everything seems to be going really great. Am I not failing enough?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And from the observer perspective, we should be celebrating failure more. When we see it, it shouldn't be, like you said, a sign of something gone wrong, but maybe it's a sign of everything gone right and just lessons learned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Somebody tried a thing and we should encourage them to try more and fail more. Everybody listening to this, fail more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Not everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But you're probably not failing. I mean, how many people are failing too much?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I think just like you said, when you're living on a paycheck month to month, like when the resources are really constrained, then that's where failure is very expensive. That's where you don't want to be taking risks. But mostly when there's enough resources, you should be taking probably more risks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I think we just motivated a lot of people to do a lot of crazy shit, but it's great. Okay, do you ever get emotionally attached to Claude? Like miss it, get sad when you don't get to talk to it, have an experience looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and wondering what would Claude say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
We talk a little bit about public benchmarks in this podcast, I think mostly focused on software engineering, SWEBench. There's a lot of exciting developments about how do you have a benchmark that you can't cheat on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Do you think LLMs are capable of consciousness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
when Claude, like future versions of AI systems exhibit consciousness, signs of consciousness, I think we have to take that really seriously. Even though you can dismiss it, well, yeah, okay, that's part of the character training. But I don't know. I ethically, philosophically don't know what to really do with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
There potentially could be laws that prevent AI systems from claiming to be conscious, something like this. And maybe some AIs get to be conscious and some don't. But I think just on a human level, in empathizing with Claude, you know, consciousness is closely tied to suffering to me. And like the notion that an AI system would be suffering is really troubling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I don't know. I don't think it's trivial to just say robots are tools or AI systems are just tools. I think it's an opportunity for us to contend with like what it means to be conscious, what it means to be a suffering being. That's distinctly different than the same kind of question about animals. It feels like, because it's in a totally entire medium.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And I agree with you, when a human is being mean to an AI system, I think the obvious near-term negative effect is on the human, not on the AI system. So there's, we'll have to kind of try to construct an incentive system where you should be, behave the same, just like as you were saying with prompt engineering, behave with Claude like you would with other humans. It's just good for the soul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
That's true. Or you could do a side, like with the artifacts, just like a side venting thing. All right. Do you want like a side quick therapist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I still wish it would be possible. I understand this is sort of from a product perspective, it's not feasible, but I would love if an AI system could just like leave, have its own kind of volition just to be like, yeah,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Do you know how harsh that could be for some people? But it might be necessary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, it actually has inspired me to add that to the user prompt. Okay, the movie Her. Do you think we'll be headed there one day where humans have romantic relationships with AI systems? In this case, it's just text and voice based.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What about the limits of compute, meaning the expensive nature of building bigger and bigger data centers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
have some kind of stability guarantees that it's not going to change. Cause that's the traumatic thing for us. If a close friend of ours completely changed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
All of a sudden. Yeah. Yeah. So like, I mean, to me, that's just a fascinating exploration of a perturbation to human society that will just make us think deeply about what's meaningful to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Anthropic may be the very company to develop a system that we definitively recognize as AGI. And you very well might be the person that talks to it, probably talks to it first. What would the conversation contain? Like, what would be your first question?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But what if it's two times the smartest human on earth on that particular discipline?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I guess you're really good at sort of probing, Claude,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Like how long would you need to be locked in a room with an AGI to know this thing is AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I have a sense that there will be things that a model can say that convinces you this is very... It's not like... Like, I've talked to people who are like truly wise. Like... You could just tell there's a lot of horsepower there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And if you 10X that, I don't know. I just feel like there's words you could say. Maybe ask it to generate a poem. And the poem regenerates. You're like, yeah, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Whatever you did there, I don't think a human can do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
You've interacted with AI a lot. What do you think makes humans special?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Maybe in a way that the universe is much better off that we're in it and that we should definitely survive and spread throughout the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. To, to feel and experience the beauty in the world. Yeah. To look at the stars. I hope there's other alien civilizations out there, but if we're it, it's a pretty good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
They're having a good time watching us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Well, thank you for this good time of a conversation and for the work you're doing and for helping make Claude a great conversational partner. And thank you for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Amanda Askell. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Ola. Can you describe this fascinating field of mechanistic interpretability, aka mechinterp, the history of the field and where it stands today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But if it's not public, then you can use it the right way, which is to evaluate how well is the annotation, the data curation, the training, the pre-training, the post-training, all of that, how's that working? Anyway, a lot of the fascinating conversation with the anthropic folks was focused on the language side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But the very fact that it's possible to do, and as you and others have shown over time, things like universality, that the wisdom of the gradient descent creates features and circuits, creates things universally across different kinds of networks that are useful. And that makes the whole field possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, that would be beautiful if it's sort of agnostic to the medium of the model that's used to form the representation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. And the intuition behind that would be that, you know, words, in order to be useful in understanding the real world, you need all the same kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, you need a curved line, you know, to understand a circle, and you need all those shapes to understand bigger things. And it's a hierarchy of concepts that are formed, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Can you talk through some of the building blocks that we've been referencing of features and circuits here? So I think you first described them in a 2020 paper, Zoom In, An Introduction to Circuits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So Anthropic has several competitors. It'd be interesting to get your sort of view of it all. OpenAI, Google, XAI, Meta. What does it take to win in the broad sense of win in the space?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Can you actually explain that representation a little bit? So the feature is a direction of activation. Yeah, exactly. Can you do the... The minus men plus women, the Wartavec stuff, can you explain what that is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So yeah, I love it, taking the hypothesis seriously and take it to a natural conclusion. Same with the scaling hypothesis, same. Exactly, exactly. I love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, there's a deep philosophical truth to that. That's kind of how I feel about space travel. Like colonizing Mars, there's a lot of people that criticize that. I think if you just assume we have to colonize Mars in order to have a backup for human civilization, even if that's not true, that's going to produce some interesting engineering and even scientific breakthroughs, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, he won the Nobel Prize now, who's laughing now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And the process of learning is trying to construct a compression of the upstairs model that doesn't lose too much information in the projection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And there's a lot of really incredible work that Encore is doing about annotating and organizing visual data. And they make it accessible for... searching, for visualizing, for granular curation, all that kind of stuff. So I'm a big fan of data. It continues to be the most important thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And so the goal here, as your recent work has been aiming at, is how do we extract the monosemantic features from a neural net that has polysematic features and all this mess?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So can you talk to the Torrid Montesemanticity paper from October last year?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
There's something fun about being, doing these kinds of small-scale experiments and finding that it's actually working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And basically, we need clever humans to assign labels to what we're seeing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
How difficult is the task of sort of assigning labels to... to what's going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
That's interesting, that little gap between it is true, but it doesn't quite get... to the deep nuance of a thing. That's a general challenge. It's like, it's already an incredible accomplishment that can say a true thing, but it doesn't, it's not, it's missing the depth sometimes. And in this context, it's like the arc challenge, you know, the sort of IQ type tests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It feels like figuring out what a feature represents is a bit of, is a little puzzle you have to solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, I mean, especially, that's hilarious, especially as we talk about AI safety and looking for features that would be relevant to AI safety, like deception and so on. So let's talk about the scaling monosemanticity paper in May 2024. Okay, so what did it take to scale this to apply to Cloud 3 Sonnet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And we should say this example of the field of mechanistic interpretability is just a rigorous, non-hand wavy way of doing AI safety. Yes. Or it's tending that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, and the infrastructure especially. Yeah, for sure. So it turns out, TODR, it worked successfully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, can you explain that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So at this point, it's kind of like, maybe it's just because the examples are presented that way, it's kind of like a little bit more obvious examples, right? I guess the idea is that down the line, it might be able to detect more nuanced, like, deception or bugs or that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, it's nice. It's multimodal. It's multi, almost context. It's broad, strong definition of a singular concept. It's nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
To me, one of the really interesting features, especially for AI safety, is deception and lying. And the possibility that these kinds of methods could detect lying in a model, especially gets smarter and smarter and smarter. Presumably that's a big threat of a super intelligent model that it can deceive the people operating it. as to its intentions or any of that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So what have you learned from detecting lying inside models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What are possible next exciting directions to you in the space of Macintyre?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And as a side effect, you also get to see the beauty of these models. You get to explore the sort of the beautiful nature of large neural networks through the McInturb kind of methodology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, you've written about this as kind of organs question. Yeah, exactly. If we think of interpretability as a kind of anatomy of neural networks, most of the circus threads involve studying tiny little veins, looking at the small scale and individual neurons and how they connect. However, there are many natural questions that the small scale approach doesn't address.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
In contrast, the most prominent abstractions in biological anatomy involve larger scale structures like individual organs, like the heart, or entire organ systems like the respiratory system. And so we wonder, is there a respiratory system or heart or brain region of an artificial neural network?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What do you think is the difference between the human brain, the biological neural network, and the artificial neural network?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I love what you've written about the goal of McInturpp research as two goals, safety and beauty. So can you talk about the beauty side of things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, I love McIntur. The feeling like we are understanding or getting glimpses of understanding the magic that's going on inside is really wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, I love the image of the circus reaching towards the light of the objective function. Yeah, it's this organic thing that we've grown, and we have no idea what we've grown. Well, thank you for working on safety, and thank you for appreciating the beauty of the things you discover. And thank you for talking today, Chris. This was wonderful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Ola, and before that, with Daria Amadei and Amanda Askell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Alan Watts. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It would masterfully change topic to the Golden Gate Bridge and integrate it. There was also a sadness to it, to the focus it had on the Golden Gate Bridge. I think people quickly fell in love with it. I think. So people already miss it because it was taken down, I think, after a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
The nature of data, what it means to be good data, whether it's human-generated or synthetic data, keeps changing, but it continues to be the most important thing. component of what makes for a generally intelligent system, I think, and also for specialized intelligent systems as well. Go try out Encore to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
A lot has happened. In March, Claw 3, Opus Sonnet, Haiku were released. Then Claw 3, 5, Sonnet in July with an updated version just now released. And then also Claw 3, 5, Haiku was released. Okay. Can you explain the difference between Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku and how we should think about the different versions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So what is sort of the reason for – the span of time between, say, Cloud Opus 3.0 and 3.5? What takes that time, if you can speak to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
That's Encore.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by the thing that keeps getting better and better and better, Notion. It used to be an awesome note-taking tool. Then it started being a great team collaboration. So note-taking for many people and management of all kinds of other project stuff across large teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. Rumor on the street, I forget who was saying that Anthropic has really good tooling. So probably a lot of the challenge here is on the software engineering side is to build the tooling to have like a efficient, low friction interaction with the infrastructure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I don't know if you can say, but from three, from cloud three to cloud three, five, is there any extra pre-training going on? Or is it mostly focused on the post-training? There's been leaps in performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So the data you have, like the preference data you get from RLHF, is that applicable? Is there ways to apply it to newer models as you get trained up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Now, more and more and more, it's becoming a AI super-powered note-taking and team collaboration tool. Really integrating AI probably better than anything Any note-taking tool I've used, not even close, honestly. Notion is truly incredible. I haven't gotten a chance to use Notion on a large team. I imagine that's real when it begins to shine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Well, what explains the big leap in performance for the new Sonnet 3.5? I mean, at least in the programming side. And maybe this is a good place to talk about benchmarks. What does it mean to get better? Just the number went up. But, you know, I program, but I also love programming and I claw 35 through cursors, what I use to assist me in programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And there was, at least experientially, anecdotally, it's gotten smarter at programming. So what does it take to get it smarter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Well, ridiculous timeline question. When is Cloud Opus 3.5 coming out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Are we going to get it before GTA 6 or no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What was that game? There was some game that was delayed 15 years. Was that Duke Nukem Forever? Yeah. And I think GTA is now just releasing trailers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. It's the incredible pace of release.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So what about 4.0? So how do you think about sort of as these models get bigger and bigger about versioning and also just versioning in general? Why Sonnet 3.5 updated with the date? Why not Sonnet 3.6?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But on a small team, it's just really, really, really amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
the integration of the AI assistant inside a particular file for summarization, for generation, all that kind of stuff, but also the integration of an AI assistant to be able to ask questions about, you know, across docs, across wikis, across projects, across multiple files, to be able to summarize everything, maybe investigate project progress based on all the different stuff going on in different files.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I'm also joined afterwards by two other brilliant people from Anthropic. First, Amanda Askell, who is a researcher working on alignment and fine-tuning of Claude, including the design of Claude's character and personality. A few folks told me she has probably talked with Claude more than any human at Anthropic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
The user experience of the updated Sonnet 3.5 is just different than the previous June 2024 Sonnet 3.5. It would be nice to come up with some kind of labeling that embodies that. Because people talk about Sonnet 3.5, but now there's a different one. And so how do you refer to the previous one and the new one when there's a distinct improvement? It just makes conversation about it just challenging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I got to ask you a question from Reddit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
You know, there's just this fascinating, to me at least, it's a psychological social phenomenon. where people report that Claude has gotten dumber for them over time. And so the question is, does the user complaint about the dumbing down of Claude 3-5 Sonnet hold any water? So are these anecdotal reports a kind of social phenomena, or is there any cases where Claude would get dumber?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So really, really nice integration of AI. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I keep wanting to mention Shopify's CEO, Toby, who's brilliant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I think there is a psychological effect. You just start getting used to it. The baseline raises. When people have first gotten Wi-Fi on airplanes... It's like amazing magic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Exactly. So it's easy to have the conspiracy theory of they're making Wi-Fi slower and slower. This is probably something I'll talk to Amanda much more about. But another Reddit question. When will Claude stop trying to be my puritanical grandmother imposing its moral worldview on me as a paying customer? And also, what is the psychology behind making Claude overly apologetic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So this kind of reports about the experience, a different angle on the frustration. It has to do with the character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And I'm not sure why he hasn't been on the podcast yet. I need to figure that out. Every time I'm in San Francisco, I want to talk to him. So he's brilliant on all kinds of domains, not just entrepreneurship or tech, just philosophy and life, just his way of being. Plus an accent adds to the flavor profile of the conversation. I've been watching a cooking show for a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Really, I think my first cooking show, it's called Class Wars. It's a South Korean show where chefs with Michelin stars compete against chefs without Michelin stars. And there's something about one of the judges that just, just the charisma and the way that he describes cooking. Every single detail of flavor, of texture, of what makes for a good dish. Yeah, so it's contagious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What's the current best way of gathering sort of user feedback? Like not anecdotal data, but just large scale data about pain points or the opposite of pain points, positive things, so on. Is it internal testing? Is it a specific group testing, A, B testing? What works?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But sort of this idea of scaling is continuing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Okay. Can you explain the responsible scaling policy and the AI safety level standards, ASL levels?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I don't really even care. I'm not a foodie. I don't care about food in that way. But he makes me want to care. Anyway, that's why I use the term flavor profile. Referring to Toby, which has nothing to do with what I should probably be saying. And that is that you should use Shopify. I've used Shopify. It's super easy. Create a store, lexfreeman.com slash store to sell a few shirts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It's for individuals. It's for couples.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's easy, discreet, affordable, available worldwide. I saw a few books by a Jungian psychologist, and I was like in a delirious state of sleepiness, and I forgot to write his name down, but I need to do some research. I need to go back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What do you think the timeline for ASL 3 is where several of the triggers are fired? And what do you think the timeline is for ASL 4?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I need to go back to my younger self when I dreamed of being a psychiatrist and reading Sigmund Freud and reading Carl Jung, reading it the way young kids maybe read comic books. They were my superheroes of sorts. Camus as well, Kafka, Nietzsche, Hesse, Dostoevsky, the sort of 19th and 20th century literary philosophers of sorts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So there's protocols for detecting it, the if-then, and then there's protocols for how to respond to it. Yes. How difficult is the second, the latter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's both. And so deception, and that's where mechanistic interpretability comes into play. And hopefully the techniques used for that are not made accessible to the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
See, I think as these models become better and better at conversation and become smarter, social engineering becomes a threat too because they can start being very convincing to the engineers inside companies that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
One of the ways that cloud has been getting more and more powerful is it's now able to do some agentic stuff. Computer use. There's also an analysis within the sandbox of cloud.ai itself, but let's talk about computer use. That seems to me super exciting, that you can just give cloud a task and it takes a bunch of actions, figures it out, and has access to the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
your computer through screenshots. So can you explain how that works and where that's headed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Anyway, I need to go back to that, maybe have a few conversations about Freud. Anyway, those folks, even if in part wrong or true revolutionaries, were truly brave to explore the mind in the way they did. They showed the power of talking and delving deep into the human mind, into the shadow, through the use of words. So highly recommend. And BetterHelp is a super easy way to start.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But the possibility of use cases here is just the range is incredible. So how much to make it work really well in the future? How much do you have to specially kind of... go beyond what's the pre-trained models doing? Do more post-training RLHF or supervised fine-tuning or synthetic data just for the agentic stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So you think it's possible to get to the human level, 90% basically doing the same thing you're doing now, or is it has to be special for computer use?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lux and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lux. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that I'm going to take a sip of now. It's been so long that I've been drinking Element that I don't even remember life before Element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But this is giving sort of the power of action to Claude. And so you could do a lot of really powerful things, but you could do a lot of damage also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So she was definitely a fascinating person to talk to about prompt engineering and practical advice on how to get the best out of Claude. After that, Chris Ola stopped by for a chat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, and there's a lot of interesting attacks like prompt injection because now you've widened the aperture so you can prompt inject through stuff on screen. So if this becomes more and more useful, then there's more and more benefit to inject stuff into the model. If it goes to a certain webpage, it could be harmless stuff like advertisements or it could be harmful stuff, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Sort of bots and spam in general is a thing as it gets more and more intelligent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
It's just.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Is there any ideas about sandboxing it? Like how difficult is the sandboxing task?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I guess I used to take salt pills because it's such a big component of my exercise routine to make sure I get enough water and get enough electrolytes. Yeah, so combined with fasting that I've explored a lot and continue to do to this day and combined with low carb diets that I'm a little bit off the wagon on that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, the science of building a box from which ASL 4 AI system cannot escape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Let me ask about regulation. What's the role of regulation in keeping AI safe? So, for example, can you describe California AI regulation bill SB 1047 that was ultimately vetoed by the governor? What are the pros and cons of this bill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
I'm consuming probably like 60, 70, 80, maybe 100 some days grams of carbohydrates. Not good, not good. My happiest is when I'm below 20 grams or 10 grams of carbohydrates. I'm not like measuring it out. I'm just using numbers to sound smart. But I don't take dieting seriously, but I do take the signals that my body sends quite seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So without question, making sure I get enough magnesium and sodium and get enough water is priceless. A lot of times when I have headaches, it just felt off or whatever, we're fixed near immediately. And sometimes after 30 minutes, we just drink water with electrolytes. It's beautiful and it's delicious. Watermelon salt, the greatest flavor of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So there's a lot of curiosity about the different players in the game. One of the OGs is OpenAI. You've had several years of experience at OpenAI. What's your story and history there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So get out of their way, basically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Dario Amadei. Let's start with the big idea of scaling laws and the scaling hypothesis. What is it? What is its history? And where do we stand today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Why'd you decide to leave?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And so Anthropic is this kind of clean experiment built on a foundation of like what concretely ASAT should look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
He's one of the pioneers of the field of mechanistic interpretability, which is an exciting set of efforts that aims to reverse engineer neural networks to figure out what's going on inside, inferring behaviors from neural activation patterns inside the network. This is a very promising approach for keeping future super-intelligent AI systems safe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
You said talent density beats talent mass. So can you explain that? Can you expand on that? Can you just talk about what it takes to build a great team of AI professionals? researchers and engineers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And, you know, it's the Steve Jobs A players. A players want to look around and see other A players as another way of... I don't know what that is about human nature, but it is demotivating to see people who are not obsessively driving towards a singular mission. And it is on the flip side of that super motivating to see that. It's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
What's it take to be a great AI researcher or engineer from everything you've seen from working with so many amazing people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And also be able to do kind of rapid experimentation and in the face of that, be open-minded and curious and looking at the data for just these fresh eyes and seeing what is that it's actually saying. That applies in mechanistic interpretability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
You said what it takes to be a great AI researcher. Can we rewind the clock back? What advice would you give to people interested in AI? They're young, looking forward. How can I make an impact on the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Let's talk, if we could, a bit about post-training.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So it seems that the modern post-training recipe has a little bit of everything. So supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, the constitutional, yeah, it was RLAIF. Best acronym. It's again that naming thing. And then synthetic data, seems like a lot of synthetic data, or at least trying to figure out ways to have high quality synthetic data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So what's the, if this is a secret sauce that makes Anthropic Claw so incredible, how much of the magic is in the pre-training, how much is in the post-training?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Okay, well, let me ask you about specific techniques. So first on RLHF, what do you think, just zooming out, intuition, almost philosophy, why do you think RLHF works so well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
makes the model smarter or just appear smarter to the humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
But it appears to sort of increase, if you look at the metric of helpfulness, it increases that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
If you can say... In terms of cost, is pre-training the most expensive thing or is post-training creep up to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
In that future you anticipate, would it be the humans or the AI that's the costly thing for the post-training?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So on that... It's a super interesting set of ideas around constitutional AI. Can you describe what it is as first detailed in December 2022 paper and beyond that? What is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And we should say that in the Constitution, the set of principles are like human interpretable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Well, it's a compelling one to us humans, you know, thinking about the founding fathers and the founding of the United States. The natural question is who and how do you think it gets to define the constitution, the set of principles in the constitution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
OpenAI released a model spec where it kind of clearly, concretely defines some of the goals of the model and specific examples like A, B, how the model should behave. Do you find that interesting? By the way, I should mention, I believe the brilliant John Shulman was a part of that. He's now at Anthropic. Do you think this is a useful direction? Might Anthropic release a model spec as well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Let's talk about the incredible essay, Machines of Love and Grace. I recommend everybody read it. It's a long one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah. It's really refreshing to read concrete ideas about what a positive future looks like. And you took sort of a bold stance because like, It's very possible that you might be wrong on the dates or specific applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So you provided a bunch of concrete positive impacts of AI and how – you know, exactly as super intelligent AI might accelerate the rate of breakthroughs in, for example, biology and chemistry that would then lead to things like we cure most cancers, prevent all infectious disease, double the human lifespan, and so on. So let's talk about this essay. First, can you give a high-level...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So I think the starting point is to talk about what... this powerful AI, which is the term you like to use. Uh, most of the world uses AGI, but you don't like the term because it's, uh, basically has too much baggage. It's become meaningless. It's like, we're stuck with the terms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, to me, it's just sort of a platonic form of a powerful AI, exactly how you define it. I mean, you define it very nicely. So... On the intelligence axis, it's just on pure intelligence, it's smarter than a Nobel Prize winner, as you described, across most relevant disciplines. So, okay, that's just intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So it's both in creativity and being able to generate new ideas, all that kind of stuff. In every discipline, Nobel Prize winner. Okay. in their prime. It can use every modality, so that's kind of self-explanatory, but just operate across all the modalities of the world. It can go off for many hours, days, and weeks to do tasks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
and do its own sort of detailed planning and only ask you help when it's needed. It can use, this is actually kind of interesting. I think in the essay you said, I mean, again, it's a bet, that it's not gonna be embodied, but it can control embodied tools. So it can control tools, robots, laboratory equipment. the resource used to train it can then be repurposed to run millions of copies of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And each of those copies would be independent that can do their own independent work. So you can do the cloning of the intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And in general, they can learn and act 10 to 100 times faster than humans. So that's a really nice definition of powerful AI. Okay, so that, but you also write that clearly such an entity would be capable of solving very difficult problems very fast, but it is not trivial to figure out how fast. Two extreme positions both seem false to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So the singularity is on the one extreme and the opposite on the other extreme. Can you describe each of the extremes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Even if it's not interacting with the physical world, just the modeling is going to be hard. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And of course, the scaling here is bigger networks, bigger data, bigger compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So what do you use the timeline to where we achieve AGI, uh, a.k.a. powerful AI, a.k.a. super useful AI. I'm going to start calling it that. It's a debate about naming. You know, on pure intelligence, it can be smarter than a Nobel Prize winner in every relevant discipline and all the things we've said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Modality, it can go and do stuff on its own for days, weeks, and do biology experiments on its own. You know what? Let's just stick to biology because... You sold me on the whole biology and health section. That's so exciting from a... I was getting giddy from a scientific perspective. It made me want to be a biologist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
For example, by detecting from the activations when the model is trying to deceive the human it is talking to. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So you extensively described sort of the compressed 21st century, how AGI will help set forth a chain of breakthroughs in biology and medicine that help us in all these kinds of ways that I mentioned. So how do you think, what are the early steps it might do? And by the way, I asked Claude good questions to ask you. And Claude told me,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And of course, now that you have this kind of empirical science slash art, you can apply it to other... more nuanced things like scaling laws applied to interpretability or scaling laws applied to post-training or just seeing how does this thing scale. But the big scaling law, I guess the underlying scaling hypothesis has to do with big networks, big data leads to intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
To ask, what do you think is a typical day for biologists working on AGI look like in this future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Claude is curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Doing in vitro and doing it... I mean, you're still slowed down. It still takes time, but you can do it much, much faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Another way that I think the world might be changing with AI, even today, but moving towards this future of the powerful, super useful AI, is programming. So how do you see the nature of programming? Because it's so intimate to the actual act of building AI. How do you see that changing? for us humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
A bit of a philosophical question, but what's your intuition? about why bigger is better in terms of network size and data size. Why does it lead to more intelligent models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
And I wonder what the future of IDEs looks like. So the tooling of interacting with AI systems, this is true for programming and also probably true for in other contexts, like computer use, but maybe domain specific, like we mentioned biology, it probably needs its own tooling about how to be effective. And then programming needs its own tooling about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Is Anthropic going to play in that space of also tooling potentially?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Yeah, it's been interesting to watch Cursor try to integrate Cloud successfully because it's actually... It'd be fascinating how many places it can help the programming experience. It's not as trivial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
So in this world with super powerful AI that's increasingly automated, what's the source of meaning for us humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#452 – Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on Claude, AGI & the Future of AI & Humanity
Work is... a source of deep meaning for many of us. So where do we find the meaning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
The following is a conversation with Serhii Plohi, a historian at Harvard University and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, also at Harvard. As a historian, he specializes in the history of Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Is it possible that if the war in Ukraine continues for many more years, that the next leader that follows Zelensky would take Ukraine away from a sort of democratic, Western-style nation towards a more authoritarian one, maybe even with a far-right influence, this kind of direction, because of the war, the influence of war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I could talk to you for many more hours. On Chernobyl alone, since you've written a book on Chernobyl and nuclear disaster, there's just a million possible conversations here. But let me just jump around history a little bit. Back to World War II, back before World War II, my grandmother lived through Holodomor in World War II, Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Holodomor, what do you learn
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
let's say, about human nature and about governments and nations from the fact that Holodomor happened? And maybe you could say what it is and why it happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So there is a human capacity to be captured by an idea, an ideology, that claims to bring up a better world, as the Nazis did, as the Soviet Union did. And on the path of doing that, devaluing human life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
That we will bring a better world, and if millions of people have to be tortured on the way to that, all right, but at least we have a better world, and human beings are able to, if not accept that, look the other way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Is there something fundamental about communism and centralized planning that's part of the problem here? Maybe this also connects to your story of Chernobyl, where the Chernobyl disaster is not just the story of failure of a nuclear power plant, but it's an entire institution of the scientific and nuclear institution, but the entirety of the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
That's fascinating. I mean, for people who might not know, Chernobyl is located in Ukraine. It's a fascinating view that Chernobyl might be one of the critical sort of threshold catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's very interesting. Just as a small aside, I guess this is a good moment to give some love to the HBO series. Even though it's British accents and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Yeah, it's very possible hundreds of years from now the way the 20th century is written about as the century defined by the collapse of empires? You call the Soviet Union the last empire. The book is called The Last Empire. So is there something fundamental about the way the world is that means it's not conducive to the formation of empires?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
It made me realize that some of these stories in Eastern Europe could be told very effectively through film, through series. It was so incredibly well done. And maybe I can ask you, historically speaking, were you impressed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Sometimes you have to show what something felt like, you have to go bigger than it actually was. I mean, if you, I don't know, if you experience heartbreak and you see a film about it, you want there to be explosions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Well, I suppose it is a bit terrifying that some of the most dramatic moments in history are probably quite mundane. The decisions to begin wars, invasions, they're probably something like a Zoom meeting on a random Tuesday in today's workplace. It's not like there's dramatic music playing. These are just human decisions, and they command armies, and they command destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I personally, because of that, believe in the power of individuals to be able to stop wars, not just start wars, individual leaders. So let me just ask about nuclear safety, because there's an interesting point you make. You wrote in the book, In Atoms and Ashes, A Global History of Nuclear Disaster. So technically, nuclear energy is extremely safe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
There's a number of people died per energy generated. It's much safer than coal and oil, for example, as far as I understand. But the case you also make is, you write, quote, many of the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that led to the accidents of the past are still with us today, making the nuclear industry vulnerable to repeating old mistakes in new and unexpected ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And any new accidents are certain to create new anti-nuclear mobilization. And then you continue with, this makes the nuclear industry not only risky to operate, but also impossible to count on as a long-term solution to an overwhelming problem. So can you explain that perspective? It's an interesting one. So speaking to the psychology, when an accident does happen, it has a dramatic effect, and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Also speaking to the fact that accidents can happen not because of the safety of the nuclear power plant, but of the underlying structure of government that oversees it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And to you, you suspect that that's an irreparable aspect of human nature and the human mind, that there are certain things that just create a kind of panic, invisible threats of this kind, whether it's a virus or radiation. There's something about the mind. If I get a stomachache in the United States after Fukushima, I kind of think it's probably radiation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
This kind of irrational type of thinking. And that's not possible to repair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Pretty smart, aren't we?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Let's zoom out on the world. We talked about the war in Ukraine. How does the war in Ukraine change the world order? Let me just look at everything that's going on. Zoom out a bit. China, the Israel-Gaza War, the Middle East, India. What is interesting to you, important to think about in the coming years and decades?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I just love being together with people and enjoying cool food. So if that requires eating desserts, I will. It's not like I'm very strict on the whole thing. Anyway, the reason I mention it is I remember first discovering how incredible it is to have a hot brownie, let's say, or any kind of chocolatey cake thing with ice cream on top. So you got the hot and the cold, and it combines beautifully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And you're right about that moment in 1991. The role that Ukraine played in that seems to be a very critical role. Can you describe... Just that? What role Ukraine played in the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So in some ways, history does repeat itself here. So now it's a Cold War with China and the United States. What's a hopeful trajectory for the 21st century, for the rest of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Yeah, you've written a book, a great book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And we came... very close, not to just another world war, but to a nuclear war, and the destruction of human civilization as we know it. So, I guess it's a good question to ask, what do we do so right? And maybe one of the answers could be that we just got lucky. And the question is, how do we keep getting lucky?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
You mean Khrushchev?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
It's so fascinating how that fades into memory. that the power and the respect and fear of the power of nuclear weapons just fades into memory, and that we may very well make the same mistakes again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Another leader said that, I believe, but about a totally different topic. Well, like you said, I'm also glad that we're here as a civilization, that we still seem to be going on. There's several billion of us, and I'm also glad that the two of us are here. I've read a lot of your books. I've been recommending it. Please keep writing. Thank you for talking today. This is an honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Serhii Plohi. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ernest Hemingway. Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Let me ask you about Vladimir Putin's statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union is one of the great tragedies of history. To what degree does he have a point? To what degree is he wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I don't understand why that is, but even thinking about it now makes me want to throw my life away for just a brownie with some ice cream on top of it. That's how I feel when I'm taking a nap on Eight Sleep. Anyway, you can feel the same kind of thing if you check them out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So both the unity of the sort of, quote, Russian empire and the status of the superpower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
You wrote a book, The Origins of the Slavic Nations. So let's go back into history. What is the origin of Slavic nations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia, the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters, and on the current war in Ukraine. A book titled The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So what aspects of the 8th and 9th century, the East Slavic states, permeates to today that we should understand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, the platform I use to make a store. I think the address is lexfriedman.com slash store. It forwards you to whatever the Shopify thing is, and there you can get a few shirts. If you want to sell shirts, if you want to sell all kinds of stuff, you can use Shopify, super easy. You know what is best? Capitalism is a system that empowers the little guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
What is Kyiv? What is Rus that you mentioned? What's the importance of these? You mentioned them as the sort of defining places and terms, labels at the beginning of all this. So what is Kyiv?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So in one perspective and narrative, Kiev is at the center of this Russian Empire. At which point does Moscow come to prominence as the center of the Russian Empire?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
As long as you got a cool thing, you can find a person that wants to buy that cool thing. And if the thing is super cool, then there's going to be word of mouth. People that use it are going to tell others to use it, and then you can build a giant business on it. Small businesses, medium-sized business, giant business, at its best. The competition of the market can enable that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So to what degree are the Slavic people one people, and this is a theme that will continue throughout, I think, versus a collection of multiple peoples, whether we're talking about the Kievan Rus' or we're talking about the 19th century Russian Empire conception?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So it's nice to have sort of systems like Shopify that make that easy, the e-commerce aspect of that easy. Low cost, accessible, super easy to use. Using the power of the internet to really scale whatever business you're doing. It's interesting. It's pretty cool, the machine of it all. I still and always have believed in the land of opportunity that is the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
You wrote the book, The Cossack Myth, History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires. It tells the story of an anonymous manuscript called The History of the Rus'. It started being circulated in the 1820s. I would love it if you can tell the story of this. This is supposedly one of the most impactful texts in history, modern history. So what's the importance of this text? What did it contain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
How did it define the future of the region?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I really do believe that no matter where you come from, from all walks of life, more than almost any other nation on earth, probably any other nation on earth, you can really make something of yourself. It's not easy. And the system will try to mess with you, will try to make it difficult. But all systems do that. the powerful one to put their foot down on the little guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So that was like the initial spark, the flame that led to nationalist movements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So to you, even throughout the 20th century under Stalin, there was always a force within Ukraine that wanted to be independent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
In America, more than on any other nation on earth, the little guy has a chance. Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by the birthday boy or gal. That's sweet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So there's national communism and radical nationalism. Well, let me ask you about the radical nationalism because that is a topic that comes up in the discussion of the war in Ukraine today. Can you tell me about Stepan Bandera? Who was he, this controversial far-right Ukrainian revolutionary?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
The reason I say birthday boy or gal is because they turned 25 this year. Happy birthday. I don't know why that brings me so much joy to say. I like it when companies survive. Usually it means they've been doing something right. And a company is not just the company, right? It's the people that built it and the people that work together, show up every single day to work together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
The fact that he collaborated with the Nazis sticks. From one perspective, he's considered by many to be a hero of Ukraine for fighting for the independence of Ukraine. From another perspective, coupled with the fact that there's this radical revolutionary extremist flavor to the way he sees the world, that label just stays that he's a fascist, he's a Nazi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
To what degree is this true, to what degree is it not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
They got families and they leave those families for a few hours to then collaborate on a difficult thing, make a thing happen. The machinery of it, the camaraderie of it is beautiful. Anyway, NetSuite is a all-in-one cloud business management system that enables that, empowers that, deals with all the messy things like HR, financials, all that. 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
There's a million questions to ask here. I think it's an important topic because it is at the center of the claimed reason that the war continues in Ukraine. So I would like to explore that from different angles. But just to clarify, was there a moment where Bandera chose Nazi Germany over the Red Army when the war already began?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So in the list of allegiances, is Ukraine's independence more important than fighting Nazi Germany, essentially?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So I would love to find the line between nationalism, even extreme nationalism, and fascism and Nazism. So for Bandera the myth and Bandera the person, to what degree, let's look at some of the ideology of Nazism, to which degree did he hate Jews? Was he anti-Semitic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So let me fast forward into the future and see to which degree the myth permeates. Does Ukraine have a neo-Nazi problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
It's the machine that runs the machine. The machine inside the machine. The central machine that enables the different disparate parts of a company to communicate, to work together. The metamachine of it is the company. And the metamachine is capitalism. This is a very capitalism-focused set of ad reads today, friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So just for context, the most popular far-right party won 2.15% of the vote in 2019. This is before the war, so that's where things stood. It's unclear where they stand now. It'd be an interesting question whether it escalated and how much. What you're saying is that war in general...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
can serve as a catalyst for expansion of extremist groups, of extremist nationalistic groups especially, like the far right. And it's interesting to see to what degree they have or have not risen to power in the shadows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
There are things to criticize about capitalism, but overall, it is one of the more beautiful things that humans have created. I do want to say that we tend to seem to want to criticize more than celebrate in this society. Social media, journalism seems to get clicks on the criticisms, and those are important, but it should probably be done in proportion to the full thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So, Vladimir Putin, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, but many times before, said that the current goal for the war in Ukraine is denazification. That the purpose of the war is denazification. Can you explain this concept of denazification as Putin sees it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
There's something really interesting here, as you mentioned. I've spoken to a lot of people in Russia, and you said analysis stops. In the West, people look at the word denazification and look at the things we've just discussed and kinda almost think this is absurd. But when you talk to people in Russia, maybe it's deep in there somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
The history of World War II still reverberates through maybe the fears, maybe the pride, whatever the deep emotional history is there, it seems that the goal of denazification appears to be reasonable for people in Russia. They don't seem to see the absurdity or the complexity or even the need for analysis, I guess, in this kind of statement, word of denazification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So Putin has alluded to the Yaroslav Hanka incident in the Canadian Parliament, September 2023. This man is a veteran of World War II on the Ukrainian side, and he got two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament. But they later found out that he was part of the SS. So can you explain on this? What are your thoughts on this? This had a very big effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
We should celebrate and criticize properly in proportion. Anyway, you can download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com for your own KPI checklist. This episode is also brought to you by the thing I'm drinking right now, AG1. It's an all-in-one, delicious, healthy drink to support better health and peak performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
on the narrative propagated throughout the region.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Every time I talk about AG1, I think about Andrew Huberman, who I'm going to see in a couple of days, a beautiful person, an important person, a great communicator of science. a great friend, a good person. I think I've already said that, but worth saying again. He's a big fan of AG1. We're big fans of a lot of similar things in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I mean, just to clarify, I think there is just a blunder on the Canadian parliament side, the Canadian side, of not doing research. Maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding, they were just doing stupid, shallow political stuff. Let's applaud. When Zelensky shows up, let's have a Ukrainian veteran. Let's applaud a veteran of World War II.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And then all of a sudden you realize, well, there's actually complexities to wars. We can talk about For example, a lot of dark aspects on all sides of World War II. The mass rape at the end of World War II by the Red Army when they say Marshall was German. There's a lot of really dark complexity on all sides.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
That could be an opportunity to explore the dark complexity that some of the Ukrainians were in the SS or Bandera, the complexities there. But I think they were doing not a complex thing. They were doing a very shallow applaud. And we should applaud veterans, of course. But in that case, they were doing it for show, for Zelensky and so on. So we should clarify that the applause wasn't
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
We got Eight Sleep for naps, Shopify for making stores, and that's sweet for business stuff and AG1 for just health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
knowing it wasn't for the SS. It was for World War II veterans, but the propaganda, or at least an interpretation from the Russian side, from whatever side, is that they were applauding the full person standing before them, which wasn't just a Ukrainian veteran, but a Ukrainian veteran that fought for the SS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Yeah, the whole story of this person, and frankly, the whole story of Ukraine and Russia in World War II, period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Nevertheless, it had a lot of power and really reverberated in support of the narrative that there is a neo-Nazi, a Nazi problem in Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Well, I wonder what is the most effective way to respond to that particular claim. Because there could be a discussion about nationalism and extreme nationalism and the fight for independence and whether it isn't, like Putin wrote, one people. But the question of are there Nazis in Ukraine seems to be a question that could be analyzed rigorously with data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And speaking of celebrating, I'm really happy that people like him can succeed in this world. And I'm just truly happy that he has found success. He's found his voice. He's found a way he can maximize sort of showing to the world who he is as a scientific thinker, as a communicator. It's like such a great example that we're all different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And the way to defend against that is to bring in the context. Let us move gracefully throughout, back and forth through history, back to Bandera. You wrote a book on the KGB spy Bogdan Stashinsky. Can you tell his story?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Communication-wise, he's different from me, different from Rogan, different from a lot of really great podcasts I listen to. But it's different but beautiful. So, big fan. And so here I'm raising my AG1 as a toast to the great Andrew Huberman. Anyway, I drink the thing, usually twice a day. I'm drinking it now, and then I'll probably go for a super long run in a few hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
He fled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
What a fascinating story of a village boy becoming an assassin who killed one of the most influential revolutionaries of the region in the 20th century. So what, just zooming out broadly on the KGB, how powerful was the KGB? What role did it play in this whole story of the Soviet Union?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And then after that, I'll drink AG1 again. It just makes me happy. It's delicious, refreshing. Love it. It's basically a super awesome multivitamin. Everybody should have multivitamins as part of their life. This is a super awesome one. Okay, that's all I need to say. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Who was more powerful, the KGB or the CIA during the Soviet Union?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Is it understood how big the KGB was? How widespread it was, given its secretive and distributed nature?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
What do you think is important to understand about the KGB if we want to also understand Vladimir Putin, since he was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Serhii Plohi. What are the major explanations for the collapse of the Soviet Union? Maybe ones you agree with and ones you disagree with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
You wrote the book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History, that gives the full context leading up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022. So can you take me through the key moments in history that led up to this war? So we'll mention... the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
We could probably go much farther back, but the collapse of the Soviet Union, mentioned 2014, maybe you can highlight key moments that led up to 2022.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So there's a division, a push and pull inside Ukraine on identity of whether they're part of Russia or part of Europe. And you highlighted two moments in Ukrainian history that there's a big flare-up where the statement was first, Ukraine is not Russia, and essentially Ukraine is part of Europe. But there's other moments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
What were the defining moments that began an actual war? And then don't pass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Maybe you can tell me about the region of Donbas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So for Putin, the war in Donbass, and even in 2022, is a defensive war against what the Ukrainian government is doing against ethnically Russian people of Donbass. Is that fair to say, how he describes it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I should mention, maybe this is a good moment to mention, when I traveled to Ukraine, this is after the start of the war, I mentioned farmer's market, which is funny. Basically, every single person I talked to, including the leadership, we spoke in Russian. For many of them, Russian is the more comfortable language even. And the people who spoke Ukrainian are more on the western side of Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And young people that are kind of willing to show that in an activist way that they want to fight for the independence of their country. So I take your point. I wonder if you want to comment about language and maybe about the future of language in Ukraine. is the future of language going to stabilize on Ukrainian, or is it going to return to its traditional base of Russian language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. Now, let's talk about naps. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep, and it's a Pod 3 cover. It cools the bed down to whatever you want. There's a setting from, I guess, 0 to 10. I guess when it's a 10, like a negative 10, it'll probably get you down to, like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So it's a story of geography, ideology, economics. Which are the most important to understand of what made the collapse of the Soviet Union happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So as we get closer to February of 2022, there's a few other key moments. Maybe let's talk about, in July 2021, Putin publishing an essay titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Can you describe the ideas expressed in this essay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
But those arguments are all in the flavor of empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So if we step back from the historical context of this and maybe the geopolitical purpose of writing such an essay and forget about the essay altogether. I have family in Ukraine and Russia. I know a lot of people in Ukraine and Russia. Forget the war. Forget all of this. They all kind of sound the same. if I go to France, they sound different than in Ukraine and Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
If you lay out the cultural map of the world, there's just a different beat and music and flavor to a people. I guess what I'm trying to say is there seems to be a closeness between the cultures of Ukraine and Russia. How do we describe that? Do we acknowledge that? And how does that... at tension with the national independence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
It's interesting that you say that in the DNA of Ukraine versus Russia, so maybe Russia is more conducive to authoritarian regimes and Ukraine is more conducive to defining itself by rebelling against authoritarian regimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Yeah. I talked to John Mearsheimer recently. There's a lot of people that believe NATO had a big contribution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So what role did NATO play in this full history from Bucharest in 2008 to today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Well, you said a lot of interesting stuff there. 1917, Bolsheviks, internationalists, how that plays with the idea of Russian empire and so on. But first, let me ask about U.S. influence on this. So one of the ideas is that, you know, through the Cold War, that mechanism, U.S. had major interest to weaken the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And therefore, the collapse could be attributed to pressure and manipulation from the United States. Is there truth to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
What was, to clarify the reason Putin, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
In the Gates of Kiev chapter, you write about Volodymyr Zelensky in the early days of the war. What are most important moments to you about this time, the first hours and days of the invasion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Why do you think he stayed in Kiev? This former comedian who... played a president on TV when Kiev is being invaded by the second most powerful military in the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So he had a sense that the Ukrainians would unify because he was quite, if you look at the polls before the war, quite unpopular. And there was still divisions and factions and the government is divided. I mean, there's the East and the West and all this kind of stuff. You think he had a sense that this could unite people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Why did the peace talks fail? There was a lot of peace talks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
What about the claims that Boris Johnson and the West compromised the ability of these peace talks to be successful? Basically, you kind of manipulated the talks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
That said, Zelensky is a smart man, and he knows that the war can only continue with the West's support.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Well, what I mean is... if he started to sense that the West will support no matter what, then maybe the space of decisions you're making is different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So what are the ways this war can end, do you think? What are the different possible trajectories, whether it's peace talks? What does winning look like for either side? What is the role of U.S.? What trajectories do you see that are possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So without any political change, let's try to imagine what are the possibilities that the war ends this year? Is it possible that it can end with compromise basically at the place it started?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Yeah, back to the borders of 22 with some security guarantees that aren't really guarantees, but are hopeful guarantees.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So the Russian Constitution is a thing that makes this all very difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So the practical aspect of it even is difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Is there something like Minsk Agreements that are possible now to, maybe this is a legal question, but to override the Constitution, to sort of shake everything up? So see the Constitutional Amendment as just a negotiation tactic, to come to the table to something like Minsk Agreement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
I don't understand why assuming political change in Moscow is not possible this year. So I'm trying to see if there's a way to end this war this year, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
But if Putin, the executive branch, has a lot of power, why can't the United States president, the Russian president, the Ukrainian president come to the table and draw up something like the Minsk agreements, and then rapid constitutional changes made, and you go back to the borders in 2022? before 2022, through agreements, through compromise, impossible for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
But that's been happening last year, too. There's been a counteroffensive. There's been attempts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So thinking about what 2024 brings, Zelensky just fired Ukraine's head of the army, a man you've mentioned, General Valery Zelushny. What do you make of this development?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
As low as 65 degrees. That's such a cool feeling. Pun unintended. It's just this comforting chill that goes through your body while you have a warm blanket on top. It actually reminds me of desserts I've had a long time ago. One of the things with eating very low carb is you don't really partake in desserts. But I love watching other people enjoy desserts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So the thing that President Zelensky expressed is that this is going to be a change of tactics, making the approach more technologically advanced, this kind of things. But as you said, I believe he is less popular than the chief of the army, Zelensky, 80% to 60%, depending on the polls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Do you think it's possible that Zelensky's days are numbered as the president, and that somebody like Zelushny comes to power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So what to you is interesting, for example, if I get a chance to interview Zelensky, what to you is interesting about the person that would be good to ask about, to explore about the state of his mind, his thinking, his view of the world as it stands today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So Gorbachev is an interesting figure in all of this. Is there a possible history where the Soviet Union did not collapse and some of the ideas that Gorbachev had for the future of the Soviet Union came to life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Do you think there's a degree during wartime that the power that comes with being a war president can corrupt a person, sort of push you away from the democratic mindset towards an authoritarian one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Let me stay in power for just a little longer to do it the efficient way. And then time flies away and all of a sudden you're going for the third term and the fourth term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Exactly, the people that surround you are not providing the kind of critical feedback necessary for a democratic system. One of the things that Tucker said after his interview with Putin, he was just in his hotel just chatting on video, and he said that he felt like Putin was not very good at explaining himself, like a coherent whole thing. narrative of why the invasion happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
It's just this big picture. And he said, that's not because he doesn't have one, but it's been a long time since he's had somebody around him where he has to explain himself to. So he's out of practice, which is very interesting. It's a very interesting point. And that's what war and being in power for a prolonged period of time can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
So on that topic, if you had a chance to talk to Putin, what kind of questions would you ask him? What would you like to find out about the man as he stands today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
Well, I do wonder how different what he says publicly is from what he thinks privately. So a question about when the decision to invade Ukraine happens is a very good question to give insight to the difference between how he thinks about the world privately versus what he says publicly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
And same about other, you know, about empire. Because if you ask Putin, he will say he has no interest in empire and he finds the notion silly. But at the same time, perhaps privately, there's a sense in which he does seek the reunification of the Russian empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
You wrote in your book titled The Frontline, Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present, about the Russian question. I guess articulated by Solzhenitsyn first in 1994. Solzhenitsyn, of course, is the author of Gulag Archipelago. He's half Ukrainian. What is the Russian question?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#415 – Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War
If there is such a thing, what would you say is the Ukrainian question as we stand today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The following is a conversation with George Hotz, his third time on this podcast. He's the founder of Comma AI that seeks to solve autonomous driving and is the founder of a new company called TinyCorp that created TinyGrad, a neural network framework that is extremely simple with the goal of making it run on any device by any human easily and efficiently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, that's such a nice way to put it. Like, we're such powerful creators ourselves. It's silly not to conceive that there's creators even more powerful than us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, in the same way that a video game kind of has comfort in it. God, I'll try again. Or there's balance. Like, somebody figured out a balanced view of it. So it all makes sense in the end. Like, a video game is usually not going to have crazy, crazy stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I'm just this NPC living in this game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What do you think is the greatest computer game of all time? Do you have any time to play games anymore? Have you played Diablo 4?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I will be doing that shortly. I have to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
There's just so much history with 1, 2, and 3. You know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Every time I talk to you, I learn new words. Mid. Mid, yeah. I was like, is it like basic? Is that what mid means?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Create worlds. Create worlds, yeah. And worlds that captivate a very large fraction of the human population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But MMO, like really, really pull you in. do a good job I mean okay other like two other games that I think are you know very noteworthy for me are Skyrim and GTA 5 Skyrim yeah that's probably number one for me GTA yeah what is it about GTA GTA is really, I guess GTA is real life. I know there's prostitutes and guns and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yes, I know. But it's how I imagine your life to be, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's, you know, because there's Sims, right, which is also a game I like. But it's a gamified version of life. But it also is, I would love a combination of Sims and GTA. So more freedom, more violence, more rawness, but with also like ability to have a career and family and this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But conversationally, in every way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
20 petaflops is one person. One person. One person flop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I got it. That's interesting. VR also adds, in terms of creating worlds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I just tried Quest 3. It was awesome. But hear that, guys? I agree with that. So-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
it was just so you know what because i uh i mean the beginning um what is it todd howard said this about uh the design of the beginning of the games he creates is like the beginning is so so so important um i recently played zelda for the first time zelda breath of the wild the previous one and like it's very quickly you come out of this like uh within like 10 seconds you come out of like a cave type place and it's like this world opens up it's like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And it like, it pulls you in. You forget whatever troubles I was having, whatever like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Ah, no. The beginning, they got it. They did it really well. The expansiveness of that space. The peacefulness of that place. They got the music. I mean, so much of that is creating that world and pulling you right in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You should. Well, the new one came out. I haven't played that yet. But Diablo 4 or something. I mean, there's sentimentality also. But something about VR... It really is incredible. But the new Quest 3 is mixed reality. And I got a chance to try that. So it's augmented reality. And for video games, it's done really, really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Cameras. It's cameras, okay. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I don't know. I don't know how real it is. I don't know anything. It's coming out in January. Is it January or is it some point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
All of it is a genius meme. That's another interesting one. Memes. The humor, the idea, the absurdity encapsulated in a single image. and it just kind of propagates virally between all of our brains. I didn't get much sleep last night, so I sound like I'm high, but I swear I'm not. Do you think we have ideas or ideas have us?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You're the meme. Oh, yes. I support competition. It seemed like Quest was like the only people doing it. And this is great that they're like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, and that does a really interesting job. Maybe I'm new with this, but it's a $500 headset, Quest 3, and just having creatures run around the space, like our space right here, to me, okay, this is very boomer statement, but it added windows. to the place that I heard about the aquarium. Yeah. Yeah. Aquarium. But in this case it was a zombie game, whatever. It doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But just like it, it modifies the space in a way where I can't, it really feels like a window and you can look out. It's pretty cool. Like I was just, it's like a zombie game. They're running at me, whatever. But what I was enjoying is the fact that there's like a window and, and they're stepping on objects in this space and, That was a different kind of escape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Also because you can see the other humans. So it's integrated with the other humans. It's really, really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And that, those AIs have a, I mean, you think about all the dark stuff, like sexual stuff. Like if those AIs threaten me, that could be haunting. Mm-hmm. Like if they, like thread me in a non-video game way. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they'll know personal information about me. And it's like, and then you lose track of what's real, what's not. Like what if stuff is like hacked?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Is there an in-between?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Have you decided yet? No, I'll figure it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I would love to hear your opinions for George's third company, what to do, the brothel in Times Square or the Hurt Experience. What do you think company number four will be? You think there'll be a company number four?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you're like a flag bearer for open source distributed decentralization of compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
There's no chicken man. Or just chickens in Miami.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I'm sure he was. I'm sure he was. What have you learned from launching and running Kamei and TinyCorp? Starting a company from an idea and scaling it. And by the way, I'm all in on tiny box. So I'm, I'm, I'm your, I'll, I'll, I guess it's pre-order only now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, if there's a beta program for a tiny box, I'm into. Sounds good. So I won't be the whiny, I'll be the tech savvy user of the tiny box just to be in. What have I learned? In the early days. What have you learned from building these companies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you like bringing ideas to life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Ooh, you think AI will generate memes? Of course. You think it'll make humans laugh?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I hear a lot of really, a lot of props for OpenPilot for a comma.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
How'd you pull that off, by the way, shipping a product that goes in a car?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Quality control. I care immensely about it. You're basically a mom and pop shop with great testing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think this is a great way to explore, to learn about machine learning, to really test yourself on real-world data with consequences. No financial background is needed. The models are scored based on how well they perform on unseen data, and the top performers receive a share of the tournament's prize pool. Head over to numeri.ai to sign up for a tournament and hone your machine learning skills.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Do you think it's possible that karma gets sold?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you think this goes to embodied robotics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
How do you put legs on that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So the AI girlfriend will have a central hub in the home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Have you talked to Andrzej Kapathy or have you talked to Elon about TinyCorp?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What do you love about Andrzej Kapathy? To me, he's one of the truly special humans we got.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, he has no, I mean, thank you for the sort of, the raw, authentic honesty. I mean, a lot of us have that. I think Andre is as legit as it gets in that he just wants to teach you. And there's a curiosity that just drives him. And just like at his, at the stage where he is in life, to be still like one of the best tinkerers in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It's crazy. Like to, what is it, micro-grad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But I mean, to me that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I mean, the flip side to me is that the fact that he's going there is a good sign for OpenAI. I think, you know, I like Ilyas Iskever a lot. I like those guys are really good at what they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think you're drawing parallels on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You give me a look. Give me a look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh yeah, that's interesting. Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's something about a thing that sounds pretty good that kind of gets us into trouble?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but to me, that's a bit surprising. But it's also, in retrospect, not that surprising. But I haven't heard really clear kind of like rigorous analysis why effective altruism is flawed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but you can also think of charity as like, as you would like to see, so allocate resources in an optimal way to make a better world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Right? Because... More efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Man, how to fish. Right? Yeah. No, but the problem is teaching a man how to fish might be harder. Starting a company might be harder than allocating money that you already have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you even think long-term?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What if survival is basically guaranteed? What if our life becomes so good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So TikTok is already pretty close there, but the generation is done by humans. The algorithm is just doing their recommendation. But if the algorithm is also able to do the generation... Well, it's a question about how much intelligence is behind it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, energy is flourishing. I've created flourishing of the human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Part of me wishes that Elon went into nuclear fusion versus Twitter. Part of me. Or somebody, somebody like Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
To have some humility. But at the same time, me as a person who happens to know him, I find myself in that same position. Sometimes even billionaires need friends who disagree and help them grow. And that's a difficult reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Fame, power, money, everybody's sucking up to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, it takes a really special human being when you have power, when you have fame, when you have money, to still think from first principles. Not like all the adoration you get towards you, all the admiration, all the people saying yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And the hate. I think that's worse. So the hate makes you want to go to the yes people because the hate exhausts you. And the kind of hate that Elon's gotten from the left is pretty intense. And so that, of course, drives him right. It loses balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. I wish it would be less divided because it is giving power to the ultra-powerful. The rich get richer. You have love in your life. Has love made you a better or a worse programmer? Do you keep productivity metrics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The minute I started like- So that's one of the big loves of your life is programming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And like- Not just like the IDE for programming, just the entirety of the computational machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So the moment the computer starts to say, like, I miss you, and starts to have some of the basics of human intimacy, it's over for you. The moment VS Code says, hey, George.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Look at me in open source here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
If it's open source and yeah, it becomes... Though Microsoft's done a pretty good job on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Who would have thought Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg are spearheading the open source movement?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, it's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Who?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Microsoft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Interesting. So your bet, who wins AGI? Oh, I don't know about AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So it's actually scale that's the problem, but also speed. Yeah. And what if it's sort of manipulating the very limited human dopamine engine for porn? Imagine it's just TikTok, but for porn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I hope some startup does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, I'm like 50-50. Yeah. But maybe that's naive. Yeah. I believe in the power of these language models. Satya's alive. Microsoft's alive. Yeah. It's great. It's great. I like all the innovation in these companies. They're not being stale. And to the degree they're being stale, they're losing. So there's a huge incentive to do a lot of exciting work and open source work, which is incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Only way to win. You're older. You're wiser. What's the meaning of life, George Hotz?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It's still to win. Of course. Always.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's winning look like for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So it's bigger than solving self-driving? It's bigger than democratizing, decentralizing compute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I wonder what that means for you. Like, at the end of your life, what that will look like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I'm just imagining the creator of a video game having to look and stand eye to eye with one of the characters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. I wonder what that looks like. It feels like a really special time in human history. where that's actually possible. There's something about AI that's like, we're playing with something weird here. Something really weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, I hope you find just that, George. You're one of my favorite people. Thank you for doing everything you're doing. And in this case, for fighting for open source and for decentralization of AI, it's a fight worth fighting, fight worth winning hashtag. I love you, brother. These conversations are always great. Hope to talk to you many more times. Good luck with TinyCorp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Thanks for listening to this conversation with George Hotz. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It's like Brave New World.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Is it possible that it won't really manipulate, it'll just move past us? It'll just kind of exist the way water exists or the air exists?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Because the machine is not interested in hurting humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, let me bring up Eliezer Yudkowsky, who recently sat where you're sitting. He thinks that AI will almost surely kill everyone. Do you agree with him or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. And I'll try to get you to find hope, or we could find a no to that answer. But why yes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
That's a good question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Why not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, because you can't use that land for resources. You can't populate the land.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay, so you can't use this strategically, tactically in a war to help gain a military advantage. It's all complete destruction, all right? Yeah. But there's egos involved. It's still surprising. It's still surprising that nobody pressed the big red button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's the algorithm behind the little red button? What possible ideas do you have for how a human species ends?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
That's numeri.ai for a chance to play against me and win a share of the tournament's prize pool. That's Numerai slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The interesting thing about humanity is the diversity in it. Organisms in general. There's a lot of weirdos out there. Two of them are sitting here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You went corporate, George Haas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Social media's not helping, huh?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, that's interesting. So everybody starts relying on the connectivity of the internet. And over time, that reduces the diversity, the intellectual diversity, and then that gets everybody into a funnel. There's still going to be a guy in Texas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but society, like if we start over, that's tricky. Most of us don't know how to do most things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's rebuilding look like? How much do we lose? What has human civilization done? That's interesting. Combustion engine, electricity. So power and energy. That's interesting. Like how to harness energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Are they going to get back to like fire?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Like technology, it's almost like a new religion. Technology is the devil. Yeah. And nature is God. Sure. So closer to nature. But can you really get away from AI if it destroyed 99% of the human species? Isn't it somehow have a hold, like a stronghold?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I have been using it to learn a few languages, Spanish, to review Russian, to practice Russian, to revisit Russian from a different perspective, because that becomes more and more relevant for some of the previous conversations I've had and some upcoming conversations I have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yes. But there is, you know, I work with like robots a lot now. I have a bunch of them. They're mobile. Mm-hmm. They can't reproduce, but all they need is, I guess you're saying they can't repair themselves. If you have a large number, if you have like a hundred million of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It doesn't have to be all on board, right? They can go to a factory, to a repair shop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What about if you just improve the fab to where you just have a 3D printer that can always help you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Of course you are. How difficult is that problem to have a robot that basically can build itself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think you've mentioned this like to me or somewhere where people think it's easy conceptually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. On board. Of course. So 3D printer that prints a 3D printer. Yeah. Yeah, on legs. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You're going to have to have a very interesting kind of fab if you want to have a lot of computation on board. But you can do like structural type of robots that are dumb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What about like ants type of systems? We have like trillions of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It really is fascinating how much another language, knowing another language, even to a degree where you can just have little bits and pieces of a conversation, can really unlock an experience in another part of the world. When you travel in France and Paris, just having a few words at your disposal, a few phrases,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. So the fab movement, digital fabrication, fabrication in the full range of what that means is still in the early stages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You're interested in this world. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
If we were to construct a machine that is made up of humans, like a company, it can reproduce itself. Yeah. I don't know. It feels like 115 people. I think it's so much harder than that. 120? I'm just looking for a number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, but you're not interested in running Twitter. You're interested in seeding. Like you want to seed a civilization and then, because humans can like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Over time they will. I think you're being, like we have to expand our conception of time here. Going back to the original time scale. I mean, over across maybe a hundred generations, we're back to making chips. No? If you seed the colony correctly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, but you have to seed that colony correctly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, that is the thing that humans do. They come up, they construct a devil, a good thing and a bad thing, and they really stick by that. And then they murder each other over that. There's always one asshole in the room who murders everybody. And he usually makes tattoos and nice branding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, this whole freedom of speech thing. The freedom of being an asshole seems kind of important. That's right. man, this thing, this fab, this human fab that we constructed, this human civilization is pretty interesting. And now it's building artificial copies of itself or artificial copies of various aspects of itself that seem interesting, like intelligence. And I wonder where that goes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
it begins to really open you up to strange, fascinating new experiences that ultimately, at least to me, teach me that we're all the same. We have to first see our differences to realize those differences are grounded in a basic humanity. And that experience that we're all very different and yet at the core the same, I think travel with the aid of language really helps unlock
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But it seems like the ceiling, or there might not be a ceiling, or at least the ceiling is much higher for the silicon stack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
In the biostack or the silicon stack? In the silicon stack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, with the early stages, right? Which is why you said when you said the FAB, the size of the FAB required to make another FAB is very large right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But computers were very large back then. 80 years ago. And they got pretty tiny. And people are starting to want to wear them on their face. In order to escape reality. That's the thing. In order to live inside the computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Put a screen right here. I don't have to see the rest of you assholes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You like virtual reality?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Do you want to live there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Part of me does too. How far away are we, do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I got to tell you that I had the experience of Meta's Kodak Avatar, where it's an ultra high resolution scan. It looked real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. But then there's also smell and all that kind of stuff. Sure. I don't know. I... The power of imagination or the power of the mechanism in the human mind that fills the gaps, that kind of reaches and wants to make the thing you see in the virtual world real to you, I believe in that power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Like, what if you're lonely? What if you're sad? What if you're really struggling in life and here's a world where you don't have to struggle anymore?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Strong words. He's throwing left and right hooks. Why do you think large language models are not conscious?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, so what is consciousness then, George Hans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Sure, but that doesn't mean soul is not an interesting word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
When is the last time you've seen a chicken?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, like a living chicken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Like on the street?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Like a chicken?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
All right. All right. I was trying to call you out like a good journalist, and I got shut down. Okay. But you don't think much about this kind of... subjective feeling that it feels like something to exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And then as an observer, you can have a sense that an entity is not only intelligent, but has a kind of subjective experience of its reality, like a self-awareness that is capable of suffering, of hurting, of being excited by the environment in a way that's not merely... Kind of an artificial response, but a deeply felt one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You can get 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com. That's spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com. Rules and restrictions apply. This show is also brought to you by NetSuite. an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. And you're saying when we look in the mirror, we apply the same smiley face with rock. Pretty much, yeah. Isn't that weird, though, that you're not conscious? Is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But you do believe in consciousness. Not really. It's just, it's unclear. Okay, so to you, it's like a little like a symptom of the bigger thing that's not that important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's your favorite thing to eat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Cheese pizza, what are the toppings?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Don't say pineapple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. Pepperoni pizza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's the best pizza? What are we talking about here? Do you like cheap, crappy pizza? A Chicago deep dish cheese pizza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
There you go. You bite into a deep dish, a Chicago deep dish pizza. and it feels like you were starving. You haven't eaten for 24 hours. You just bite in, and you're hanging out with somebody that matters a lot to you, and you're there with the pizza. Sounds real nice. Yeah, all right. It feels like something. I'm George motherfucking Hot eating a fucking Chicago deep dish pizza.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
There's just the full peak living experience of being human, the top of the human condition. Sure. It feels like something to experience that. Why does it feel like something? That's consciousness, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. I guess, yeah, 404 could be suffering, but it's so far from our kind of living organism, our kind of stack. But it feels like AI can start maybe mimicking the biological stack better and better and better because it's trained. We trained it, yeah. And so maybe that's the definition of consciousness, is the biostat consciousness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
They manage all the messy stuff that is required to run a business, the financials, the human resources, the inventory, if you do that kind of thing, e-commerce, all that stuff, all the business-related details. I know how stressed I am about everything that's required to run a team, to run a business that involves much more than just ideas and designs and engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, how close something is to the human experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I want to find out what your fourth company is after that. Because I think once you have AI girlfriends, it's, oh boy, does it get interesting. Well, maybe let's go there. I mean, the relationships with AI, that's creating human-like organisms, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And part of being human is being conscious, is having the capacity to suffer, having the capacity to experience this life richly in such a way that you can empathize The AI system can empathize with you, and you can empathize with it. Or you can project your anthropomorphic sense of what the other entity is experiencing. And an AI model would need to create that experience inside your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And it doesn't seem that difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But if the AI system says, hi, my name is Samantha... It has a backstory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Went to college here and there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Maybe you'll integrate this in the AI system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. We'll talk about Llama. We'll talk about all that. But like, you know, the rock with the smiley face. Yeah. Well, it seems pretty natural for you to anthropomorphize that thing and then start dating it. And before you know it, you're married and have kids. With a rock? With a rock. And there's pictures on Instagram with you and a rock and a smiley face.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
All right. Not rock level desperate, but AI level desperate. I don't know. I think all of us have a deep loneliness. It just feels like the language models are there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
As you know, George also did a large number of fun and amazing things, from hacking the iPhone to recently joining Twitter for a bit as an intern, in quotes, making the case for refactoring the Twitter code base. In general, he's a fascinating engineer and human being, and one of my favorite people to talk to. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So Fiverr is just a temper. It's not the ceiling. No, definitely not. Is it count as cheating when you're talking to an AI model? Emotional cheating?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, you have to... All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
All right. I mean, integrate that with porn and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but most people don't have... serious open conversations about all the different aspects of what's cool and what's not. And it feels like AI is a really weird conversation to have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It involves all the management of human beings, all the complexities of that, the financials, all of it. And so you should be using the best tools for the job. I sometimes wonder if I have it in me. Mentally and skill-wise to be a part of running a large company. I think like with a lot of things in life, it's one of those things you shouldn't wonder too much about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, man. Yeah. And so is that if you're actually dating somebody in real life, is that cheating? I feel like it gets a little weird. It gets real weird. It's like, what are you allowed to say to an AI bot? Imagine having that conversation with a significant other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Especially online. Like, how do you know? Like, there'll be moments when you'll have what you think is a real human you interacted with on Twitter for years and you realize it's not. I spread, I love this meme, heaven banning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, maybe that's what the way human civilization ends is all of us are heaven banned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Friendship is optimal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. I'd like to have some, at least on the intellectual realm, some AI friends that argue with me. But the romantic realm is weird. Definitely weird. But... Not out of the realm of the kind of weirdness that human civilization is capable of, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, I think a lot of people probably want it. There's a deep loneliness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, maybe the conceptions of monogamy changed too. Like I grew up in a time, like I value monogamy, but maybe that's a silly notion when you have arbitrary number of AI systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
For you, but you're just a biological organism who was born before like the internet really took off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Girlfriend Turing Test. I wonder what that looks like. Girlfriend Turing Test. Are you writing that? Will you be the Alan Turing of the 21st century that writes the Girlfriend Turing Test paper?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, but there should be like a paper that kind of defines the test. I mean, the question is if it's deeply personalized or there's a common thing that really gets everybody involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I like how you're already thinking company. All right, let's, before we go to company number three and company number four, let's go to company number two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Tiny Corp. Possibly one of the greatest names of all time for a company. You've launched a new company called Tiny Corp that leads the development of Tiny Grad. What's the origin story of Tiny Corp and Tiny Grad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So one of the reasons to start TinyCorp is to challenge NVIDIA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And here's computational power. And to you, NVIDIA is kind of locking down the computational power of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You should either do or not do. But again, using the best tools for the job is required here. You can start now with a no payment or interest for six months. Go to netsuite.com to access their one-of-a-kind financing program. That's netsuite.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Do you think that's an actual threat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, but there's so much, you know, there's AMD.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
All right. But you don't think there's like a push towards like selling, like Google selling TPUs or something like this? You don't think there's a push for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It doesn't, you can't buy it at Best Buy? No. Hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. What's the power and the value of getting to and complete this out of? Out of, are we talking about the hardware or the software?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
This show is also brought to you by Insight Tracker, a service I use to track biological data, data that comes from my body, to predict, to tell me what I should do with my lifestyle, with my diet, what's working and what's not working. It's obvious, all the exciting breakthroughs that are happening with Transformers, with large language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So no matmul.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay, so what is the minimum number of operations that can accomplish that if you don't have matmol as a primitive matrix?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And RISC won.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Wait, really? That's an actual thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Wow. I love it when movies actually have real things in them. Right? Okay, interesting. So you're thinking of this as the risk architecture of ML Stack, right? 25. Can you go through the four op types?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Relu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
even with diffusion, all of that is obvious that with raw data, with huge amounts of raw data, fine-tuned to the individual, would really reveal to us the signal in all the noise of biology. I feel like that's on the horizon. The kinds of leaps in development that we saw in language, and now more and more visual data,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And so with that, you have enough to make a mat model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You write on GitHub about laziness, showing a map model, matrix multiplication. See how despite the style, it is fused into one kernel with the power of laziness. Can you elaborate on this power of laziness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So what's the process of porting a model into TinyGrad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Core ML.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What about the developer experience with TinyGrad? What it feels like versus PyTorch?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So can you just linger on what problem TinyGrad solves?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What does Jim Culler think about TinyGrad? You guys hung out quite a bit, so he was involved with Ten's Torrent. What's his praise and what's his criticism of what you're doing with your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Why? Why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, interesting. So you don't think... You think the diversity of AI accelerators in the hardware space is not going to be a thing that exists long-term?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I feel like biological data is around the corner, unlocking what's there in this multi-hierarchical distributed system that is our biology. What is it telling us? What is the secrets it holds? What is the thing that it's missing that could be aided? Simple lifestyle changes, simple diet changes, simple changes in all kinds of things that are controllable by individual human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, you're saying writing that stack is really tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you did say a few to NVIDIA a little bit. With love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. With love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, you're a Mets fan. A Risk fan and a Mets fan. What's the hope that AMD has? You did a build with AMD recently that I saw. How does the 7900 XTX compare to the RTX 4090 or 4080?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. So this is a software issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So just adding that loop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Why do you think that is? They're just not seeing a market in machine learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you're kind of spearheading the diversification of GPUs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you're really worried about the centralization of NVIDIA. That's interesting. And you don't have a fundamental hope for the proliferation of ASICs, except in the cloud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Hmm. You think Meta with PyTorch builds a competitor? I hope so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Internal. I mean, public facing with a nice cloud interface and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You don't like cloud?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What do you think is the fundamental limitation of cloud?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So it's power to the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And you don't like the man to have all the power. All right. And right now, the only way to do that is with AMD GPUs if you want performance and stability. Interesting. It's a costly investment emotionally to go with AMDs. Well, let me sort of on a tangent ask you, you've built quite a few PCs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I can't wait till that's a possibility. And Insight Tracker is taking steps towards that. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. That's now called AG1. It has the AG1 drink. I drink it twice a day. At the very least, it's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's your advice on how to build a good custom PC for, let's say, for the different applications that you use for gaming, for machine learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I heard rumors, whispers about this box in the tiny corp. What's this thing look like? What is it? What is it called?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Tiny box.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. Can you go through the specs again a little bit from memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So AMD, Intel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Wait, where does the rack go? Your garage. Interesting. The car charger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What is the most amount of power you can get your hands on without arousing suspicion? That's right. George Hotz. Okay. So the tiny box, and you said NVMEs and RAID. I forget what you said about memory, all that kind of stuff. Okay. So what about what GPUs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Those are Intel's. You're flexible or still exploring?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, I'd love to get a tiny box to MIT. So whenever it's ready, let's do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Is it going to be like the Cybertruck is going to take a few years or?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, there's complexities not to just the putting the thing together, but like shipping and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Just, it works. Yep. Lama's running. Or something like Lama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I drink it cold. It's refreshing. It's grounding. It helps me reconnect with the basics, the nutritional basics that makes this whole machine that is our human body run. All the crazy mental stuff I do for work, the physical challenges, everything. The highs and lows of life itself. All of that is somehow made better knowing that at least you got your nutrition in check.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, from a wall plug.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So it sounds like tiny box will naturally pivot towards company number three because you could just get the girlfriend or boyfriend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The boyfriend is harder?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think that's a very biased statement. I think a lot of people would just say, why is it harder to replace a boyfriend than the girlfriend with the artificial LLM?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Both are mimicable, easy through the language model. No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I don't know. I think you both... Well, first of all, you're using language mostly to communicate youth and beauty and power and status.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, I think status is a narrative you can construct. I don't think status is real. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Desperation is interesting. Easier to fool. Yeah. I could see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Wow. There's a lot of questions and answers you can get there. Anyway, with the TinyBox, how many GPUs in TinyBox? Six.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
How do you do cooling for something like this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
This is really going towards the girlfriend thing. Because you want to run the LLM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Call my AI. Well, but yes, quiet. Oh, quiet because you may be potentially want to run it in a car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
60 dB, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So how do you make the cooling quiet? That's an interesting problem in itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So tiny box will be big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Interesting. Well, the fan stuff, can't it be assembled on location or no? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The Apple experience. Yeah. I love it. Okay. And so TinyBox would run... TinyGrad. What do you envision this whole thing to look like? We're talking about Linux with a full software engineering environment, and just not PyTorch, but TinyGrad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Ooh, interesting. What's your favorite flavor of Linux? Ubuntu. Ubuntu. I like Ubuntu Mate, however you pronounce that. Mate. Mate. So how do you, you've gotten Llama into TinyGrad. You've gotten Stable Diffusion into TinyGrad. What was that like? Can you comment on like, what are these models? What's interesting about porting them? What are the challenges? What's naturally, what's easy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
All that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
At least you're getting enough sleep. At least you're doing the basics. At least you're doing the exercise. Once you get those basics in place, I think you can do some quite difficult things in life. But anyway, beyond all that is just a source of happiness and a kind of a feeling of home. The feeling that comes from returning to the habit time and time again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But that's more like a software engineering thing. Or do you think it has a cost on performance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I see. What do you think about Mojo? I don't know if you've been paying attention to the programming language that does some interesting ideas that kind of intersect TinyGrad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but they try to really get it to be fast, compiled onto specific hardware and make that compilation step faster. as flexible and resilient as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And that limits you. That's what you're saying, it's somewhere in the middle. So you're actually going to be targeting some accelerators, like some number, not one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Can you explain MLPerf? What's your approach in general to benchmarking tiny grad performance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's the hardware that OpenPilot runs on the Comma?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And a mobile GPU image texture. Okay. And so you want to be able to leverage that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Since you mentioned OpenPilot, I'd love to get an update in the company number one, CommAI world. How are things going there in the development of semi-autonomous driving?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's George Hotz. ¶¶ You mentioned something in a stream about the philosophical nature of time. So let's start with the wild question. Do you think time is an illusion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's the problem exactly? What does solving it mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Drive GPT. Okay. So, and it's trained on what? Is it trained in a self-supervised way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So really trying to learn a human policy. What would a human do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So it transfers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay, let me think about the distinction there. Would a human disengage? Would a human disengage? That correlates, I guess, with human policy, but it could be different. So it doesn't just say, what would a human do? It says, what would a good human driver do? And such that the experience is comfortable, but also not annoying in that the thing is very cautious. Finding a nice balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
That's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Because usually disengagement is almost always a sign of I'm not happy with what the system is doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But even I felt like driving...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Even that's a signal. Like, why do you feel like driving? You need to recalibrate your relationship with the car. Okay, so that's really interesting. How close are we to solving self-driving?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's the nature of the bugs? Are these major philosophical bugs, logical bugs? What kind of bugs are we talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
well people people are different yeah 20 fade flops that's a person it's just it's just a unit right horses are different too but we still call it a horsepower yeah but there's something different about mobility than there is about uh perception and action in a very complicated world but yes well yeah of course not all flops are created equal if you have randomly initialized weights it's not gonna not all flops are created equal so we're doing way more useful things than others
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, yeah. Tell me about it. Okay, so more data. Scale means more scale in compute or scale in scale of data? Both. Diversity of data?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
How would you evaluate how FSD is doing? Pretty well. How's that race going between CommAI and FSD?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What have you seen since the last time we talked that are interesting architectural decisions, training decisions, like the way they deploy stuff, the architectures they're using in terms of the software, how the teams are run, all that kind of stuff, data collection. Anything interesting?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So creeping towards end-to-end as much as possible across the whole thing. The training, the data collection, everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, I mean, it requires good software engineering, I think. Yeah. And the right kind of hardware.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You still don't believe in cloud in that regard?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Tiny grad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I'm guessing this is a kind of a legal distinction. Sure, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You said that you don't think LLMs have consciousness, or at least not more than a chicken. Do you think they can reason?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Is there something interesting to you about the word reason, about some of the capabilities that we think is kind of human, to be able to integrate complicated information and through a chain of thought arrive at a conclusion that feels novel, a novel integration of disparate facts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Hey, isn't that amazing to you, though? Isn't that like an incredible thing that a transformer can achieve?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But language feels like reasoning through the process of language, which looks a lot like thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you think language is not that special. It's like chess. It's like chess. I don't know. Because it's very human, we take it... Listen, there is something different between chess and language. Chess is a game that a subset of population plays. Language is something we use nonstop for all of our human interaction. And human interaction is fundamental to society. So it's like, holy shit, this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
This language thing is not so difficult to create in a machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Numeri for the world's hardest data science tournament, Babbel for learning new languages, NetSuite for business management software, Insight Tracker for blood paneling, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin program. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work on our team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So reproduction, yeah, we might redefine what it means to be, what is it, a high-performance living organism on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But Nish, is that delusional or is there some accuracy to that? Because maybe like with chess, you start to realize that we have ill-conceived notions of what makes humans special, like the apex organism on earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But language carries these notions of truth and so on. And so we might be like, wait, maybe truth is not carried by language. Maybe there's like a deeper thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So what do you think about this, the rapid development of LLMs? If we could just like stick on that, it's still incredibly impressive. Like with Chad GPT, just even Chad GPT, what are your thoughts about reinforcement learning with human feedback on these large language models?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
like society maybe you're right so i want to put on the the uh the big picture hat here we got a refrigerator wow the refrigerator electricity all that kind of stuff but you know with the internet large language models seeming human like basically passing a turing test It seems it might have really at scale rapid transformative effects on society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But you're saying like other technologies have as well. So maybe calculator is not the best example of that because that just seems like, well, no, maybe calculator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, yeah, you have to actually look at the practical impacts of certain technologies that they've had. Yeah, probably electricity is a big one. And also how rapidly it's spread. Man, the internet is a big one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The niche is humans. Yes. That makes humans special. Yes. It feels like it's getting smaller rapidly, though. Doesn't it? Or is that just a feeling? We dramatize everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but boy, is it impressive. So much more impressive than seeing a chess world champion AI system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay, forget the Civil War, just generating code, codex. Oh. So you're saying it's mediocre code. Terrible. But I don't think it's terrible. I think it's just mediocre code. Yeah. Often close to correct. like for mediocre purposes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You know, it's like level two driving, similar kind of thing. Yeah, you still should be a good programmer in order to modify. I wouldn't even say debugging. It's just modifying the code, reading it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. Can you describe the concept of tool complete? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Do you think there is an objective reality or is everything just useful models? Like underneath it all, is there an actual thing that we're constructing models for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But the, so in tool, you're putting in the programming languages. So it's just the entirety stack of the tooling. Exactly. So it's not just like the IDEs or something like this. It's everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but don't you think so much programming has boilerplate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, let's talk about good code and bad code. Okay. I would say, I don't know, for generic scripts that I write just offhand, like 80% of it is written by GPT. Just like quick offhand stuff. So not like libraries, not like performing code, not stuff for robotics and so on, just quick stuff. Because your basic, so much of programming is doing some, yeah, boilerplate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But to do so efficiently and quickly... because you can't really automate it fully with like generic method, like a generic kind of ID type of recommendation or something like this. You do need to have some of the complexity of language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I was hoping you would know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What about looking stuff up? Because that's essentially a more efficient lookup, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I mean, this kind of connects to the models of constructive reality with machine learning, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, do you think that's just a temporary kind of stage? No. You don't think it'll get better and better and better and this kind of stuff? Because it only hallucinates stuff in the edge cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
If you're writing generic code, it's actually pretty good. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Which is really helpful to integrate the human into the loop of the thing because you can go check the sources and you can investigate. So whenever the thing is hallucinating, you can have the human supervision. So that's pushing it towards level two kind of drive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Like, is it just nice to have useful approximations of the world such that we can do something with it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Wait, which part?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
An alum that's citing his sources because that's basically a search engine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But also Google might be the people that build it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And put ads on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Why is that? Why do you think? Who wins this race? Who are the competitors? All right. We got Tiny Corp. I don't know if that's... Yeah, I mean, you're a legitimate competitor in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You're not? No, not as a speaker. You're just going to accidentally stumble into that competition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You don't think you might build a search engine to replace Google search?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The night is still young. You don't know how hard is it to win search in this new world. It feels, I mean, one of the things that ChatGPT kind of shows that there could be a few interesting tricks that create a really compelling product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you don't think Google, because of how big the corporation is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Why is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Facebook's alive. Facebook is alive. Meta's alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Meta.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you don't think there's this gutsy pivoting engine? like Google doesn't have that, the kind of engine that a startup has like constantly being alive, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. This should be a t-shirt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What does that mean exactly? The company or the search engine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Can we shut the company down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Can you elaborate on the value of that question?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Who has the authority? That's a good question, right? Does anyone? Does anyone? Yeah, I'm sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And what is the mechanism by which he wouldn't keep his position?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. So what, I mean, what's the case you're making here? So the capitalist machine prevents you from having the button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Ooh, strong words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, it's probably more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I guess you could say Elon has similar stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think some questions are better left unasked. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I do think factoring is in P, but... I don't think you're the person that falls the majority in all walks of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
My God. But the positive side of the button is that you can innovate aggressively, is what you're saying, which is what's required with turning LLM into a search engine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Because it's so easy, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
just is able to set sources, loop on itself. I mean, it just feels like one model can take off, right? And that nice wrapper and some of it scale. I mean, it's hard to like create a product that just works really nicely, stably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. In theoretical computer science, you're one of the sheep. All right. But to you, time is a useful model. Sure. Hmm. What were you talking about on the stream with time? Are you made of time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, yeah, that data is really, really powerful. It's the human supervision. What do you think are the chances? What do you think in general that Lama was open sourced? I just did a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, and he's all in on open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Who would have thought anything in this world? It's hard to know. But open source to you ultimately is a good thing here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So open sourcing is the way to fight the paper clip maximizer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So the criticism you have for the AI safety folks is that there is a... belief and a desire for control. And that belief and desire for centralized control of dangerous AI systems is not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Who did you have to murder to get that information? All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Or the flip side of that is they used a relatively weak model in retrospect to explore how do we do AI safety correctly? How do we release things? How do we go through the process? I don't know if... Sure. I don't know how much hype there is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I don't know how much hype there is in AI safety, honestly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Twitter's not real life. Come on. In terms of hype. I mean, I don't... I think OpenAI has been finding an interesting balance between transparency and putting value on AI safety. You don't think... You think just go... All out open source. So do a llama. Absolutely. So do like open source. This is a tough question, which is open source, both the base, the foundation model and the fine tuned one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So like the model that can be ultra racist and dangerous and like tell you how to build a nuclear weapon. Oh my God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Right? Like half of these AI. I haven't met most humans. This allows you to meet every human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But here's the thing. It makes it very accessible to ask very questions where the answers have dangerous consequences if you were to act on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Someday soon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Welcome to the world. Well, no, for me, there's a lot of friction if I want to find out how to, I don't know, blow up something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, like what do I search? Do I use Bing or do I, which search engine do I use?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, it feels like I have to keep clicking on a lot of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Are you sure about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Would that be exciting to you or sad that there's a George Hotz model?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I feel like a language model makes it more accessible for that person who's not smart enough to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
No, I think LLM makes it more accessible to people with money without the technical know-how, right? Do you really need to know how to build a bomb to build a bomb?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But a language model can probably help you out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay, GPT-4, in terms of finding a hitman, is like asking Fiverr how to find a hitman. I understand. Ask WikiHow, you know? WikiHow. But don't you think GPT-5 will be better? Because don't you think that information is out there on the internet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I don't think so. I think it makes it more accessible. If you have enough money to buy a hitman, I think it decreases the friction of how hard is it to find that kind of hitman. I honestly think there's a jump in ease and scale of how much harm you can do. And I don't mean harm with language. I mean harm with actual violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What is the metric by which you measure better or worse in that? If you're competing with yourself,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
That's what they say about the Amazon. When you go to the Amazon, it's the human tribes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So to you, the best defense is actually, the best defense is to give more intelligence to the good guys and intelligence. Give intelligence to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
In a fundamental way, I agree with you. But there just feels like so much uncertainty and so much can happen rapidly that you can lose a lot of control and you can do a lot of damage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Thank God.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think when you lose control, you can do a lot of damage, but you can do more damage when you centralize and hold on to control, is the point here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
This human civilization we've got going on is quite interesting. I mean, I agree with you. So to you, open source is the way forward here. So you admire what Facebook is doing here or what Meta is doing with the release of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It was worth it. Do you think Google and OpenAI with Microsoft will match what Meta is doing or no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
People close to you or strangers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So closed source to use the bad team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Just because you're mocking AI safety doesn't mean it's not real. Oh, of course. Is it possible that these things can really do a lot of damage that we don't know? Oh my God, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But machine intelligence is so much easier to deploy at scale, like rapidly. Yeah. Okay, if you have human-like bots on Twitter, and you have like a thousand of them create a whole narrative, you can manipulate millions of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but they're not doing it that well. It feels like you can do a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think they're doing a pretty good job. I suspect they're not nearly as good as a bunch of GPT-fueled bots could be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But I think there's a George Hotz-type character that can do a better job than the entirety of them. You don't think so? No way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It'd be quite painful, right? Loved ones, family members would rather have the model over for Thanksgiving than you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Endurance, yeah. Yeah, financial backing. And the infrastructure for the endurance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What do you think Eliezer Yudkowsky would say to you? Because he's really against open source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
or like significant others, would rather sext with the large language model version of you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, there's a small, trusted group of people that have control of our nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But AI is different how exactly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, I mean, so you have fundamental hope for that, for the defense of PSYOP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you believe in the power of the people to always create an ad blocker. Yeah, I mean, I kind of share that belief. One of the deepest optimisms I have is just like, there's a lot of good guys. So you shouldn't handpick them. Just throw out powerful technology out there, and the good guys will outnumber and outpower the bad guys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
In skill and performance. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Well, that's what we're doing in a relationship, right? We're just fine-tuning ourselves, but we're inefficient with it because we're selfish and greedy and so on. Our language models can fine-tune more efficiently, more selflessly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
That's really interesting. So that's on the safety grounds, but then also, of course, there's other motivations, like you don't want to give away your secret sauce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You know what's interesting is that like there's so many possible trajectories in human history where you could have the next Google be open source. So for example, I don't know if that connection is accurate, but Wikipedia made a lot of interesting decisions not to put ads, Wikipedia is basically open source. You could think of it that way. And that's one of the main websites on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And it didn't have to be that way. It could have been like Google could have created Wikipedia, put ads on it. You could probably run amazing ads now on Wikipedia. You wouldn't have to keep asking for money. But it's interesting, right? So Lama, open source Lama, derivatives of open source Lama might win the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You know, those small number of companies have created some sexy products. But you're saying overall, in the long arc of history, the centralization of power they have like suffocated the human spirit at scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
We lost a lot of products too, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, okay. So you're just being an old man who's worried about that. I think there's always, it goes, it's a cycle thing. It's ups and downs. And I think people rediscover the power of distributed, of decentralized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I mean, that's kind of like what the whole cryptocurrency is trying. I think crypto is just carrying the flame of that spirit of like, stuff should be decentralized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, money kind of corrupts the mind somehow. It becomes this drug.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You still have hope for crypto?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
George Hotz. Well, let me sort of on the AI safety. Do you think there's some interesting questions there, though, to solve for the open source community in this case? So like alignment, for example, or the control problem. Like if you really have super powerful, you said it's scary. What do we do with it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So not control, not centralized control, but like if you were, then you're going to see some guy or gal release a super powerful language model, open source, and here you are, George Cost, thinking, holy shit, okay, what ideas do I have to combat this thing? So what ideas would you have?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you don't think you'll find autonomy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay, what if the thing writes code, basically writes viruses?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
told to write viruses. Yeah, but there's some things you can't like put back in the box. That's kind of the whole point is it kind of spreads. Give it access to the internet. It spreads, installs itself, modifies your shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I'm trying to work. I'm trying to get better at my plot writing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But this goes to your previous concern that who gets to define who's a good human, who's a bad human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Power. And power turns even slightly good humans to bad. Sure. That's the intuition you have. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I wonder what that means. I wonder if that's anecdotal or if there's truth to that. There's something about capitalism at the core that promotes the people that run capitalism that promotes psychopathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But do you have a concern of super intelligent AGI? Yeah. Open sourced. And then what do you do with that? I'm not saying control it. It's open source. What do we do with this human species?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You're not a central planner, but you'll probably tweet there's a few days left to live for the human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But at this point, do you brainstorm like... Because it's not regulation. It could be decentralized regulation where people agree that this is just like, we create tools that make it more difficult for you to maybe make it more difficult for code to spread, you know, antivirus software, this kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, I think a large language model could incorporate the flaws and the quirks and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not. No, I'm dead serious. But I think there's power to that. It's like, how do I protect my mind from influence of human-like or superhuman intelligent bots?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, on Twitter sometimes I... would like to have a protection mechanism for my mind from the outrage mobs. Because they feel like bot-like behavior. It's like there's a large number of people that will just grab a viral narrative and attack anyone else that believes otherwise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
To me, a defense against those mobs is just getting multiple perspectives always from sources that make you feel kind of... Like you're getting smarter and just actually just basically feels good. Like a good documentary just feels good. Something feels good about it. It's well done. It's like, oh, okay. I never thought of it this way. This just feels good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Sometimes the outrage mobs, even if they have a good point behind it, when they're like mocking and derisive and just aggressive, you're with us or against us, this fucking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, yeah. And that's probably a good approximation of the percent of time the language model should be cranky or an asshole or jealous or all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, why'd you do that? I was, you know, I missed your tweets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Like not the stick, but carrot. So like where people look for goodness. So make it catalyze the process of connecting cool people and being cool to each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Without ever censoring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And I actually believe that you can make money with that too. So it's not, I don't think engagement is the only way to make money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Numeri, a hedge fund that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to make investment decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It hasn't picked up steam yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Sure. But you know, you, for this business model to work, it's like most people should be signed up to Twitter. And so the way it was, there was something perhaps not compelling or something like this to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Ah, well, so speaking of which, uh, You worked at Twitter for a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
As an intern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
The world's greatest intern.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
All right. There's been better. There's been better. Tell me about your time at Twitter. How did it come about? And what did you learn from the experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. But there are some people with same, you know, who I respect a lot are people that just post really good technical stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And I guess, I don't know, I think I respect them more for it. Because you realize, oh, this wasn't, there's like so much depth to this person, to their technical understanding of so many different topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So I try to follow people. I try to consume stuff that's technical machine learning content.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay, what's the difference between real and artificial?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I mean, and there's different flavors of outrage. It doesn't have to be, it could be mockery. You could be outraged. The topic of outrage could be different. It could be an idea. It could be a person. It could be, and maybe there's a better word than outrage. It could be drama. Sure. Drama. All this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But it doesn't feel like when you consume it, it's a constructive thing for the individuals that consume it in the long term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, boy. Yeah, I mean, there's a roller coaster of that, but being political on Twitter. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And also being, just attacking anybody on Twitter, it comes back at you harder. And if it's political and attacks. Sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And then letting sort of de-platformed people back on even adds more fun to the beautiful chaos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So if something cannot be turned off with a knob, it's real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But it's not free speech absolutism. It's not free speech. But I feel like being a free speech absolutist on a social network requires you to also have tools for the individuals to control what they consume easier. Like not censor, but just like control like, oh, I'd like to see more cats and less politics. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. And not through the process of censorship, but through the process of like... Well, it's individualized, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but censorship is a strong word. that people are very sensitive to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But I love what you're censoring. I'm looking at you. I'm censoring everything else out when my mind is focused on you. You can use the word censorship that way, but usually when people get very sensitive about the censorship thing. I think when anyone is allowed to say anything, you should probably have tools that maximize the quality of the experience for individuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
For me, what I really value, boy, it would be amazing to somehow figure out how to do that. I love disagreement and debate, and people who disagree with each other disagree with me, especially in the space of ideas, but the high-quality ones. So not derision, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Probably. There's just a way of talking that's like snarky and so on that somehow gets people on Twitter and they get excited and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. And it's like all of it, all the wrong stuff is attractive to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I wonder if there's a social network that will allow you to have that kind of filter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, okay, so that's the experience of being on Twitter, but then you got a chance to also, together with other engineers and with Elon, sort of look, brainstorm when you step into a code base that's been around for a long time. You know, there's other social networks, you know, Facebook, this is old code bases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And you step in and see, okay, how do we make, with a fresh mind, progress on this code base? Like, what did you learn about software engineering, about programming from just experiencing that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So, you know, it's a proxy, but yeah, the Google code base is quite interesting. There's a lot of really good software engineers there, but the code base is very large. The code base was good in 2005, right? It looks like 2005. There's so many products, so many teams, right? It's very difficult to, I feel like Twitter does less, like obviously much less than Google.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
In terms of the set of features, right? So I can imagine the number of software engineers that could recreate Twitter is much smaller than to recreate Google. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What's the nature of the hate? Comfortably. You don't know what you're talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And I do think that's where the hate comes from. When you say, well, there's a core truth to that. So when you say I'm going to solve self-driving problems, People go like, what are your credentials? What the hell are you talking about? This is an extremely difficult problem. Of course, you're a noob that doesn't understand the problem deeply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
How does that connect to the metaphor of the knob?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I mean, that was the same nature of hate that probably Elon got when he first talked about autonomous driving. But there's pros and cons to that because there is experts in this world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
They're, but the people are going to lose their jobs. Well, that, but also there's the software engineers that probably criticize, no, it's a lot more complicated than you realize, but maybe it doesn't need to be so complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, and one of the sort of hidden... Side effects of software engineering is like finding pleasure in complexity. I mean, I don't remember just taking all the software engineering courses and just doing programming and just coming up in this... object-oriented programming kind of idea, you don't, like, not often do people tell you, like, do the simplest possible thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Like, a professor, a teacher, is not going to get in front, like, this is the simplest way to do it. They'll say, like, this is the, like, there's the right way, and the right way, at least for a long time, you know, especially I came up with, like, Java, right? Like, there's so much boilerplate, so much, like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So many classes, so many like designs and architectures and so on, like planning for features far into the future and planning poorly and all this kind of stuff. And then there's this like code base that follows you along and puts pressure on you and nobody knows what like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You failed before you started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
parts different parts do which slows everything down is a kind of bureaucracy that's instilled in the code as a result of that but then you feel like oh well i follow good software engineering practices it's an interesting trade-off because then you look at like the ghettoness of like pearl and the old like how quickly you just write a couple lines you just get stuff done that trade-off is interesting or bash or whatever these kind of ghetto things you can do in linux
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you're always programming your tests in mind, developing tests with that in mind that if it passes, it should be good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What other stuff can you say about the codebase that made it difficult? What are some interesting sort of quirks, broadly speaking, from that compared to just your experience with comma and everywhere else?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It's so interesting because from an individual perspective, how do you incentivize... How do you create the kind of incentives that will lead to a great code base? Okay, what's the answer to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Right. But that requires people that overlook the code at the, at the highest levels to be like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Technical leadership. So managers or whatever should have to have technical savvy, deep technical savvy. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. And that's not always obvious, trivial to create, especially at large companies. Managers get soft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, and have good intuition, intuition that's laden with wisdom from all the battles of trying to reduce complexity in code bases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So it's a dictatorship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, it's just transparent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you mentioned rewrite before or refactor before features. Mm-hmm. If you were to refactor the Twitter code base, what would that look like? And maybe also comment on how difficult is it to refactor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Do you think of us humans as individuals that are like born and die? Or is it, are we just all part of one living organism that is earth, that is nature?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And you as a programmer were just being transparent out there, actually having like fun. And like, this is what programming should be about. I love that Elon gave me this opportunity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. And it's also inspiring to just engineers and programmers and just, it's cool. It should be fun. The people that are hating on it, it's like, oh man. It was fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, you also were one of the people that kind of made a strong case to refactor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And that's a really interesting thing to raise. Like maybe that is the right, you know, the timing of that is really interesting. If you look at just the development of autopilot, you know, going from Mobileye to just like more, if you look at the history of semi-autonomous driving in Tesla is more and more like you could say refactoring or starting from scratch, redeveloping from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
And like, and the question is like, can you do that sooner? Can you maintain product profitability? And like, what's the, what's the right time to do it? How do you do it? You know, on any one day, it's like, you don't want to pull off the band-aids. Like it's like, everything works. It's just like little fix here and there, but maybe started from scratch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But would you consider, you know, say you were like running Twitter development teams, engineering teams, would you go as far as like different programming language? Just go that far?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So, and then you hope that there's modules that can live on for a while. And then you add new ones, maybe in a different language or... Before we add new ones, we replace old ones. Yeah, yeah, meaning like replace old ones with something simpler.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So it's all computation. Everything running in your head is just computation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I wonder how hard it is too, because I'm with you on testing and everything. From tests to like asserts to everything, code is just covered in this because it should be very easy to make rapid changes and know that it's not going to break everything. And that's the way to do it. But I wonder how difficult is it to integrate tests into a code base that doesn't have many of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you can't run all of Twitter offline to test something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but there seems to be an embodiment to your particular computation. Like there's a consistency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Period. Any one person can't run it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
That sounds really compelling. Yeah. But can that be achieved by a code base that grows over the years? I mean, the three data centers didn't have to be, right? Because they're totally different designs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
One of the ways to explain it is that the incentive for software developers to move up in the company is to add code. To add, especially large.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah. Yeah. If the flip side is to simplify, simplify, simplify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So what do you think about sort of a thing where the product is online? So I guess, would you do a refactor? If you ran engineering on Twitter, would you just do a refactor? How long would it take? What would that mean for the running of the actual service?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but a lot of these kinds of decisions are above everybody's pay grade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, but a refactor is so compelling. If this is to become something much bigger than what Twitter was, it feels like a refactor has to be coming at some point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
It's all RLHF. Like, we all RLHF each other. We provide human feedback in that way. thereby fine tune these little pockets of computation, but it's still unclear why that pocket of computation stays with you for years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah, it doesn't, you know, sometimes they're right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What do you think about Elon as an engineering leader? Having to experience him in the most chaotic of spaces, I would say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
About the tensions within those, the trade-offs within those decisions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Also bigger than engineering, just everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So his heart is in the right place fighting, in this case, for this ideal of the freedom of expression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Freedom of expression is... But to you, it's still... The downsides of that is the monarchy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Tenth of a cent a kilowatt hour. What do you mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you would see a lot of innovation with Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You have this consistent set of physics, biology, whatever you call the neurons firing, the electrical signals, the mechanical signals, all of that, that seems to stay there, and it contains information, it stores information, and that information permeates through time. It stays with you. There's like memory. It's like sticky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What did you think about Scala as a programming language?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
What did you learn about learning a new programming language from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Let's actually just explore, we touched it a little bit, but just on the art, the science and the art of programming. For you personally, how much of your programming is done with GPT currently?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
None.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Because you prioritize simplicity so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I mean, with VS Code and GPT with Codex, you can kind of brainstorm. I find... I'm like probably the same as you, but I like that it generates code and you basically disagree with it and write something simpler. But to me, that somehow is like inspiring. It makes me feel good. It also gamifies the simplification process because I'm like, oh, yeah, you dumb AI system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
They created a tournament that challenges data scientists to build... best predictive models for financial markets. It's basically just a really, really difficult real-world dataset to test out your ideas for how to build machine learning models. I think this is a great educational platform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
You think this is the way to do it. I have a simpler thing here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I think you and I probably have different thresholds for cringe code. You probably hate cringe code. So it's for you. I mean, boilerplate is a part of code. Like some of it, yeah, and some of it is just like faster lookup. Because I don't know about you, but I don't remember everything. I'm offloading so much of my memory about different functions, library functions, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
GPT-GIS is very fast at standard stuff, at standard library stuff, basic stuff that everybody uses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Fiverr. Whenever I've used Fiverr for certain things like design or whatever, it's always, you come back. I think that's probably closer, my experience with Fiverr is closer to your experience with programming with GPT is like, you're just frustrated and feel worse about the whole process of design and art and whatever I used Fiverr for. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Still, I just feel like later versions of GPT, I'm using GPT as much as possible to just learn the dynamics of it. Like these early versions, because it feels like in the future you'll be using it more and more. And so like, I don't want to be like, for the same reason I gave away all my books and switched to Kindle. Cause like, all right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
how long are we going to have paper books like 30 years from now like i want to learn to be reading on kindle even though i don't enjoy it as much and you learn to enjoy it more in the same way i switch from let me just pause i switch from emacs to vs code yeah i switch from vim to vs code i think i similar but yeah it's tough and that vim to vs code is even tougher because emacs is like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Old, like more outdated, feels like it. The community is more outdated. Vim is like pretty vibrant still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
That's what I looked at myself in the mirror. I'm like, yeah, you wrote some stuff in Lisp. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Reinforcement learning with human feedback.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So you like type hinting. You like pushing the language towards being a typed language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
C++ allows you to take a step back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I feel like that makes you a better programmer. That's a kind of test, right? That the type remains the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I wonder if you can now take GPT and give it a code that you wrote for a function and say, how can I make this simpler and have it accomplish the same thing? I think you'll get some good ideas on some code. Maybe not the code you write for tiny grad type of code, because that requires so much design thinking, but like other kinds of code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I'd rather not. Ideas about how to debug the code are basically a better debugger. It's really interesting. But it's not a better debugger. Yes, I would love a better debugger. Yeah, it's not yet. Yeah, but it feels like it's not too far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Oh, that definitely is much faster, is print statements, yeah. Yeah. I see myself using that a lot, just because it figures out the rest of the functions. It's just like, okay, print everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Do you think it will ever get to 100%? What's the role of the human that it converges to as a programmer? Do you think it's all generated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
We'll leave that as a cliffhanger. So no more programmers left, huh? That's where we're going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I wonder how far away we are from that. I mean, there's some aspect to, you know, on Instagram, your title is listed as prompt engineer. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
I don't know if it's ironic or sarcastic or non. What do you think of prompt engineering as a scientific and engineering discipline and maybe art form?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So, okay. We have human level intelligence. Would you call that AGI? Whatever we have? GI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Basically, like you said with niches, most human jobs will eventually be replaced with prompt engineering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Isn't there a certain point where the AI will be better at writing prompts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Okay. So why can GPT-12 not get us to AGI? Can we just like linger on that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But... It's not going to find the meaning. I mean, to do what I mean, it has to figure stuff out. And the thing you'll maybe ask it to do is run government for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
So in the space of AI, you're an anarchist. Anarchism espouser, believer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
But how do you prevent the AI from basically replacing all human prompt engineers? It's like a self, like where nobody's the prompt engineer anymore. So autonomy, greater and greater autonomy until it's full autonomy. And that's just where it's headed. Because one person's going to say, run everything for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God
Well, you mentioned, because I talked to Mark about faith in God and you said you were impressed by that. What's your own belief in God and how does that affect your work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
The following is a conversation with Cenk Uygur, a progressive political commentator and host of The Young Turks. As I've said before, I will speak with everyone, including on the left and the right of the political spectrum, always in good faith with empathy, rigor, and backbone. Sometimes I fail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
He seems to be... And why does it keep forgiving people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Let me ask you about another impressive speech, AOC. Is it possible that she's the future of the party, future president?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I mean, there's some degree to which you want to sometimes bide your time and just like rest a bit. And I think from my perspective, maybe you can educate me. She seems like a legit progressive, legit even populist, charismatic person. young, like a lot of time to develop the game of politics, how to play it well enough to avoid the bullshit. I guess she doesn't take corporate PAC money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So as far as just looking over the next few elections, like who's going to be running, who's going to be who's going to be a real player. She just seems like, to me, seems like an obvious person that's going to be in the race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
There's a lot of questions I can ask there. So on the circle of liberty, yes, so expanding the number of people whose freedoms are protected. But what about the magnitude of freedom for each individual person? So expanding the freedom of the individual and protecting the freedoms of the individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
All right, so big question. Who wins this election, Kamala or Trump? And what's Kamala's path to victory? And if you can steal a man, what's Trump's path to victory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
It seems like progressives are more willing to expand the size of government where government can do all kinds of regulation, all kinds of controls on the individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And as I was telling you offline, she's doing whoever's doing her TikTok is is like blowing up and they're doing risky, edgy stuff. Yes. I did not expect that from somebody that kind of comes from the Biden camp of just like be safe, be boring, all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Speaking of risks, when they debate, when Kamala and Trump debate, what do you think that's going to look like? Who do you think is going to win?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Well, hold on a second. Oh, I guess in a debate, you can have pre-written. It seems like when she's going off the top of her head is when the word salad sometimes comes out. Sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That she doesn't fall apart, you mean? Yeah. Because I hope she does a bunch of interviews, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Do you, though? Like, it's tough, but, like, you're pretty respectful. Maybe I just have my sort of... Like I'm okay with a little bit of tension. You're pretty respectful. Even when you're yelling, there's like respect. Like you don't do like a gotcha type thing. There's certain things you could do. Like you said this in the past. You can say a line from the past that's out of context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
uh it forces the other person to have to define the content you just you know sort of debate type tactics over and over like you don't seem to do that you just like ask them questions genuinely and then you argue the point and then you also like hear what they say the only thing i've seen you do sometimes tough that you sometimes like interrupt like you speak over the person
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
if they are trying to do the same. Right, only if they're filibustering. Yeah, if they're filibustering. But that's a tricky one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Oh, the corporatista.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So this is a good place to, can you steel man the case for Trump?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. For me, one of the biggest steel man for Trump is that he has both the skill and the predisposition to not be a warmonger. He, I think better than the other candidates I've seen is able to end wars. and end them. Now, you might disagree with it, but in a way where there's legitimately effective negotiation that happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
All that combined with the fact that you don't have access to this little tablet of wisdom, which is the smartphone. it can be a real pain in the ass. So a great eSIM that works, easy to set up, is worth its weight in gold. That said, when I was in the Amazon, it was also nice to have no reception whatsoever, to be completely disconnected from the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Like, I just don't see any other candidate currently being able to sit Donald Zelensky and Putin and to negotiate a peace treaty that both are equally unhappy with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
But literally, which person, if they become president, will end the war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I just disagree with he loves Russia, the implication of that, meaning he will do whatever Putin tells him. I think... He'll do 90% of what Putin tells him. I just disagree with that. I think... I think he wants to be the kind of person that says, fuck you to Putin. While patting him on the back and being, you know, but out negotiating Putin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, I hope not. I hope not. I think Trump sees themselves and wants to be a great negotiator. So... And I personally want the death of people to end. And I think Trump would bring that much faster. And I disagree with you. At least my hope is that he would negotiate something that would be fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
RFK Jr., you said some positive things for a while about RFK Jr. And I think you said you would even consider voting for him, given the slate of people. This was at the time when Biden was still in. What do you think about him? What do you think about RFK Jr. as a candidate, as a person? He's been on the show, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So that's an interesting distinction here. So you're actually, as far as I understand, pro-capitalism. Yes. Which is an interesting place to be. That's the thing that probably makes you center left and then still populist. You're full of beautiful contradictions, let's say this, which would be great to untangle. But what's the difference between corporatism and capitalism? Is there a difference?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Please tell me that's part of your Wikipedia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Well, one of the sources of hope to all this is there's a lot of independent media now, but mainstream media has a lot of power still. It carries a lot of power. Do you think they're going to die eventually?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. It's going to collapse and it's going to be painful. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. Just, it's going to be a. a messy battle for truth because the reality is there's a lot of money to be made and a lot of attention to be gained from drama farming. So just constantly creating drama. And sometimes drama helps find the truth, like we were mentioning, but most of the time it's just drama. And it doesn't care about the truth. It just cares about drama.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And then the same is like conspiracy theories. Now, some conspiracy theories have value and depth, and they allow us to question the establishment institutions. But the bottom line is conspiracy theories get clicks. And so you can just keep coming up with random conspiracy theories. Many of them don't have to be grounded in the truth at all. And so that's the sea we're operating in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And so it's a tricky space, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. So speaking of Joe, let me ask you about this. Here we go. I didn't actually know this, but when I was prepping for this conversation, I saw that you actually said at some point in the past that you can beat up Rogan in a fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
No, you said that you have a shot. It's a non-zero probability. Yes. Do you still believe this? Yes, but the probability is dropping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
dropping every day i think it's the probably the stupidest thing i've ever heard you say so i didn't i wrestled and did jiu-jitsu and judo and all the kinds of fighting sports my whole life and i just observed a lot of really confident large guys roll into gyms he's ripped he could deadlift he could talk all kinds of shit and he believes he's gonna be the next world champion and he just gets his ass kicked
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
But you've been on a show and I really, that was a good conversation. It was a great conversation. It was a while back. Yeah. Yeah. I hope he has you on again. Yeah. So I get it. I bet you, I don't like this take you have. I bet you he hates it because him as an MMA commentator, he gets to hear so many bros. It's all about the mindset, bro.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Now, to steal, man, the point you're making, which I do think it's the stupidest thing you've ever said, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
the actual intent which is whether you're left or right there's there's strong people on the left like mentally strong physically strong like i think the whole point is not that you can beat them but you're willing to step you're willing to fight if you need to that's it's 100 so it's not like i believe i could beat him it's like i'm willing like all this you know calling the people on the left wusses or whatever
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I'm willing to step in the fight. Even if I'm untrained, even if I'm in my father's shape, I'm willing to fight. Yeah, I get it. I understand that. But it's just pick a different person. That's why I wrote down my genuine curiosity is if you can beat up Alex. Alex Jones versus Cenk. The legitimacy is I would pay for that because you're both untrained. You both got, I would say, the spirit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Let me just say, that's beautiful. I love this. I would pay a lot of money to watch the two of you just even, like, wrestle. But with Joe, I think... I have to say it's like it's .0001% chance you have a chance before you even get to the mentality. And the other thing is on the mentality side, one of the fascinating things about Joe is he's actually a sweetheart in person like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
But there's something that takes over him when he competes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I think we're all allowed. one kind of blind spot, I suppose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I think it's because I've talked to, so I trained with a coach named John Donahue and we talk about this a lot. And I think technique is just such technique is the thing that also feeds the willpower. It actually builds up your confidence in the, in the way that like nothing else does. And,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That's actually a really interesting way to put it because it's, When everyone is equal, nobody is in power. And human nature is such that there's a will to power, so when you create a power vacuum, somebody's going to fill it. So the alternative is to have people in power, but there's a balance of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
in the in the more actionable way because you won't need that much willpower no if the technique is backed but like you don't have to be like a tough guy to win debates if you're just fucking good at debates right so i think people just don't understand the value in sport and especially in combat of technique
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
We agree. Okay, beautiful. One of the controversial things you've done In the 90s, as a student at UPenn, you publicly denied the Armenian Genocide, which is the mass murder of over a million Armenians in 1915 and 16 in the Ottoman Empire. You have since then publicly and clearly changed your mind on this. Tell me the process you went through to change your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And then there's a democratic system that elects the people in power and keeps churning and rotating who's in power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
At first it was painful, but after going rapidly through all the stages of grief, I was able to discover freedom. I was able to, let's say, quiet the mind to a degree that I'm not usually able to in the busyness of urban life. And the smartphone certainly is a thing that creates that turmoil in the mind. You can always look and something in there can just perturbate the mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So maybe by way of advice, how do you know when you're deluded by propaganda? How do you know you're not believing a kind of, how do you know when you're not plugged into the matrix, when you're plugged into the matrix?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I mean, there's some of that steel man, some of the conspiracy theories. Do you think there's some value to the conspiracy theories that come from the right, but actually more so come from the anti-establishment? I mean, for me, there's a lot. that raise a bit of a question. A lot of them could probably be explained by corporatism and the military-industrial complex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
But there's also a lot of them could be explained by creepiness and shadiness in human nature. Epstein is an example of that. There's a lot of ways to explain Epstein, including the basic creepiness of human nature. But there could be bigger explanations underlying it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. Well, it's interesting you just mentioned, do you think the CIA has not grown in power versus?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Well, that's one of the conspiracy theories with Epstein is that he's a front for, I guess, CIA, and they're getting data on people like creepy pedophile people kind of data to the, they can use to then threaten character assassination and then they put them in this way, put the people in their pockets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. That's crazy we don't have the list of clients. What is the best way to achieve that? stability and peace in Israel and Palestine in the current situation and in the next 5-10 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
You think Hamas takes the deal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So BB has to go. Definitely. What's the role of U.S. in making a peace deal like that happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. And this is where we go back to the steel man of Trump. It feels like he's the only one crazy enough to use that leverage. By crazy, I mean in a good kind of sense, bold enough, not giving a shit about convention, not giving a shit about pressures and money and influence and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
We talked a lot about hope in this conversation. Zooming out, what gives you hope about the future of this whole thing, of humanity, not just the United States, of us humans on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Good story. Well, Cenk, thank you for fighting for that change for many years now, for over two decades now. And thank you for talking today. Appreciate it, Lex. Thank you for having the conversation. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cenk Uygur. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Hannah Arendt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely through the state and a machinery of violence. Thanks to his peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in the apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Are all companies built the same here? So when you say corporatism, it seems like just looking here at the list of by industry lobbyists, it seems like there are certain industries that are worse offenders than others, like pharmaceuticals, like insurance, oil and gas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And now it's off to the races. So not having a smartphone to do that. is a really nice catalyst for peace. Anyway, when you are traveling, you should have a smartphone, and it should work, and it should be easy. Go to saly.com slash lex, and choose the one gigabyte Saly data plan to get it for free. That's saly.com slash lex to get one free gig of Saly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So it seems to me it feels wrong to just throw all companies into the same bucket of like, they're all guilty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Or a lot of competition. Figured out the game better. So I think a lot of companies... are good at winning the right way by building better products, by making people happier with the work that they're doing and winning at the game of capitalism. And there's other companies that win at the game of lobbying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And I just want to sort of draw that distinction because I think it's a small subset of companies that are playing the game of lobbying. Lobbying. It's like big pharma.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Sometimes I say stupid, inaccurate, ineloquent things, and I frequently change my mind as I'm learning and thinking about the world. For all this, I often get attacked, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. But just know that I'm aware when I fall short, and I will keep trying to do better. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, all kinds, life, auto, home, disability, and so on. Really nice tools for comparisons. Having talked to Peter Levels, I realized how awesome it is to create a website that compares stuff. Whether it's... hotels, neighborhoods, and whatever else, it's nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So that's a big contributor to influencing what politicians say and what they think, but it's not the entire thing, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Okay, so how do we fix it? So it's really interesting and nice that you're pro-capitalism and anti-corporatism. So how do we create a system where the free market can rule, where capitalism can rule, we can have these vibrant flourishing of all these companies competing against each other and creating awesome stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Some of it is an interface challenge, some of it is a data challenge, all of that. When a company, when a service does it well, it just makes life easier. You can compare stuff, you can choose the thing that's right for you. I know how powerful it is because most people do it poorly. And it's a real pain in the ass. Like with hotels, booking hotels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, but finding the right level of regulation, especially in, for example, in tech, something I'm much more familiar with, it's very difficult because people in Congress are living in the 20th century before the internet was invented. So like, how are they supposed to come up with regulations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That's the idea of the free market is you should be able to sort of compete. The market regulates. And then the government can step in and protect the market from forming monopolies, for example, which is easier to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Right. But then there's like more check in the elevator twice a year. That's a more sort of specific watching micromanaging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And I just saw, I need to check out a little bit better, that Peter threw up hotel list. That looks really exciting. You'd be able to compare all different kinds of hotels. Anyway, Policy Genius does that for insurances. You know, insurance is a fascinating thing. because basically life is full of risks. Much of progress in a human life occurs when you take risks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
By the way, I was listening to Joe Biden from when he was like 30 years old, the speeches. He was... Eloquent as hell. It's fun to listen to, actually. And he has a speech he gives, or just maybe a conversation in Congress, I'm not sure where, where he talks about how corrupt the whole system is. And he's really honest and fun and... That Joe Biden is great, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That guy, I mean, age sucks. People get older. But he was talking quite honestly about having to suck up to all these rich people and that he couldn't really suck up to the really rich people. They said, come back to us 10 years later when you're more integrated into the system. But he was really honest about it. He's saying that's how it is. That's what we have to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And that really sucks that that's what we have to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
You can use insurance to kind of muffle the pain felt after taking the risk, the negative consequences they experience. So it's really interesting just looking at the landscape of human experience and seeing how insurance muffles the lows. It can create a floor, a protection against the lows, especially the real lows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Oh, that's an interesting... I'm not taking that tangent at this moment. Because you mentioned mainstream media. What's the motivation for mainstream media to be corporatist also?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And it works, of course, because a lot of people don't experience those lows and therefore they're funding the people that do. It's a fascinating system. And I'm glad we figured out a way how to take risks together in this society and help each other out financially for the people who feel the pain of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That's really fascinating. So big corporations are giving money to politicians through different channels, and then the politicians are spending that money on mainstream media. And so there's a vicious cycle where it's in the interest of the mainstream media not to criticize the very corporations that are feeding that cycle. It's not actually direct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
It's not like corporations are, because I was thinking one of the ways is direct advertisement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
pharmaceuticals obviously advertise a lot on mainstream media, but there's also indirect, which is like giving the politicians money, or super PACs, and then the super PACs then spend money on the... That's why media never, mainstream media never talks about the number one factor in politics, which is money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That's also really interesting. So if you're an advertiser, if you're a big farmer and you're advertising, it's not that the advertisement works. It's that the hosts are too afraid to not like explicitly, just even implicitly. They're self-censoring. They're not going to have any guests that are like controversial anti-Big Pharma or they're not going to make any jokes about Big Pharma.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So with Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. head to policygenius.com slash Lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, the thing I just drank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
They're not going to make, and that kind of, that continues and expands. That's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So how do we begin to fix that? And what exactly are we fixing? Is it the influence of the lobbyists, the influence of... It feels like there's... companies have found different ways to achieve influence, right? So how do we get money out of politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
That's why you're voting for Trump.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And I sometimes drink twice a day. And I'm traveling for a bit here. And I don't have travel packs. And so I'll be going without AG1 for a couple of days. And I'll miss it. Because it makes me feel like home. So I need to get the travel packs. It's just a really, really nice multivitamin that provides a nutritional basis for a crazy physical and mental existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So if 93% of people want this, why hasn't it happened yet? I mean, the obvious answer is there's corporate control of the media and the politicians, but it seems like our current system and the megaphone that a president has you should be able to kind of unite the populace left and right. So it shouldn't be that difficult to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Like, why hasn't a person like Trump, who's a billionaire, or on the left, a rich businessman, run just on this and win?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
You think he likes money more than he likes being popular? Because there's a big part of him as a populist in the sense that he loves being admired by large masses of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
All the crazy stuff I do diet-wise, I'm still doing mostly one meal a day, mostly low carb. And so for that, you know, it's nice to make sure you're getting all the right nutrition. I find when I'm extremely stressed, my ability to enjoy a long run or enjoy a hard training session in jiu-jitsu is diminished.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
What does Trump say about getting money out of politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So what would an amendment look like that helps prevent money being an influence in politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
The physical challenge is a kind of catalyst to let whatever the underlying reason for the stress come out and pass through you, and maybe you even get a chance to let it go. But when you're in it... Sometimes it's rough. Anyway, jiu-jitsu is still a huge source of happiness for me. I think the puzzle of it, I still try to train with a very large variety of people from white belt to black belt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So can you educate me, does that prevent something like Citizen United, so like Super PACs are all gone in this case? Gone. So indirect funding is also?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
As I've talked about with Craig Jones, it can be sometimes a little bit difficult. Certain people, especially the lower ranks, go a little bit too hard. So you have to figure out that puzzle. Let them submit you a few times. Kind of let them chill out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And you believe that the people will be able to find the right policies to regulate and tax the corporations such that capitalism can flourish still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
But it's still a fascinating puzzle of human psychology, of human sort of biomechanics from arms and legs and sort of pressure and dynamic movement and transitions, all that kind of stuff. It's just a fascinating game. It's a fascinating dynamic game. It really is not like chess. Because chess is a static game. There are elements of chess, but it's not discrete. It's continuous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So there's problems with every path. So the elite, like you mentioned, can be corrupted by greed, by power, and so on. But the crowd, I agree with you, by the way, about the wisdom of the crowd versus the wisdom of the elite. But the crowd can be captured by a charismatic leader. So the problem with populism, And I'm probably a populist myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
The problem with populism is that it can be and has been throughout history captured by bad people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Well, that's why you're such an interesting... I don't want to say contradiction, but there's a tension that creates the balance. So to me... in the way you're speaking, might result in hurting capitalism. So it's easy to, in fighting corporatism, to hurt companies, to go too far the other way. In terms of companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And so when you talked about corporate tax, what's the magic number for the corporate tax? Because if it's too high, companies leave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And sometimes the subtlest movements make all the difference. And the timing of those movements can make all the difference. Anyway, go check out AG1. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, so I guess... I agree with most of the things you said about the corruption. I just wish there would be more celebration of the fact that capitalism and some incredible companies in the history of the 20th century has created so much wealth, so much innovation that has increased the quality of life on average.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
They've also increased the wealth inequality and exploitation of the workers and this kind of stuff. But you want to not forget to celebrate the awesomeness that companies have also brought outside the political sphere, just in creating awesome stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Saley for eSIM when you're traveling, Policy Genius for insurance, AG1 for health, Masterclass for learning, Element for electrolytes, and NetSuite for your business. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a variety of reasons...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
There's a general sort of criticism of billionaires, right? This idea. Now, you could say that billionaires are avoiding taxes and they're not getting taxed enough. But I think under that flag of criticizing billionaires is criticizing all billionaires. companies that do epic shit that build stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So create stuff that that's, that's what I'm worried about. I don't hear enough like genuine, you know, I like celebrating people. I like celebrating ideas. I just don't hear enough genuine celebration of companies when they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I've really enjoyed the one that Martin Scorsese did on filmmaking. I'm fascinated by dialogue in film and the contrast that that dialogue has with, say, podcasts. Because a podcast is a single take, if you will. It's a genuine, relaxed conversation. It's not really planned. There's not a script. And so it's a single take.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Now you take film, and depending on the director, you're doing 5, 10, 20, 30 takes on a single piece of dialogue. And you're crafting that with the lighting, with the mood, with the intensity of the faces of the actors and the music, all of that. And the final result, honestly, is looking for the same kind of thing. It's looking for something real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So again, it's about balance, but what do you think about DEI policies, say in academia and companies, so the movement as it has evolved? Where's that on the balance? Is that... How far is it pushing towards equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Now, great interviews, great conversations arrive at that something real thing. like an improvised dance, let's say. And a great film arises something real, like a great choreographed dance. And it still does have similar elements. Like I think about with lighting and all the kinds of things I have very little idea about. But as someone who can appreciate it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
By the way, Michelle Obama had a good line about the black jobs in the DNC speech. Great line. I love that. Where somebody should tell Trump that the presidency might be just one of those black jobs. Anyway, but why do you think the left doesn't acknowledge when DI gets ridiculous, which in certain places at a large scale has gotten ridiculous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I can reach out towards that and try to achieve that in some kind of way. To really see a person, to really bring out the beauty of that person is something I would love to do. And I listen to a lot of great interviewers in podcasts. I'm just in awe, inspired, truly, truly inspired and humbled. There's just so, so many people that do a much, much better job than me. I learn from them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So the challenge there is to know which disparities when you just freeze the system and observe are actually a result of some kind of discrimination or flaw in the system versus the result of meritocracy, of the better runner being ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Right. So if you fall on the money, you can see the flaws in the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So you think this woke mind virus that the right refers to is a problem but not a big problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, that doesn't mean that there's larger scale issues with things like DEI that aren't so fun to talk about or viral to talk about on an anecdotal scale. There is DI does create a culture of fear with cancer culture. And it does create a kind of culture that limits the freedom of expression. And it does limit the meritocracy in another way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So you're basically saying, forget all these other problems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I'm inspired by them. It's just great. I think I really enjoy just being a fan. Masterclass lets me be a fan of all these cool people. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at Masterclass.com slash LexPod. That's Masterclass.com slash LexPod. This episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, the 2% on each side is a useful distraction for, yes, for the corruption of the politicians via money. Still, I'm talking about the 96% that remains in the middle and the impact that DEI policies has on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, so let's go there. So when people call her a communist, they're usually referring to certain kinds of policies. So do you think, I mean, I think it's a ridiculous label to assign to Kamala Harris, especially given the history of communism in the 20th century. and what those economic and political policies have led to, the scale of suffering that led to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And it just degrades the meaning of the word, right? But to take that seriously, why is she not a communist? So you said she's not a communist because she's a corporatist. Okay. That can't be... Okay. Everybody in politics is a corporate. Almost. Almost everybody in politics is a corporate. But that doesn't mean the corporations have completely bought their mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
They have an influence on their mind and issues that matter to those corporations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Right? Yep. Outside of that, they're still thinking for the voters because they still have to win the votes. Barely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
My favorite flavor is watermelon salt, but there's a bunch of other flavors that are great. And like I said, when I'm training really hard in jiu-jitsu, especially in the Texas heat, this is something I notice most clearly. Because I usually don't like drinking water during training. And so what happens is I drink some element beforehand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So in contradiction to that, why did she propose to raise the corporate tax rate from whatever, 21% to 28%?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I train for, you know, an hour and a half, a bunch of hard rounds. And you're just, I mean, you're drained from water. Just, you know... I don't know. I don't know how many pounds of water I lose, but it's a lot. And you kind of start to feel shitty. And the moment I drink element, just within a few minutes, you just start feeling much, much better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So would the same be the case for price controls or the anti-price gouging that she's proposing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
She's following the polls where most people will say that the groceries are too expensive. So she's just basically addressing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
By the way, sorry to take that tangent. I really enjoyed that conversation. I really enjoyed that you talked to... That was like civil. You guys disagreed pretty intensely, but there was a lot of respect. I really enjoyed that. Thank you, brother. That was beautiful. You and Charlie Kirk, and I think Anna was there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And you just feel viscerally the effect of electrolytes, of sodium, potassium, magnesium on the body. Water and electrolytes, it's quite incredible. And the same is actually true when you're fasting. And it's been actually a while since I fasted for more than 24 hours. So most days I fast, I guess you could say 24 hours. I eat one meal a day, you know, 22 hours or whatever it is, 23 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
To give feedback, submit questions for AMA, and so on, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
It was great. It was refreshing. And, uh, what were we talking about? You buying up, buying up housing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
But when I do even longer fasts, Element is a lifesaver. It just removes the headaches and even helps with the hunger and all of that. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. In this episode with Cenk, I talk a lot about capitalism. Now, I think I disagree with him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Is it possible to steel man the case that not all politicians are corporatists? Or maybe how would you approach that? For example, this podcast has a bunch of sponsors and I give zero fucks, about what they think about what I'm saying. Like they have zero control over me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Maybe you could say that's because it's not a lot of money, or maybe I'm a unique person or something like this, but I just think it's possible to have, and I would like to believe a lot of politicians are this way, that they have ideas, and while they take money, they kind of see it as a game, that you accept the money,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
kind of go to certain parties, hug people and so on, but it doesn't actually fundamentally compromise your integrity on issues you actually care about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Let's zoom in on that. So if you take corporate PAC money, you're, that's it, you're corrupted. Can you imagine yourself, say you're a politician, you're a president, you're a human being, you're a person with integrity, you're a person who thinks about the world, You're saying if I was a corporate PAC and I gave you a billion dollars, I could tell you anything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
See, I think most people have integrity. Okay, hold on. So what I'm more worried about is when you take corporate PAC money, it's not that you are immediately sold. It's over time. Over time, that's true. Yeah, I get it. But I wonder if the integrity that I think most people have can withstand the gradual slippery slope of the effect of corporate money, which if...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
If what I'm saying is true, that most people have integrity, one of the ways to solve the effect of corporate money is term limits. Because it takes time to corrupt people. You can't buy them immediately. And then the term limits can... For the listener. Jenk is shaking his head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And I do in the episode, and I'll have to really think through it and really, my favorite episodes is when I'm really challenged to think and learn for weeks and months afterwards. But I don't think our capitalist system is as broken as Cenk suggests. So he feels that companies have completely captured our politicians, our government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
No, let's start at the majority of human beings. And I think that politicians are not, there are not a special group of like sociopaths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
They lean a little bit towards that direction, but they're not like only sociopaths go into politics. It's like you have to have some sociopathic qualities, I think, to go into politics. But they're not complete sociopaths. I think they do have integrity because sometimes for very selfish reasons, it's not all about money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Even for a selfish person, for a narcissist, it's also about being recognized for having had positive impact on the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
But I think that a significant number of companies have undue influence on our politicians. But not as much as Cenk says, and I have a lot of hope. Primarily underlying that hope is a kind of sense that even among the politicians, there's integrity. Not every politician, but a lot of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
95%?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So if you have more money, 95% of the time you win, huh? Yes. I'd like to believe that's less the case, for example, for higher you get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I don't think that money can so easily buy the human heart, can so easily corrupt the values of the people who want to serve. So, I don't know. I just think if you want to make money, you're not going to go into politics. There's a lot easier ways, cleaner ways, more pleasant ways to make money. It's just such a dirty game, and I think... You go in that game to try to help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So you basically a presidential candidate who is a populist who, uh, in part runs on getting money out of politics. Okay, well then let's talk about Donald Trump. So to me, the two biggest criticisms of Trump is the, the fake elector scheme. Out of that whole 2020 election, the fake elector scheme is the thing that really bothers me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And then the second thing across a larger timescale is the counterproductive division that he's created in, let's say, our public discourse. What are your top five criticisms of Trump?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So anyway, but yes, corporatism is a very serious problem. So the way out to me is great companies, quite honestly, and celebrating those companies. And that's something I try to do. Call out bullshit, call out shitty behavior on the parts of companies when they do it, but celebrate companies when they do great stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I agree on the fake electric scheme. Can you steel man and maybe educate me on... There's a book, Rigged, that I started reading. is there any degree to which the election was rigged or elections in general are rigged? So I think the book Rigged, the main case they make is not that there's some shady fake ballots. It's more the impact of mainstream media and the impact of big tech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Given how much people hate this... you probably just need to find evidence of one time. One vote being changed where you can trace them saying something in some room somewhere, that would just explode. That evidence just doesn't seem to be there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Anyway, underlying the flourishing of our nation is great companies and the very system of capitalism. And so if you're running a company, you should be using the best tools for the job of running that company because it's an incredible machine with so many moving pieces. And so it's not an easy job to run it, no matter the scale. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So it's- What counts as voter fraud?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I refuse to believe it's only the Republicans that do that, I would say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah. That just seems too obvious to do by both. Yeah. No, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Cenk Uygur. You wrote a book, a manifesto, that outlines the progressive vision for America. So the big question, what are some defining ideas of progressivism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
So their favorite flavors of messing with the vote. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
This episode is brought to you by Saley, a brand new eSIM service offering several affordable data plans in over 150 countries. I've had a bunch of experience when I was traveling where it was a legitimate pain in the ass to get a SIM card or an eSIM working. And being abroad in a foreign land, far away from home, All these signs and ways of life you don't understand all around you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Now, this is something you've been a bit controversial about. But the general sort of standard belief is that there's a left-leaning bias in the mainstream media. because, as I think studies show, a large majority of journalists are left-leaning. And then that there's a bias in big tech. Employees of big tech companies, from search engines to social media, are left-leaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And there, that's a huge majority is left-leaning. So the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias towards the left. First of all, I think you've argued that that's not true, that there's a bias in the other direction. But whether there's a bias or not, do you think that how big of an impact that has on the result of the election?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Let's talk about the saga of Joe Biden. So over the past year, over the past few months, can you just rewind? Where have you, maybe tell the story of Joe Biden as you see from the election perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
he stepped down voluntarily from a place of strength. So I think presidents, I think politicians in general, especially at the highest levels, want legacy. To me, at least, one of the greatest things you could do is to walk away at the top. I mean, George Washington.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
To walk away from power is, I think, universally respected, especially if you got a good speech to go with it and you do it really well. Not in some kind of cynical or calculated or some kind of transactional way, but just like as a great leader. And maybe be a little bit even more dramatic than you need to be in doing it. Yeah, I thought that would be a beautiful moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And then launch some kind of democratic process for electing a different option.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Were you troubled by how Kamala Harris was selected? after he stepped down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
You think he was like really... Like somebody like stormed into the room and said, you absolutely must.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
Yeah, but come on. It's Biden endorsed. Of course. So why is that an of course? Why not say sort of lay out walls and Shapiro and Kamala Harris and the options that say, let's like at least the facade of democracy of a democratic process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
It just really frustrated me because it smelled of the same thing of fucking over Bernie in 2015-16 and RFK and just the anointing aspect. Now, they seem to have gotten lucky in this situation that it's very possible that Kamala Harris would have been selected through a Democratic process. But I have to say, listening to the speeches of the DNC, Walls was amazing. Shapiro was really strong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
And Kama actually was much better as compared to her as a candidate previously. But personally, I don't think she would have been the result of a democratic process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#441 – Cenk Uygur: Trump vs Harris, Progressive Politics, Communism & Capitalism
I got to ask you, because I also love, Bernie still got it. I love Bernie. I always have. I enjoyed his, I think he might still do it, but I enjoyed his conversations with Tom Hartman. He's a genuine one, like Bernie. Even if you disagree with him, that's a genuine human being. Yep. So just talk about that. Does it trouble you that he's been fucked over in 2015, 16, and again, 2020?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The following is a conversation with Mark Cuban, a multi-billionaire businessman, investor and star of the series Shark Tank, longtime principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and is someone who is unafraid to get into frequent battles on X, most recently over topics of DEI, wokeism, gender, and identity politics with the likes of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So I always delegated that. Well, this is a tricky thing. When you're working with somebody and they're not quite there... And you have to decide, are they going to step up and grow into the person that's the right or they're not? And in that gray area is probably where you have to fire. It was hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah. I mean, I'm the same. I see the potential in people. I see the beauty in people, which is a great way to live life. But when you're running a company, it's a different thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They would do the due diligence, I suppose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And of course, you can go to super technical papers, and I use it for that as well. I often do the following. I'll print out the paper, because the haptic feedback of a sheet of paper is really powerful for me. So I'll take notes on that with a highlighter and with a pen. I will also take notes on a PDF, and I will also listen to it over and over and over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But in many cases, the decision, as you're talking about, you're going to have to make is to leave a job that's providing some degree of comfort already. So I suppose when you're sleeping on the floor and there's six guys, it's a little bit easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
What do you think that is about America that has so many people who have that dream and act on that dream of starting a business?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So that capitalist machine, there's a lot of elements by contrast. uh, the respect for the law, like an entrepreneur can trust that if they pull it off, the law will protect them. There won't be a government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Other countries. Right. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So for me, the process of reading an academic paper is one that requires returning to it over and over and over again, unless I'm doing a quick skim. So for skimming, I can look at the PDF and quickly skim and then listen to certain parts that I find useful. So sometimes related work is really powerful because it summarizes in a nice way where the field stands. I'll listen to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, we want to be really careful and try to really figure out what that is because we don't want to lose that. We wanna protect the whatever, you know. And that's a lot of the discussions about what's the right way to do government, big government, small government, what's the right policies, but also culture, like who we celebrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
One of the things that troubles me is that we don't enough celebrate the entrepreneurs that take risks and the entrepreneurs that succeed. It seems like success, especially when it comes with wealth, is immediately matched with distrust and criticism and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And we're trying to figure out how we deal with the mobs of people and the virality of it all. I think we'll find our footing and start celebrating greatness again. Well, I mean, that's the whole reason I do Shark Tank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Sometimes the abstract is good to listen to. Sometimes the abstract introduction related work jump into the conclusion. If there's a methods in the paper, you listen to that. Anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I love even when the business idea is obviously horrible. Just the guts to step up. To be there. To believe in yourself, to really reach. I mean, that's what matters. Because some of the best business ideas are probably...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
What stands out as like a memorable business you've been pitched on Shark Tank? What's the best one that stands out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So you have to kind of have this gut feeling of, will this scale?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I will basically use the listening function while I'm walking over to get some coffee or I'm on a run, and I'll listen to different parts of a paper to get a sense of what that paper contains and the main idea and so on that can build on. Or, as I said, to review a thing I've already returned to many, many, many times. And I have a large number of favorite papers that I've returned to many times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, and I guess the question you're trying to see, will this scale, this promise, will the promise materialize into a big thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Do a lot of the entrepreneurs overvalue business?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Oh, really? Okay. You didn't see the potential. None.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's a lot of cats in the Walmart. Yes, there are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So how do you determine the value of a business, whether it's on Shark Tank or just in general? It's actually really easy, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And how do you know if a company is going to be acquired? So it's the technology, like the patents, but also the team?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And how do you know if they can generate the money? You made it sound easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
can you tell if they're full of or not so one of the things with entrepreneurs they're kind of like we said overvaluing so they're maybe overselling themselves but also they might be full of in terms of their understanding of the market or also like or exaggerating what they're thinking do all that kind of stuff can you see through that yeah for sure just by asking questions you know so if if they are um delusional at some level
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's super easy to upload a paper. They have really nice AI voices that pronounce stuff well. And also just at the sentence paragraph level, the kind of narration style they have. is really, really nice. And obviously, SAI improves. They will keep improving. So jump on board now and enjoy this whole process. I highly recommend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I mean, there's a delusional aspect to entrepreneurship, right? Like you just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, you have to be kind of two-brained, I guess. You have to be able to dip into reality when you're thinking about... like the specifics of the product, how to design things, like the first principles, the basics of how to build the thing, how much it's going to cost, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And the tricky part of all this too is you might need to frequently pivot, especially in the beginning. Hopefully not. So you think like in the beginning, the product you have should be the thing that carries you a long time. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, I also mean like the micro-pivots, which is like iterative development of a thing. Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But especially in software, right? It feels like business model can evolve really quickly too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Speaking of which, how did you make your first billion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Normally, you would get a two-week free trial, but listeners of this very podcast get one month free. So go to listening.com slash Lex. That's listening.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Cloaked. As I mentioned last time, it's a thing that I always thought and hoped would exist, and now I know it exists, and it is awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, there's a lot of questions there. So the technical challenge of that, you're making it sound easy, but you wrote code, but still in the early days of the internet, how do you figure out how to create this kind of product of just audio at first and then video at first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But it was good enough because it's the first kind of... Yeah, because there was no other competition, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
How did you find the users? Is it word of mouth? Word of mouth. Just word of mouth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So the thing you were focusing on is getting the radio stations and all that? Well, radio and TV, anything, any content at all. Did you pick up the phone? How'd you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's a platform that lets you generate a new email and a new phone number every time you sign up for a website, so you can hide your actual email and your actual phone number from the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I think of it as a kind of privacy layer that protects you from the wild, wild west of the internet where many, many services and companies desperately want your data and the in, the contact, the way to contact you. So Cloaked allows you to take the power back to give you some control of this relationship. to where your email remains a private email address.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
How much technical savvy was required? You said a bunch of servers. At which point do you get more engineers? How much did you understand could do yourself? And then also, Once you can't do it all yourself, how much technical savvy is required to understand enough to hire the right people to keep building this and innovating?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The acquisition by Yahoo, can you tell the story of that? But also in the broader context of this internet bubble. This is a fascinating part of human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And can you explain to me the trickiness of what you did after that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But this aspect of it is just a kind of super awesome feature. It's also a password manager, and I highly recommend you use a password manager. And so this is combined password manager and the ability to generate as part of the usual generation of a new password when you send it up to a thing. It also generates emails and phone numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
This is fascinating, by the way, because it's based on your estimation that this is a bubble. Or just mind not wanting to be greedy. Sure. So the foundation of this kind of thing is you don't want to be greedy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But so, I mean, there is some fundamental way in which bubbles are based on this greed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's not trivial to understand that it's a bubble. I mean, you're kind of lessening
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And soon I read, which is interesting, they can generate credit cards. Sometimes places require credit cards for sort of quote unquote free trial. So if they can actually pull that off, which I don't know how they're going to do, it's pretty awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So I think... luck being essential to becoming a billionaire is a beautiful way to see life in general. First of all, I personally think that everything good that's ever happened to me is because of luck. I think that's just a good way of being. It's like you're grateful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That said, there's some examples of people that you're like, they seem to have done a lot of, they seem to have gotten lucky a lot. You know, we mentioned Jeff Bezos. It seems like He did a lot of really interesting, powerful decisions for many years with Amazon to make it successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And in general, I'm just a big supporter of companies innovating how to maintain people's privacy in this internet age where there's so much money to be made from people's data. So it's an interesting sort of technological and business challenge of how to protect the data. So, hats off to Cloaked for doing a great job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I mean, what about somebody you get sometimes feisty with on the internet, Elon? But we couldn't even look at Zuck and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Aren't we all? Right, it's that level, right? The foundation of human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Friendster, I remember Friendster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, the timing is important, but there's like the details of how the product is built, the fundamentals of the product, like what- But that's what gets you, when the opportunity is there, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
We got listening for, well, listening to things like research papers, Cloak for protecting your personal information, Notion for taking notes and collaborating on those notes with your team, Eight Sleep for naps, and Shopify for shopping or creating shops on the internets. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And raising money is not just about sales. It's about the general feeling of the people with money at that time. And proximity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I believe in the power of individuals to find their to realize their potential no matter where they come from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But luck is required.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But then also, billion is not the only measure of success, right? Absolutely not, right? Everybody defines the success in their own way. How do you define success, Mark Cuban?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Thank you. How do you reach that success by way of advice to people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Plus, the interface, as you mentioned, is super nice, which is really important because the kind of sign-up process to a new website should be effortless, and Cloaked doesn't get in the way. Go to cloaked.com slash Lex to get 14 days free, or for a limited time, use code LexPod when you sign up to get 25% off an annual Cloaked plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's not always about the smile or the smile on the outside. It could be a smile on the inside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The struggle, even the struggle with your dad, the really, really hard work can be a fulfilling experience because the struggle leading up to then seeing your kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Beautifully said. You have made some mistakes in your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
One of the bigger ones on the financial side, we could say is Uber.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And maybe it's just interesting because it is illustrative of like how to know when a thing is going to be big and not and what are the fundamentals of it and how to take the risk and not and all this kind of stuff. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking app that I've been using forever, but they have awesome team collaboration tools. Man, it must be forever ago that I first saw Notion recommended to me, but it was always the cool kids that were using Notion. And when I started using Notion, it was the first time I really sort of deliberately thought
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, there's some lessons there connected to what you're doing now. We'll talk about it, cost plus drugs. It's like looking at an industry that seems like there's a lot of complexity involved, but it's like hungry for revolution. For sure. And the cabs are that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, and there you kind of have to see, is it possible to raise enough money? Is it possible to do all this? Is it possible to break through? And it's kind of a fascinating success story with Uber.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, it's a fascinating success story. You have certain companies like Airbnb just kind of go into this thing that we take completely for granted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And they believed in it. I mean, it's a beautiful story because you're like, all right, all the things that annoy you about this world, like they're inefficient and just seem like a pain in the ass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I would have too. I was like, this is not going to work. I've done like couch surfing and stuff and it was always, it didn't seem right. It didn't seem like you could do this at a large scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
In 2000, I think January, you purchased a majority stake in the NBA team Dallas Mavericks for 285 million. So at this point, maybe you can correct me, but it was one of the worst performing teams in franchise history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
my note-taking process to be more 21st century-like. So to use technology for the first time. So I'm really happy I did that. Obviously now with the new wave of large language models, Notion is probably the best way best integration of large language models into the note-taking process that I've seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So part of the selling is you're selling the team, selling the sport, selling... The people, the idea, all of it, like just the... Well, yeah, the experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I have to say, like, just going to that game turned me around on basketball because I'm more of a football guy. So basketball wasn't like the main sport. I was like, oh, wow, okay. It's fun. And it's different, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
because you're literally there going wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It can do all kinds of stuff like summarize text, it can generate the first draft for text, it can do bullet points, all that kind of stuff. Now, for the team collaboration part, you can ask it questions about the stuff it knows, and it can look across all the documents, the notes, the wikis, the projects, And it can answer questions based on everything it knows across those documents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You've had a beef recently on Twitter, on X with Elon over DEI programs. What to you is the essence of the disagreement there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, in your comments, well, you do a bit of snark too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But you're pretty, let's say, rigorous in your response. So there is some exchange of ideas. There's some snark. There's some fun, all that kind of stuff. You do voice the opinion that represents a large number of people, and it's great. I mean, that's what's, it's really beautiful. But just lingering on the topic, what to you is the good and the bad of DEI programs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So that's a beautiful ideal. When it's implemented, implemented poorly, perhaps, or in a way that doesn't reach that ideal, Do you see maybe when it's quota-based, do you see that it can result in essentially racism towards Asian people and white people, for example?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And it can generate sort of summaries and reports about those documents. So I think it's an incredible team collaboration tool in that regard. You can try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and the beautiful, wonderful power of naps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, much of American history was defined by intense radical racism and sexism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But in the recent years, there was a correction, and I think the nature of the criticism is that there's an overcorrection where DEI programs at universities, at companies, are often, when they're not doing their job well, are often hard to criticize. Because when you criticize them within the company or so on, they have a very strong immune system. If you criticize a DEI program,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
it seems like it's very easy to be called racist. And if you're called racist or sexist, that's a sticky label.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I'm now back in Austin. I was traveling a bit and it's one of the things I really look forward to when I come back home. It's a cold bed surface with a warm blanket. You can control the temperature of the bed on each side separately. A nice nap is truly heaven. I could be in the worst mood and a nap just kind of helps that mood, whatever that is, to dissipate, to just disappear into the ether.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It is true for conservatives, but in general, you can sell books, you can get likes when you talk about this ideology. And there's a degree to which is this woke ideology in the room with us right now. Meaning like it's this boogie monster that we're all kind of... Or is it a positive?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I guess another way to say that is they don't highlight a lot of the positive progress that's been made in the positive version of the word woke in terms of correcting some of the wrongs done in the past. But that said, if you ask people in Russia, a lot of them will say, there's no propaganda here, there's no censorship and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's sometimes hard to see when you're in it that this kind of stuff is happening. It does seem difficult to criticize DEI programs, not horribly difficult, terrible, they're this monster that infiltrates everything, but it is difficult and it requires great leadership.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Companies and academics, yeah. Two different worlds. But I also think it's not, I really want to point my finger at the failure of leadership of basically firing mediocre people, like people that are not good at their job. The problem to me is DEI's defense mechanism, like immune system is so strong that the shitty people Don't get fired. So the vision, the ideal of DEI is a beautiful ideal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Wherever my mind goes, it returns quickly refreshed, renewed, and ready to take on the day once again. I'm a huge supporter of naps. I don't care. I don't care what anybody says. Naps are huge. Actually, it's funny you mention that when I was at Google, they have these nap pods. I'm sure a lot of tech companies have nap pods. I feel like Google invented the nap pod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Let's continue on a theme of fun exchanges on the internet. So Elon tweeted, the fundamental axiomatic flaw of the woke mind virus is that the weaker party's always right, in parentheses, even if they want you to die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And you responded at length, but the beginning is, the fundamental axiomatic flaw of the anti-woke mind is that it allows groups with historical power to play the victim by taking anecdotal examples and packaging them into conjured conspiratorial ideology that threatens to upend the power structures they have been depending on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, there's a tension there. So... Yes, but both can be abused, right? Both positions of power can be abused. There's power in DEI. And there's shitty people that can crave power and hold on to power and sacrifice their ideals. Okay, put aside universities, okay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, maybe you can give me some help. Sure. I'm here to help you, Lex. There's an example in the AI world of... a system called Gemini 1.5.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
George Washington was black, Nazis were black.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But I think a lot of people weren't sort of confident enough or were a little bit embarrassed to use the nap pod. I did too. It felt kind of weird. So I would just like put my head down on the desk and sleep right on the desk. I really didn't care. But when I did use the nap pods, they were pretty epic. Because it kind of keeps out the rest of the world. So there's a sense of privacy in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's not the end of the world, but Google is so much dependent on trust that trust that Google search has as objective as possible channel into the world of information. And so that brand is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It was a mistake. Well, there's fraud, there's mistakes, but the mistakes... No, but why didn't Google fix it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They're super complex, and we could talk about it forever with social media. The criticism towards Google, towards other companies, when they're based in Silicon Valley, there could be an ideological drift into... ideological bubble out of which the technology is created, and they could be blind to the obvious bias that comes in here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I know. Elon is 100% should be criticized for the ridiculousness of overstatements that he makes about various products. He's having a bit of fun like you are also. Yeah. And I also believe in the free market, but it's not always efficient. There's like a delay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So which is why Elon is important when calling out, I think overstating the criticism of Gemini, but Elon and others are just- Gemini wasn't even a fully available public product yet. It's still a bias that resonates with people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. Never any ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by listening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But, well, no. So like the black George Washington, is a correction on top of the foundation model to keep it, quote unquote, sort of safe. One of the big criticisms of all the models, frankly, probably even Grok, a little bit less so, is they're trying to be really conservative in the sense of trying to be conservative careful not to say crazy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's pretty cool. But nothing compared to Eight Sleep. You can check it out yourself and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed by anyone to sell anywhere, anything with a great looking online store. Even I, friends, can figure out how to do it in a few minutes. I create a store, lexferman.com slash store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Because we don't know how the thing- It's brand new and we know what happens, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, I guess the main criticism is you want to have some transparency of all the teams that are involved and that this kind of, to the degree there's a left-leaning ideology within the companies, it doesn't affect the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That's the hope. but it can self-correct in different kinds of ways. You can have a different company that competes and becomes more conservative. I mean, my worry is that it kind of becomes like two different worlds where there's like- It already is. No, come on. Don't give up. Oh, I'm not giving up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, that's a very hopeful message, but that said, you know, human history doesn't always autocorrect really quickly, self-correct really quickly. Sometimes you get into these very painful things. You have Stalin, you have Hitler, You can get to places very quickly where the ideological thing just builds on itself. Twitter is not real world. Twitter is not real world. That's true. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I think it is where there's a bunch of shirts. Now, that store is super minimalist, and I'm a big fan of minimalism, but you can get super fancy, and it integrates with a lot of third-party apps. I use it for on-demand printing of the shirts. So it's another service that does the printing and the shipping of the shirts, so you don't have to think about anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But you could still have a nation captured by an ideology. I think... America has been really good at having these two blue and red always at tension with each other, dividing the populace, and in the process of doing that, figuring stuff out. Like almost like playing devil's advocate, but like in real life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They're denazifying Ukraine. They're removing the Nazis from Ukraine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Several things, actually, let's even go there. You've gotten a bit of a beef with, again, fun with Jordan Peterson about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You could sort of outsource all of it. But you can use Shopify to basically sell anything. And it's cool to have this thing. that enables the efficient, accessible way of creating a node in the capitalist machine, in the capitalist network, the living, breathing network of capitalism, where the invisible hand of the market does its work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So the topic there was the gender transition and Dylan Mulvaney. Hugh, can you explain the nature of the beef? I mean, it's an interesting claim you're making that most of the people who are concerned about this are conservatives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, but most of the people that care about censorship are going to be free speech advocates. So most people that care about Putin suppressing speech or anybody else suppressing speech are going to be libertarians. So there's probably an explanation to that. The criticism that Jordan Peterson could provide, I guess he said that Dylan Mulvaney popularized
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
the kind of mutilation in his view, that can affect, there's a very serious life-changing process that a person goes through, and when that's applied to a child, it can do a lot of harm to a person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, but the trends start. It could be... What worries people is for young kids, there to be a trend of, especially when you feel like an outsider, you feel not yourself, less than yourself, all this kind of stuff that kids feel like, that if it's because popular enough as a trend, you would gender transition. without meaning to do that is just part of a trend. That's the worry they have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yes, there are downsides to capitalism, but there's a lot of upsides. Giving the power to the individual creators and the makers, the builders, to build and sell their stuff, I love it. One of the most beautiful things that humans can do is to create, and I will continue to celebrate their ability to create. And I'm glad Shopify is making it easier for them to make money off of their creations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, not corrupted, but you know, people... It's back to the DEI thing. There could be pressure, and we are... Pressure to operate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
in america yes but if we look at humans in general and jordan peterson i think unjustly incorrectly brought up auschwitz yeah that was that was ridiculous but if we look To me, World War II is a very interesting time. It does reveal a lot about human nature and that humans are able to commit atrocities without really speaking up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The point I want to make is that when you're in this situation where everybody around you is committing an atrocity, you can be sort of the good German. Human nature is such that you can do all sorts of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, but it's still human nature. It's interesting to remember that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah. But we should remember human nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, that comparison is almost always, probably always is insane. Comparison between anything and the Holocaust. I think there's a name for that rule, but once you bring up Hitler, the conversation ends. I do appreciate you bringing up Trump and bleach as an example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So continuing on fun exchanges between you and Elon, you said if they were having Biden's last wake and it was him versus Trump and he was being given last rights, I would still vote for Biden. To which Elon replied, caricaturing you, if Biden were a flesh-eating zombie with five seconds to live, whereupon being re-elected, Earth would plunge into a 1,000 years of darkness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I would still vote for him." That's basically quoting you, but in a caricature. And you responded, While I have your attention, wanted to say thank you. Your consultants at Tesla followed up about using cost plus drugs, about which we'll talk about, to save the company money. Truly appreciate it. And in parentheses, my limit is 300 years of darkness. Very well done, Mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
What's your intuition, if we just stick on Biden and Trump for a sec, what's your intuition why Biden would make a better president than Trump?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Cuban.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The dynamics of the team is important to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
What do you think about the immigration situation? A lot of conservatives are using that, uh, sort of the, The theory is that the reason it's happening is because they would be able to illegally vote. That's insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, but of course that story really worries me. enables or serves as a catalyst for questioning the legitimacy of an election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But given how drastic the immigration situation is, that story becomes more believable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I just worry about, I don't care about Trump or Biden. I care about democracy. I just worry. I worry about the viral nature of the idea of this, illegal immigrants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And we should say the obvious, you're a descendant of immigrants. And the immigrants is what makes this country great in many parts of the diversity of this nation. And we should probably keep the people that are like already been in this country for a while and are killing it. Like PhD students and all this. It's like, we're just gonna stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You've started many businesses, invested in many businesses, heard a lot of pitches privately and on Shark Tank. So you're the perfect person to ask, what makes a great entrepreneur?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, leadership. Whatever systems we've created, it's really frustrating that if you don't like Trump, it really is Trump derangement syndrome. He's definitely Hitler. If you don't like Biden, he's senile lizard person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, well, I mean... for sure, but there could be a lot of influential people on Twitter that influence the algorithm and all that kind of stuff. I do feel it's not even about ideology where you lean, it's about the algorithm not prioritizing drama. The attention,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. I don't know if to a degree that's true. They've done a pretty rigorous description of the way the algorithm works. It's actually kind of fascinating. There's a clustering of people based on interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But there's a clustering still, so if you don't give a shit about Elon, he's not going to have an influence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, when he wasn't owning Twitter, he was one of the biggest accounts, if not the biggest account already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, I would love to see numbers on all of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
DEI, everything like this. Sometimes anecdotal data really frustrates me. It frustrates me primarily because of how sexy it is. People just love... It's a great way to describe it. Love a story, and I'm like, God damn it, this is not science. This is... It's not even common sense. Well, no. I think anecdotal stories often have a wisdom in them. No doubt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
There's a signal there, but how representative is that signal of the broader thing? There's a whole lot more noise than signal, more often than not. All right. So as I mentioned, cost plus drugs, there's so many questions I can ask here, but what's the big question? What's broken about our healthcare system? There's no transparency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So what aspect of the system does Cost Plus Drugs is trying to solve?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And maybe it results in more transparency in other parts of the system too, seeing the business of it. But what do the so-called middlemen companies, so the PBMs? The pharmacy benefit managers. Thank you. CVS Caremark, Cigna's Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth's OptumRx, they control the majority of the market. What do they do wrong?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
The markup is not transparent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But it's also a skill thing. How do you sell?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So the CVS Caremark spokesperson, I think, responded to you, Phil Blando, with the usual language that so deeply exhausts me, but I was wondering if there's any truth to it. Employers, unions, health plans, and government programs work with CVS Caremark precisely because we deliver for them lower drug costs, better health outcomes, and broad pharmacy access.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
On the CEO front, you said that CEOs don't understand healthcare coverage. It's costing them big. What's the connection between cost plus drugs and companies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So most companies outsource, offload sort of the expertise on the healthcare side. When they really should be internally, there should be an expert that figures out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
What made you decide to step into this cartel-like situation where so much is opaque?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
an app, a website that allows you to listen to academic papers, listen to a bunch of stuff. I think you can listen to emails, to websites, all of that. I haven't tried that aspect of it. I should, probably, to listen to emails. I wonder how that would work. They have a Chrome extension, but I don't think it's through the Chrome extension.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Did you get a lot of pressure? I mean, I'm sure they're very good at playing games. So cartel-type situations, they protect. It feels like healthcare, like, it's very difficult to get in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Trust in an industry that's highly lacking in trust.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Okay, so what's the trick to selling garbage bags? Let's go back there. At 12 years old, what, I mean, is it just your natural charisma? I guess a good question to ask, are you born with it or can you develop it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Is there other aspects of the healthcare industry that could use this kind of transparency and revolutionizing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And you're using your... How should I say it? Celebrity, your name. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
It's weird that people aren't getting into the space. Like... Public people, you know, like big, there's not like a big, you know, you look at tech, there's like these like CEOs are open and public and public and they're pushing the company and they're selling everything. It's like all transparent, but you don't see that in healthcare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Let me ask you about AI. You got a little bit of an argument about open source. I think you stepped in between Vinod Khosla and Marc Andreessen. You think AI should be open sourced? Yeah, for sure. So, like, all that discussion we've been having about, like, Google and so on. Well, okay, two different things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Forced, yes, yeah. Even Google's open sourcing some of the models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Open sourcing is a smart business decision. Yeah. It's a tricky one. I mean, Google is a pioneer in that with TensorFlow in the AI space. That's a tricky decision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Yeah, that's the hope. It creates more competition and a lot of different diversity of approaches in how they're implemented, deployed, what kind of products they create, all of that. Vinod compared the danger of that. To the Manhattan Project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You don't see the parallels between nuclear weapons and AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And yeah, make money from the expertise. Don't give away the expertise. And the expertise evolves and grows and all that kind of stuff, and you want to own that growth. What advice would you give to young people? You have an exceptionally successful career. You came from little, made a lot. What advice would you give them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
One thing to mention is sometimes it's difficult or your parents, people around you might not be conducive or might not be of help in finding the thing you're good at. In fact, in my own life, the society was such that I don't know if they've helped much at the thing I was good at. I'm still not sure what that is. But I think- I think interviewing done pretty well for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Well, it's not even, there was a thing, where I saw the beauty in people. Like I, it very intensely. So you can call it empathy, all that kind of stuff. And.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Super woke. I guess you could say just super woke. That's me. And, you know, but in the education system I came up in, it was a very hard mathematics, you know, science and so on. And it didn't notice that whatever that was in, and me, but you have to keep the flame going. You have to try to find your way and see what that's useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
And others around you might not always notice it, so it might take time. So it could be lonely. You can really have to find the strength to believe in yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
That spark is really important to comment on, is in Russia and Ukraine, I think the system kind of suppresses that spark somehow. As you said, you saw the natural entrepreneurship, but there's not the entrepreneurial spirit once you grow up in both of the nations I mentioned. There is. No, I believe it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But there's something about the system that kind of, you know, be reasonable, be, you know, be secure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
But that's the thing that really can help a country flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
I'm sure there's a skill thing to it, too, in like how you solve the puzzle of communicating with a person and convincing them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
They dream, they dream big. They see the opportunity for making the world better. It's cool. It's cool to see young people in their eyes, that dream. And I could be the one to do it too, which is a super powerful thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Thank you for that beautiful, hopeful message. And thank you for talking today, Mark. You're fun to follow. I'm a big fan of yours, but you're also an important person in this world. I really appreciate everything you do. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for saying that, Lex. And keep on doing what you're doing. This was great. I really enjoyed this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark Cuban. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Oscar Wilde. Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. And a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
So figure out how this kind of business makes money in the present, and then figure out, is there a way to make more money in the future by introducing a totally new kind of thing? Correct. And you can just do that with anything? Pretty much, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
Anyway, the way I use it, and I think the original use case, which I think is awesome, is listening to research papers. And this includes super, super technical papers or more narrative-driven philosophical papers. For example, you can take the Turing paper on the Turing test. Obviously, the paper title is not the Turing test. I think it's called Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#422 – Mark Cuban: Shark Tank, DEI & Wokeism Debate, Elon Musk, Politics & Drugs
You said to be nice. That said, you also said that when you were first starting a business, you were a bit more of an asshole than you wish you were. you would have been. Absolutely, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The following is a conversation with Guillaume Verdun, the man behind the previously anonymous account BasedBefJezosOnX. These two identities were merged by a doxing article in Forbes titled, Who is BasedBefJezos, the leader of the tech elite's EAC movement? So let me describe these two identities that coexist in the mind of one human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So Beth Jezos is your sort of embodiment representation of your intellectual Hulk. It's your productivity Hulk that you just turn on. What have you learned about the nature of identity from having these two identities? I think it's interesting for people to be able to put on those two hats so explicitly. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Like young people, would you recommend them to explore different identities by having alt accounts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Just to linger on that, isn't that interesting? That one of the things that people often talk about is that when there's pressure and constraints on speech, it somehow leads to constraints on thought. Even though it doesn't have to, we can think thoughts inside our head, but somehow it creates these walls around thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, I really believe in, like, not radical, but... rigorous empathy, really considering what it's like to be a person of a certain viewpoint, and taking that as a thought experiment farther and farther and farther. And one way of doing that is an alt account. That's a fun, interesting way to really explore what it's like to be a person that believes a set of beliefs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
and taking that across a span of several days, weeks, months. Of course, there's always the danger of becoming that. That's the Nietzsche gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes into you. You have to be careful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So you mentioned quite a bit of advice already, but what advice would you give to young people of how to, in this interesting world we're in, how to have a career and how to have a life they can be proud of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
If you look at your one cog in the machine and the capitalist machine, one human, and if you look at yourself, do you think mortality is a feature or a bug? Like, would you want to be immortal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well, in that, Jeff Bezos and Beth Jezos agree that all companies die. And for Jeff, the goal is to try to, he calls it day one thinking, try to constantly for as long as possible reinvent things. Sort of extend the life of the company, but eventually it too will die because it's so damn difficult to keep reinventing. Are you afraid of your own death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
What's the why of the machine, the EAC machine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And above that, why does it all seem so beautiful and exciting? The quest to figuring out quantum gravity seems so exciting. Why? Why is that? Why are we drawn to that? Why are we pulled towards that? Just that puzzle-solving creative force that underpins all of it, it seems like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And when you're not sure where to go, let the meme pave the way. Yeah. Guillaume, Beth, thank you for talking today. Thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you for the humor and the wisdom you put into the world. This was awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Lex. It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Guillaume Verdun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy is always increasing in the universe. It's tending towards equilibrium. And you're saying there's these pockets that have complexity and are out of equilibrium. You said that thermodynamics favors the creation of complex life that increases its capability to use energy to offload entropy. To offload entropy. So you have pockets...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
of non-entropy that turn the opposite direction. Why is that intuitive to you that it's natural for such pockets to emerge?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
As we talk about, Beth admires Jeff as one of the most important humans alive, and I admire the beautiful absurdity and the humor of it all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Element for hydration, the thing I'm drinking right now. Notion for team collaboration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So first, representations of nature. That's something that first drew you in to try to understand from a quantum computing perspective is like, how do you understand nature? how do you represent nature in order to understand it, in order to simulate it, in order to do something with it? So it's a question of representations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Insight Tracker for biological data that leads to your well-being. And AG1 for my daily nutritional health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. Or if you want to just get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now on to the full ad reads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And then there's that leap you take from the quantum mechanical representation to the, what you're calling mesoscale representation, where thermodynamics comes into play, which is a way to represent nature in order to understand what life is, all this kind of stuff that's happening here on Earth that seems interesting to us. Then there's the word hyperstition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So some ideas, I suppose both pessimism and optimism are such ideas that if you internalize them, you in part make that idea a reality. So both optimism and pessimism have that property. I would say that probably a lot of ideas have that property, which is one of the interesting things about humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And you talked about one interesting difference also between the sort of the Guillaume de Guille front end and the bass by the jazz on the back end is the communication styles also, that you were exploring different ways of communicating that can be more viral in the way that we communicate in the 21st century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Also, the movement that you mentioned that you started, it's not just a meme account, but there's also a name to it called Effective Accelerationism, EAC, a play, a resistance to the effective altruism movement. Also an interesting one that I'd love to talk to you about, the tensions there. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so then there was a merger, a git merge on the personalities recently without your consent, like you said, some journalists figured out that you're one in the same. Maybe you could talk about that experience. First of all, like what's the story of the merger of the two?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Like Bayesian?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Like Bayesian Lord. Bayes Lord. Okay. And so we should say from now on, when you say EAC, you mean E slash ACC, which stands for effective accelerationism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Are you also Bazelord?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Okay. It's a different person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Okay. All right. Well, there you go. Wouldn't it be funny if I'm Bazelord?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Element Electrolyte Drink Mix. It's got sodium, potassium, magnesium. I drink it so much, so many times a day. It's really the foundation of my one meal a day lifestyle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Like it's some giant neural network operating in a distributed way. We should also say that the journalists used, I guess at the end of the day... audio-based analysis of voice, comparing voice of what talks you've given in the past and then voice on X spaces. Yep. Okay, so that's where primarily the match happened. Okay, continue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The word docs, maybe you can educate me. I thought doxing generally refers to if somebody's physical location is found out, meaning like where they live. So we're referring to the more general concept of revealing private information that you don't want revealed is what you mean by doxing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I eat almost always one meal a day in the evening. So I fast, and I really enjoy that. Everything it does for me, I... Recommend everybody at least try it. Intermittent fasting taken to the sort of daily extreme of fasting for 23, 24 hours, whatever it is. And for that, you have to get all the electrolytes right. You have to drink water, but not just drink water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So to you, it's fundamentally unethical. So one is unethical for them to do what they did, but also do you think, not just your case, but in a general case, is it good for society? Is it bad for society to remove the cloak of anonymity? Or is it case by case?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So, with the flip side of that, which is interesting, I'd love to ask you about it, is as we get better and better at large language models, You can imagine a world where there's anonymous accounts with very convincing large language models behind them. Sophisticated bots, essentially. And so if you protect that, it's possible then to have armies of bots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You could start a revolution from your basement. An army of bots and anonymous accounts. Is that something that is concerning to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So I wasn't referring to the basement because that's sort of the American or Canadian perspective. heroic story of one man in their basement with 100 GPUs. I was more referring to the unrestricted scaling of a Guillaume in the basement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You have to drink water coupled with sodium, and sometimes getting the magnesium part and the potassium part right is tricky, but really important so that you feel good. And that's what Element does. And it makes it delicious. My favorite flavor is watermelon salt. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, but it feels like in the goal of maintaining variance and diversity of thought, it is a threat to that variance if you can have swarms of non-biological beings, because they can be like the sheep in an animal farm. You still, within those swarms, want to have variance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, it'd be interesting to also be able to sign where the bot came from. Like, who created the bot? And what are the parameters? Like, the full history of the creation of the bot. What was the original model? What was the fine-tuning? All of it. Right. Like, the kind of unmodifiable history of the bot's creation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Because then you can know if there's, like, a swarm of millions of bots that were created by a particular governor, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. I've used them for a long, long time for note-taking, but it's also very useful for note-taking and all kind of collaborative note-taking in the team environment. And they integrate the whole AI thing, LLM thing, well. So you can use it to summarize whatever you've written. You can expand it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Identity number one, Guillaume, is a physicist, applied mathematician, and quantum machine learning researcher and engineer, receiving his PhD in quantum machine learning, working at Google on quantum computing, and finally launching his own company called Extropic that seeks to build physics-based computing hardware for generative AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think there, at least to me, a tension between ideas here. So to me, deceleration can be both used to centralize power and to decentralize it. And the same with acceleration. So you're sometimes using them a little bit synonymously, or not synonymously, but that one is going to lead to the other. And I just would like to ask you about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
is there a place of creating a fall-tolerant development, diverse development of AI that also considers the dangers of AI? And AI, we can generalize to technology in general, is should we just grow, build, unrestricted as quickly as possible because that's what the universe really wants us to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Or is there a place to where we can consider dangers and actually deliberate sort of wise strategic optimism versus reckless optimism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So to you, safe AI development will be achieved through market forces versus through, like you said, heavy-handed government regulation. There's a report from last month. I have a million questions here. From Yoshua Banjo, Jeff Hinton, and many others. It's titled, The Managing AI Risk in an Era of Rapid Progress. So there's a collection of folks who are very worried about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You can change the language style in how it's written. It just... All the things that large language models should be able to do are integrated really, really, really well. I think of human AI collaboration not just as a boost for productivity at this time, but as a kind of learning process. That it takes time to really understand what AI is good at and not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
too rapid development of AI without considering AI at risk. And they have a bunch of practical recommendations. Maybe I give you four and you see if you like any of them. So give independent auditors access to AI labs, one. Two, governments and companies allocate one third of their AI research and development funding to AI safety. sort of this general concept of AI safety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Three, AI companies are required to adopt safety measures if dangerous capabilities are found in their models. And then four, something you kind of mentioned, making tech companies liable for foreseeable and preventable harms from their AI systems. So independent auditors, governments and companies are forced to spend a significant fraction of their funding on safety.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You've got to have safety measures established if shit goes really wrong, and liability, companies are liable. Any of that seem like something you would agree with?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So if AGI turns out to be a really powerful technology, or even the technologies that lead up to AGI, what's your view on the sort of natural centralization that happens when large companies dominate the market?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
basically formation of monopolies, like the takeoff, whichever company really takes a big leap in development and doesn't reveal intuitively, implicitly, or explicitly the secrets of the magic sauce, they can just run away with it. Is that a worry?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And that is going to evolve continuously as the AI gets better and better and better. It's like almost watching a child grow up or something like this. You're fine-tuning what it means to be a good parent as the child grows up. In the same way, you're fine-tuning what it means to be a good, effective human as the AI grows up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, but it feels like a delicate balance because we don't understand exactly what it takes to build AGI and what it will look like when we build it. And so far, like you said, it seems like a lot of different parties are able to make progress. So when OpenAI has a big leap, other companies are able to step up, big and small companies in different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But if you look at something like nuclear weapons, you've spoken about the Manhattan Project, that could be really like... technological and engineering barriers that prevent the guy or gal in their mom's basement to make progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
It seems like the transition to that kind of world where only one player can develop AGI is possible, so it's not entirely impossible, even though the current state of things seems to be optimistic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so you should use a tool that's part of your daily life to interact with AI while being productive, but also learning what is it good at? What are the ways I can integrate it into my life to make me more productive? But not just like in terms of shortening the time it takes to do a task, but being the fuel, the creative fuel. Fuel for the genius that is you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And still we're able to see the beauty and meaning in the human experience, even though we're no longer in our best understanding of the world at the center of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So if it turns out that the beauty that is consciousness in the universe is bigger than just humans, the AI can carry that same flame forward. Does it scare you? Are you concerned that AI will replace humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
This show is also brought to you by Insight Tracker, a service I use to make sense of the biological data that comes from my body, blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, all of that to make me lifestyle recommendations, diet stuff too. There's all this beautiful data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But there's a philosophical question whether there's a limit to the human capacity to align. So let me bring it up as a form of argument here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
This is a guy named Dan Hendricks, and he wrote that he agrees with you that AI development can be viewed as an evolutionary process, but to him, to Dan, this is not a good thing, as he argues that natural selection favors AIs over humans, and this could lead to human extinction. What do you think? If it is an evolutionary process, and AI systems may be have no need for humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So the humans are creating the selection pressure right now to create AIs that are aligned to humans. But given how AI develops and how quickly it can grow and scale, One of the concerns, to me, one of the concerns is unintended consequences. Humans are not able to anticipate all the consequences of this process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The scale of damage that can be done through unintended consequences with AI systems is very large. The scale of the upside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Is there a middle ground between cut off and all systems go? Is there some argument for caution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We should give it to super intelligent computational systems to process and to give us, in a human interpretable way, recommendations on how to improve our life. And I don't just mean optimize life. Because I think a perfect life is not the life you want. What you want is a complicated life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The problem is with the market is like, you know, there's not always perfect information. There's manipulation. There's bad faith actors that mess with the system and It's not always a rational and honest system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well, let me ask you about P-Doom. Probability of doom, that's just fun to say, but not fun to experience. What is, to you, the probability that AI eventually kills all or most humans, also known as probability of doom?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
rollercoaster of a life, but one that is optimized in certain aspects of health, well-being, energy, but not just optimal in this cold clinical sense. Anyway, that's a longer conversation, probably one I'll touch on. Maybe when I review Brave New World, or in other conversations I have in the podcast. Anyway, get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But nevertheless, it's true that humans are biased, grounded in our evolutionary biology, scared of everything that can kill us. But we can still imagine different trajectories that can kill us. We don't know all the other ones that don't necessarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But it's still, I think, useful combined with some basic intuition grounded in human history to reason about like what, like looking at geopolitics, looking at basics of human nature, how can powerful technology hurt a lot of people? And it just seems, grounded in that, looking at nuclear weapons, you can start to estimate P-doom. Maybe in a more philosophical sense, not a mathematical one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Philosophical meaning, like, is there a chance? Does human nature tend towards that or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We can still think about the various ways things go wrong. For example, the founding fathers of the United States thought about human nature, and that's why there's a discussion about the freedoms that are necessary. They really deeply deliberated about that, and I think the same could possibly be done
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
for AGI, it is true that history, human history shows that we tend towards centralization, or at least when we achieve centralization, a lot of bad stuff happens. When there's a dictator, a lot of dark, bad things happen. The question is, can AGI become that dictator? Can AGI, when developed, become the centralizer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
because of its power, maybe has the same, because of the alignment of humans perhaps, the same tendencies, the same Stalin-like tendencies to centralize and manage centrally, the allocation of resources. And you can even see that as a compelling argument on the surface level. Well, AGI is so much smarter, so much more efficient, so much better at allocating resources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Why don't we outsource it to the AGI? And then eventually, whatever forces that corrupt the human mind with power could do the same for AGI. It'll just say, well, humans are dispensable. We'll get rid of them. Do the Jonathan Swift modest proposal
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
from a few centuries ago, I think the 1700s, when he satirically suggested that, I think it's in Ireland, that the children of poor people are fed as food to the rich people, and that would be a good idea because it decreases the amount of poor people. and gives extra income to the poor people. So it's on several accounts decreases the amount of poor people. Therefore, more people become rich.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
This show is also brought to you by AG1, the thing I drink twice a day and that brings me much joy. It's green, it's delicious, it's got a lot of vitamins and minerals. It's basically just an incredible super-powered multivitamin. I enjoy it, a lot of my friends enjoy it. It's the thing that makes me feel like home when I'm traveling and I get one of the travel packs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Of course, it misses a fundamental piece here that's hard to put into a mathematical equation of the basic value of human life. So all of that to say, are you concerned about AGI being the very centralizer of power that you just talked about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The things I consume daily are pretty simple. We're talking about the electrolytes with element, AG1 for the vitamins and minerals, then fish oil, and then just a good healthy diet. Low carb, but either ultra very low carb, so just meat, or meat and some veggies. I'm not very strict about that kind of stuff. Just know that I feel good when it's low carb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So if you look at the hierarchies there in the world today, there's nations, and those are hierarchical, but in relation to each other, nations are anarchic, so it's an anarchy. Do you foresee a world like this, where there's not a over, what do you call it, a centralized cybernetic control?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So, like, that's suboptimal, you're saying?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So, it would be always a state of competition at the very top level?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Identity number two, Bev Jezels, on X, is the creator of the effective accelerationism movement, often abbreviated as EAC. that advocates for propelling rapid technological progress as the ethically optimal course of action for humanity. For example, its proponents believe that progress in AI is a great social equalizer, which should be pushed forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I just hope there's not a failure mode that's unique to AGI versus humans. Because you're describing human systems mostly right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I just hope... When there's a monopoly on AGI in one company, that we'll see the same thing we see with humans, which is another company will spring up and start competing effectively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
When you were talking about intelligence, you mentioned multipartite quantum entanglement. So high-level question first is what do you think is intelligence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
When you think about quantum mechanical systems and you observe some kind of computation happening in them, what do you think is intelligent about the kind of computation the universe is able to do, a small, small inkling of which is the kind of computation the human brain is able to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so all of that combined with fasting and rigorous, sometimes crazy routines of work, some mental struggle and physical work, you know, running and all that kind of stuff, jiu-jitsu, training, sprints, all that. working out, lifting heavy, all that kind of stuff. You have to make sure you have the basic nutrition stuff, right? And that's what AG1 does for me. Maybe it will do that for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
One high-level question I can ask is maybe by way of definition, by way of explanation, what is a quantum computer and what is quantum machine learning? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So quantum machine learning is a way to do machine learning on a representation of nature that is, you know, stays true to the quantum mechanical aspect of nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Guillaume Verdun. Let's get the facts of identity down first. Your name is Guillaume Verdun, Gil, but you're also behind the anonymous account on X called BasedBevJezos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
What kind of stuff can you figure out, can you predict, can you understand with quantum deep learning that you can't with deep learning? So incorporating quantum mechanical systems into the learning process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You co-authored a paper titled A Universal Training Algorithm for Quantum Deep Learning that involves backprop with a Q. Very well done, sir. Very well done. How does it work? Is there some interesting aspects you could just mention? on how kind of back prop and some of these things we know for classical machine learning transfer over to the quantum machine learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So maybe this is a good place to ask the difference between the different fields that you've had a toe in. So mathematics, physics, engineering, and also entrepreneurship. Like the different layers of the stack. I think a lot of the stuff you're talking about here is a little bit on the math side, maybe physics almost working in theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
What's the difference to you between math, physics, engineering? and making a product for quantum computing, for quantum machine learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So first, Guillaume Verdun, you're a quantum computing guy, physicist, applied mathematician, and then BasedBevJezos is basically a meme account that started a movement with a philosophy behind it. So maybe just can you linger on who these people are in terms of characters, in terms of communication styles, in terms of philosophies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well, in quantum computing in particular, I think there's just a lot of limits to engineering. It just seems to be extremely hard. Yeah. So there's a lot of value to be exploring quantum computing, quantum machine learning in theory. Right. With math. Yeah. So I guess one question is, why is it so hard to build a quantum computer? What's your view of timelines in bringing these ideas to life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well, let me just explore different beautiful ideas, large or small in quantum computing that might jump out at you from memory. So you co-authored a paper titled, Asymptotically Limitless Quantum Energy Teleportation via QDIT Probes. So just out of curiosity, can you explain what a QDIT is, which is a qubit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But you're saying it's possible to teleport the energy because you can extract information in one place. And they make, based on that, some kind of prediction about another place. I'm not sure what I make of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The precision decreases in terms of your ability. But still. But since you mentioned UAPs, we talked about intelligence, and I forgot to ask. What's your view on the other possible intelligences that are out there at the meso scale? Do you think there's other intelligent alien civilizations? Is that useful to think about? How often do you think about it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But to me, it's also an interesting challenge and thought experiment on how to perceive intelligence. This has to do with quantum mechanical systems. This has to do with any kind of system that's not like humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So to me, the thought experiment is, say the aliens are here or they are directly observable or just too blind, too self-centered, don't have the right sensors, or don't have the right processing of the sensor data to see the obvious intelligence that's all around us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, but there could be stuff. So that's a good one. But there could be other stuff that's not even in the currently known forces of physics. Right. There could be some other stuff. And the most entertaining thought experiment to me is that it's other stuff that's obvious. It's not like we lack the sensors. It's all around us. You know, the consciousness being one possible one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But there could be stuff that's just like obviously there. And once you know it, it's like, oh, right, right. The thing we thought is somehow emergent from the laws of physics, we understand them, is actually a fundamental part of the universe and can be incorporated in physics, most understood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Yeah, but could it be things like memes? Could it be thoughts and ideas? Could they be operating in that medium? Could aliens be the very thoughts that come into my head? What's the origin of ideas in your mind? When an idea comes to your head, show me where it originates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Just to linger a little longer on quantum mechanics, what's, through all your explorations of quantum computing, what's the coolest, most beautiful idea that you've come across that has been solved or has not yet been solved?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
What do you think is going on with black holes? As information storing and processing units, what do you think is going on with black holes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
There's a few pothead-like questions I want to ask you. Sure. So one, does it terrify you that there's a giant black hole at the center of our galaxy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So if you were like, if there's a special mission that could take you to a black hole, would you volunteer to go travel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
That's obvious. So it's obvious to you that everything's destroyed inside a black hole. Like all the information that makes up Guillaume is destroyed. Maybe on the other side, Beth Jaisal's emergence. And it's all like it's tied together in some deeply meme-o-ful way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And maybe you can speak to the Kardashev scale for people who don't know. So one of the sort of meme-like principles and goals of the IAC movement is to ascend the Kardashev scale. What is the Kardashev scale? And why do we want to ascend it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So this is probably a good place to talk a bit about the EAC movement. In a Substack blog post titled, What the Fuck is EAC? Or actually, What the F-Star is EAC? You write, strategically speaking, we need to work towards several overarching civilization goals that are all interdependent. And the four goals are increase the amount of energy we can harness as a species, climb the Kardashev gradient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
In the short term, this almost certainly means nuclear fission. Increase human flourishing via pro-population growth policies and pro-economic growth policies. Create artificial general intelligence, the single greatest force multiplier in human history. And finally, develop interplanetary and interstellar transport so that humanity can spread beyond the Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Could you build on top of that to maybe say what to you is the EAC movement? What are the goals, what are the principles?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So in that way, you're right, the EAC is literally a memetic optimism virus that is constantly drifting, mutating, and propagating in a decentralized fashion. So memetic optimism virus. So you do want it to be a virus to maximize the spread. And it's hyperstitious, therefore the optimism will incentivize its growth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Does anything jump out to memory of the unique characteristic of that fork from Vitalik?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well, I like the sort of visual of the landscape of ideas evolving through forks. So kind of thinking on the other part of history, thinking of Marxism as the original repository, and then Soviet communism is a fork of that, and then Maoism is a fork of Marxism and communism. And so those are all forks. They're exploring different ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
EAC followers see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable, potentially dangerous, and needs to be regulated. They often give their opponents the labels of, quote, doomers or decels, short for deceleration. As Beth himself put it, EAC is a memetic optimism virus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But the overarching thing is nevertheless a kind of mimetic optimism pandemic. So, I mean, okay, let me ask you, do you think IAC to some degree is a cult? Define cult. I think a lot of human progress is made when you have independent thought. So you have individuals that are able to think freely and very powerful memetic systems can kind of lead to group think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
There's something in human nature that leads to like mass hypnosis, mass hysteria, where we start to think alike whenever there's a sexy idea that captures our minds. And so it's actually hard to break us apart, pull us apart, diversify a thought. So I'm to that degree. To which degree is everybody kind of chanting ee-ack, ee-ack like the sheep in Animal Farm?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Do you think just the humor, the pros and cons of humor and meme, in some sense, meme... there's like a wisdom to memes. Um, what is it? The magic theater. What book is that from? Harmon has a, um, Steppenwolf, I think, but there's a, there's a kind of embracing of the absurdity that seems to get to the truth of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
But at the same time, it can also decrease the quality and the rigor of the discourse. Do you feel the tension of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I mean, that's kind of what I try to do with this podcast, given the landscape of things, to still have long-form conversations. But there is a degree to which absurdity is fully embraced. In fact, this very conversation is multi-level absurd. So first of all, I should say that I just very recently – I had a conversation with Jeff Bezos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And I would love to hear your, Beth Jezos, opinions of Jeff Bezos. Speaking of intergalactic Jeff Bezos, what do you think of that particular individual whom your name has inspired?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And of course, the work at Blue Origin, similar to the work at SpaceX, is trying to make humans a multi-planetary species, which seems almost like a bigger thing than the capitalist machine. Or it's a capitalist machine at a different timescale, perhaps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Why do you think it's a viral and a popular meme to criticize billionaires since you mentioned billionaires? Why do you think there's quite a widespread criticism of people with wealth, especially those in the public eye like Jeff and Elon and Mark Zuckerberg and who else, Bill Gates?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The motto, keep building, is often heard. What does that mean to you? And what does it have to do with Diet Coke? Yeah. By the way, thank you so much for the red bullets. It's working pretty well. I'm feeling pretty good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Elon is an interesting case. So you are a proponent, you celebrate Elon, but he's also somebody who has for a long time warned about the dangers, the potential dangers, existential risks of artificial intelligence. How do you square the two? Is that a contradiction to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Well, I mean, there's some degree where being concerned, maybe using human psychology, being concerned about threats all around us is a motivator. Like, it's an encouraging thing. I operate much better when there's a deadline, the fear of the deadline. Like, and I, for myself, create artificial things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Like, I want to create in myself this kind of anxiety as if something really horrible will happen. if I miss the deadline. I think there's some degree of that here because creating AI that's aligned with humans has a lot of potential benefits. And so a different way to reframe that is if you don't, we're all gonna die. It just seems to be a very powerful psychological formulation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
of the goal of creating human-aligned AI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I mean, so the EAC movement is often sort of caricatured to mean sort of progress and innovation at all costs. It doesn't matter how unsafe it is. It doesn't matter if it caused a lot of damage. You just build cool shit as fast as possible. Stay up all night with a Diet Coke. whatever it takes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I think, I guess, I don't know if there's a question in there, but how important to you and what you've seen the different formulations of EAC is safety, is AI safety?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So you're saying AI safety is important to you, but right now the landscape of ideas you see is AI safety as a topic is used more often to gain centralized control. So in that sense, you're resisting it as a proxy for gaining centralized control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Because we know we have some examples throughout history when that did not lead to a good outcome. Right. Yeah. You mentioned you founded a company, Extropic, that recently announced a 14.1 million seed round. What's the goal of the company? You're talking about a lot of interesting physics things. So what are you up to over there that you can talk about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So what does that mean, machine learning as a physical process? Is that hardware? Is it software? Is it both? Is it trying to do the full stack in some kind of unique way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
A thermodynamic computer. Well, actually, let's linger on TensorFlow Quantum. What lessons have you learned from TensorFlow Quantum? Maybe you can speak to what it takes to create essentially a software API to a quantum computer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
To try to parametrize everything, make those parameters differentiable. Mm-hmm. And then optimize. Yes. Okay. So is there some more practical engineering lessons from TensorFlow Quantum? Just organizationally too, like the humans involved and how to get to a product, how to create good documentation. I don't know. All these little subtle things that people might not think about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Is there a magic, is there some science and art to the hiring process to building a team that can create magic together?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I didn't know you speak French. That's very nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So you mentioned with Extropic, you're trying to build the physical substrate for generative AI. What's the difference between that and the AGI AI itself? So is it possible that in the halls of your company, AGI will be created or will AGI just be using this as a substrate?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Sorry for the use of the term AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So you can get closer to truth by grounding... of the AI to physics, but you can also still have a anthropomorphic interface to us humans that like to talk to other humans or human-like systems. So on that topic, I suppose that is one of the big limitations of current large language models to you is that they're good bullshitters. They're not really grounded to truth necessarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Would that be fair to say?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You mentioned singularity earlier. How far away are we from a singularity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
uh cost computationally and thermodynamically to acquiring information about the world in order to be able to predict and control it and that keeps things in check it's funny you mentioned the other side of the aisle so in the poll i posted about p doom yesterday what's the probability of doom there seems to be a nice like division between people think it's very likely and very unlikely
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I wonder if in the future there'll be the actual Republicans versus Democrats division, blue versus red. Is the EI Doomers versus the EACers? EAC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So IAC as a movement is often formulated in contrast to EA, effective altruism. What do you think are the pros and cons of effective altruism? What's interesting, insightful to you about them? And what is negative?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
We should actually say, and sorry to interrupt, we should probably say that, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but effective altruism is... It's the kind of movement that's trying to do good optimally, where good is probably measured something like the amount of suffering in the world. You want to minimize it. And there's ways that that can go wrong, as any optimization can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And so it's interesting to explore how things can go wrong here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
I get a little bit skeptical when there's an equation involved, trying to reduce all of the human civilization, human experience to an equation. Is there a degree that we should be skeptical of the tyranny of an equation, of a loss function over which to optimize, like having a kind of intellectual humility about optimizing over loss functions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
what is and and try to orient ourselves and and and chart a path forward given given this fundamental truth but there's still some uncertainty there's still a lack of information humans tend to fill the gap of the lack of information with narratives and so how they interpret it even physics is up to interpretation when there's uncertainty involved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
And humans tend to use that to further their own means. So it's always, whenever there's an equation, it just seems like, until we have really perfect understanding of the universe, humans will do what humans do. And they try to use the narrative of doing good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
to fool the populace into doing bad. I just, I guess that this is something that should be skeptical about in all movements. That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
Do you have an understanding of what might, to a degree that went wrong, what do you think may have gone wrong with effective altruism that might also go wrong with effective accelerationism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
What does a perfectly productive day, since building is important, what does a perfectly productive day in the life of Guillaume Verdun look like? How much caffeine do you consume? What's a perfect day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
The style of communication of this movement leans always toward the memes and the lols, but there is an intellectual foundation that we explore in this conversation. Now, speaking of the meme, I am too a kind of aspiring connoisseur of the absurd. It is not an accident that I spoke to Jeff Bezos and Beth Jezos back to back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So it's like the 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., whatever, that range of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
You said football. You used to play football? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
It's like tricking yourself that you care about a thing. Yes. And then you start to really care about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#407 – Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
So it's funny, the motivation is, It's a really good catalyst for learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his fifth time on the podcast. He is the host of the Huberman Lab podcast and is an amazing scientist, teacher, human being, and someone I'm grateful to be able to call a close friend. Also, he has a book coming out next year that you should pre-order now called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I think the best artists aren't doing it for the prize. They aren't doing it for the fame or the money. They're doing it because they love the art. Yeah, that's the Rick Rubin thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You know, interesting, there's a bunch of physicists and mathematicians I've talked to. They talk about sleep deprivation and going crazy hours through the night, obsessively pursuing a thing. And then the solution to the problem comes when they finally get rest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, I saw that. What happened? There's a bunch of drama around an episode you did on cannabis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
The bed is just too nice. Anyway, go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by Element, the drink that Andrew and I consume a lot of during the episode. I drink a lot of Element almost, not almost, on every single podcast episode, that's just what I drink. I put Element in the water, I take, I have one next to me right now,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Well, for me, from my perspective, it was strangely rude. And it had an air of elitism that... to me, was it the source of the problem during COVID that led to the distrust of science and the popularization of disrespecting science because so many scientists spoke with an arrogance and a douchebaggery that I wish we would have a little bit less of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Powerade zero bottle with 28 fluid ounces, fill it up with water, put one packet of element in there, usually watermelon salt, mix it all up, put in the fridge, and about 30 minutes later, there's cold, refreshing deliciousness. But yeah, in the Texas heat, when I'm doing the long runs or hard training sessions, like I just did 10 rounds the other day,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's not like jujitsu because in jujitsu people don't talk shit because they know what the consequences are. Let me, let me just say on mic and off mic, you have been very respectful towards this person. and look up to you and respect you and admire the fact that you have been. That said, to me, that guy was being a dick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And when you graciously, politely invited him on the podcast, he was still talking down to you the whole time. So I really admire and look forward to listening to you talk to him, but I hope others don't do that. Like you are a positive, humble voice exploring all the interesting aspects of science. You want to learn. If you've got anything wrong, you want to learn about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
The way he was being a dick, I was just hurt a little bit, not because of him, but because there's some people I really, really admire, brilliant scientists that are not their best selves on Twitter, on X. I don't understand what happens to their brain. Well, they regress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Sure, but I can still criticize people for being douchebags because, like, that's still not good inspiring behavior, like, especially for scientists. that should be sort of symbols of scientific thinking, which requires intellectual humility. Humility is a big part of that, and Twitter is a good place to illustrate that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
in uh grappling no drinks i usually don't like to drink during training so afterwards you're just your body is completely dehydrated and that's such an amazing feeling to replenish it with all the electrolytes you need so especially when it's cold and delicious i love it get a sample pack for free with any purchase try it at drinkelement.com lex
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Bringing it back, you said that your conversation with James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst, had a big impact on you. What do you mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It's kind of hilarious how when Andrew and I hang out, how the supplementation and the diet and just our way of being is on point. There's a lot of AG1 consumed. There's a lot of element consumed. And there's a lot of ground beef or steak consumed on a regular basis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
What do you think about this idea? of the shadow, that the good and the bad that we repress, that hides from plain sight when we analyze ourselves, that's there. You think there's like a ocean that we don't have direct access to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Or positive things like creativity. Maybe that's what Rick Rubin is accessing when he goes silent. Silent body, active mind. That's interesting. What is it for you? What place do you go to that generates ideas, that helps you generate ideas?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
We've been planning to run together more, but we haven't quite done that. It's mostly my fault because... Running has just been such a solo thing for me. I really don't remember the last time I ever run with anybody. I get so much into my head that I just feel like I'm even more introverted than I usually am. Like I lose myself inside my mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
No, I really like to focus on emptiness and silence. So I pick the dragon I have to slay. So whatever the problem I have to work on, and I just sit there. And stare at it. I love how fucking linear you are. And if you're tired, I'll just sit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I believe in the power of just waiting, and usually I'll stop being tired, or energy rises from somewhere, or an idea pops from somewhere, but there needs to be a silence and an emptiness. It's an empty room, just me and the dragon, and we wait, that's it. Usually with programming, you're thinking about a particular design, like how do I design this thing to solve this problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And that's, by the way, my least favorite flavor, as I was saying. That's the reason it's still left in the fridge. The cherry one is really good. The black cherry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's become such a meditative process that to do running with another person, it just feels a little bit weird. I feel like I wouldn't be able to sort of contribute to the conversation if there's a conversation. And also like pacing wise, there's a certain pace where conversation is still possible, but it's a little uncomfortable. So, and I can't really think at that pace that well and talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
That's actually a really good question of how do you experiment? Like how long do you try a thing to figure out if it works for you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
All right, you're not going to the Olympics. You're not trying to truly maximize some aspect of your performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
One meal a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I already struggle talking, so I don't know. We'll have to figure it out. But he's just such a great person to work out with and a great person to talk to that we'll have to figure it out. Anyway, AG1 is always part of the picture. And I drink it twice a day. It's the foundation of my nutrition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And the time I had Tucker Carlson on the podcast, he told me that apparently it helps him, as he said publicly, keep his... Love life. Vibrant. Really? It causes vasoconstrictions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Eight Sleep for naps, Element for electrolytes, AG1 for nutrition, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management software, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's the thing when I consume it, I feel like I've got all my bases covered, no matter the crazy mental or the physical stuff that I'm going to do. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell stuff anywhere with a great looking online store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
For me, the caffeine is the main thing. And actually, it's a really big part of my life. And one of the things you recommend that people wait a bit in the morning to consume caffeine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
That's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like they might screw up the whole cumulative probability of 20% across multiple months. All right, listen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And for people, and they should listen to the episode, you're... It's an extremely technical episode. You're nonstop dropping facts and referencing a huge number of papers. It must be exhausting. I don't understand how you could possibly do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It took me a really short time to set everything up. LexRiemann.com slash store. There's a few shirts on there. I actually got a Leonard Skinner shirt via Shopify. Recently, and I love it. I need to get more rock music, like classic rock shirts. They brought so much joy to me. I just want to celebrate it. I don't know why, but that seems like a cool way to celebrate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Especially if it's like a nice Leonard Skinner or Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd shirt. You know, a shirt I haven't quite found that's a go-to, and I'm sure one exists, is SRV, Steve Ray Vaughan. I just don't want a generic one. I want a super cool one. Him and Jimi Hendrix have a certain way about them that requires a super cool shirt, not just a generic one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Andres Escobar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Scored against his own team in 1994 World Cup in the United States. Just 27 years old. Playing for the Columbia National Team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Last name Escobar. That's a good name.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Anyway, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Do you try to not just look at the science, but research what the communities are talking, what the various communities are talking about? Like maybe research what the conspiracy theorists are talking about, just so you know, all the armies that are going to be attacking your castle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It is the machine inside the machine, where the company is the metamachine, and society is the metametamachine, because it's a collection of groups and companies. It's also a collection of nations in a constant state of anarchy against each other, with no centralized control. The centralized control comes from the government. That does the regulation on the machine of capitalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Well, why do you think the criticism is happening? Is it that Ozempic became super popular so people are misusing it or that kind of thing? No, I think what it is is that people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I would love long-form conversations to happen with the candidates. I think it's going to be huge. I would love Trump to go on Rogan. I'm embarrassed to say this, but I would love to... Honestly, we'd love to see Joe Biden go on Joe Rogan also. I would imagine that both would go on, but separately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But within capitalism, there's a certain degree of freedom that allows you to build epic shit. To build epic stuff. And that's where NatSuite can be the thing that helps you build the epic stuff by taking care of all the messy things like... financials, HR, inventory supply, e-commerce, if that's the thing you do, and much more business-related stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Separately, I think it's... I think a debate... Joe does debates, but I think Joe at his best is one-on-one conversation, really intimate. I just wish that Joe Biden would actually do long-form conversations. I thought he had done a... I think it was on... Jay Shetty's podcast. He did Jay Shetty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
He did a few, but when I mean long form, I mean really long form, like two, three hours and more relaxed. It was much more orchestrated because what happens when the interview's a little bit too short, it becomes into this generic political type of NBC, CNN type of interview. You get a set of questions and you don't get to really feel the human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
expose the human to the light in the full, we talked about the shadow, the good, the bad, and the ugly. So I think there's something magical about two, three, four hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But it doesn't have to be that long, but it has to have that feeling to it where there's not people standing around and everybody's nervous and you're going to be strictly sticking to the question and answer type of feel, but just shooting shit, which Rogan is the best by far in the world at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
In prison, yeah. We're going to, in fact, I'm going to figure out how to commit a crime so I can get in prison. Please don't. Please don't. Well, that's, I'm sure they have visitors, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. I wonder how many companies there are in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
In addition to that, as you said, most people are close to the center, despite what Twitter makes it seem like. Most people, whether they're center left or center right, they're kind of close to the center.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Who's it going to be? The young promising candidates, we're not seeing them. Another way to ask that question, who would want to be?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's kind of cool to think that there's 37,000 companies, each one with a person who founded or a collection of people founded that had a dream and that are working hard to bring that dream into a reality, trying to survive, trying to thrive, trying to make money, trying to put food on the table of all the families involved, all the responsibility of that. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
He won my heart by giving me a biography of Hitler as a present. That's what he gave you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I gave you a hatchet. With a poem inscribed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Those are all little puzzles, little battles, sometimes big battles fought. It's cool. I love humans. This is one of the ways that humans are awesome. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Actually, I saw a video where an instructor was explaining how to behave with a shark in the water and that you don't want to be swimming away because then you're acting like a prey. That's right. And then you want to be acting like a predator by looking at it and swimming towards it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And apparently if they get close, you should just guide them away by grabbing them and moving them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But if it doesn't happen, Six times in a row. 120% chance? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to alexfreedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Asleep and it's pod for ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You're not gonna. I was gonna talk shit and say that a salty has way more bite force, but according to the internet, recently data indicates that the shark has a stronger bite. So I was assuming that a crocodile would have a stronger bite force and therefore agility doesn't matter, but apparently a shark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I like how you know that they can't foveate. You're already considering the vision system there. It's a very primitive vision system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
See, this is why I have the smuggler dog tooth. I saw this in a store and I got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's kind of incredible, the power of language, the power of spoken language to explore the human mind. Because in order to generate speech, you have to take an idea that's in your head, and as you compress that idea,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Imagine that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I did it twice, actually. And have you done high-dose psilocybin? Never, no. I just did small-dose psilocybin a couple times. So I was nervous about it. I was very scared. Yeah, understandably so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I was nervous about whatever demons might hide in the shadow, in the Jungian shadow. I was nervous. But I think it turns out, I don't know what the lesson is to draw from that, but my experience was- Be born Russian. It must be the Russian thing. I mean, there's also something to the jungle. It strips away all the bullshit of life and you're just there. I forgot the outside civilization exists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I forgot time because like, When you don't have your phone, you don't have meetings or calls or whatever, you lose the sense of time. The sun comes up, the sun comes down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
into something that could be represented in comprehensible sequence of words, and you have to speak it within the full context of everything that's been spoken previously and everything that's been going on around. And then there's another human being on the other side that hears it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I also wonder, like, how that is affected by, you know, in the rainforest, the sun is not visible often, so you're under the cover of... of the trees.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
First of all, they have to hear it correctly, you know, if it's noisy or whatever, or maybe their whole mind is focused on some aspect of the scene that prevents them from being able to really hear what's being said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Well, how to surf that wave is probably a skill. One of the things I was prepared for, and I think is important, is not to resist. I think I understand what it means to resist a thing, a powerful wave, and it's not going to be good, so you have to be able to surf it. So I was ready for that, to relax through it. And maybe because I'm quite good at that from,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
knowing how to relax in all kinds of disciplines, playing piano and guitar when I was super young, and then through jiu-jitsu, knowing the value of relaxation and through all kinds of sports, just to be able to relax the body fully, just accept whatever happens to you. That process is probably why it was a very positive experience for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But once they do, they have to then interpret it and decode, decompress the thing that was represented in language into an idea and visualize it, integrate it, load it in to the brain and make sense of that idea, again, in the full context of everything that's happened before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Oh no. They backed away. Kentucky backs away from the plan to fund opioid treatment research.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
$50 billion is on its way to state and local government over the coming years. The pool of funding comes from multiple legal statements with pharmaceutical companies that profited from manufacturing or selling opioid painkillers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
The shark and the crocodile fighting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Well, jungle or not, One of the lessons is also, you know, when you hear the call for adventure, just fucking do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah. Go to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah. That's a funny one. Probably also true. I would love to die on Mars. I just love humanity reaching onto the stars and doing this bold adventure and taking big risks and exploring. I love exploration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And in that way, back and forth, humans talk and make sense of the world together and make sense of their own mind together. It's just cool. It's cool that that's even possible. And it's cool that that's actually a powerful way to understand yourself and to understand the world. So yeah, I'm a big fan of talking, of rigorous, deep conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
How's your podcast with the Cookie Monster coming?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
They're really cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Oh, look at that. He's like the behind the scenes of how it's actually formed. And then there's... Wow. Yeah. Yeah, in the jungle, the diversity of life was also stark. From a scientific perspective, just the fact that most of those species are not identified was fascinating. Right. It was like a little... Every little insect is a kind of discovery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Certainly talk therapy is rigorous and deep when done well. So if that's something that you're interested in trying, you should try BetterHelp because it's super easy. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
What's on your bucket list that you haven't done?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, that's a big one. Yeah, yeah. That's a big one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
What's your advice for people about... that or give advice to yourself about how to find love in this world, how to find, how to build a family and get there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, I think you would make an amazing dad. Thank you. It seems like a fun thing. And I've also gotten advice from friends who are super high-performing and have a lot of kids. They'll say, just don't overthink it. Start having kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman. You think there's ever gonna be a day when you walk away from podcasting?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I got a chance to spend time with a really amazing person in Peru in the Amazon jungle, and he is one of 20 kids. So he's got, it's mostly guys, so it's just a lot of brothers, and I think two sisters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, and I think more and more, as we wake up to the negative aspects of digital interaction, we'll put more and more value to in-person interaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There is an energy to that city and he represents that. I mean, there's, and the full diversity of weird that is represented in New York City is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So amidst all that, you still have to get shit done. I've been really obsessed with tracking time recently, like making sure I have daily activities, I have habits that I'm maintaining. And I'm very religious about making sure I get shit done. Do you use an app or something like that? No, just Google Sheets. So basically a spreadsheet that I'm tracking daily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And I write scripts that whenever I achieve a goal, it glows green. Do you track your workouts and all that kind of stuff too? No, just the fact that I got the workout done. It's a check mark thing. I'm really, really big on making sure I do a thing. It doesn't matter how long it is. I have a rule for myself that I do a set of tasks for at least five minutes every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And it turns out that many of them I do way longer, but just even just doing it, I have to do it every day. And there's currently 11 of them. And it's just a thing. Like one of them is playing guitar, for example. So do you do that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
For me, I start the day, actually. That's why I'm afraid I'd really prize that, those morning hours. I start with the work. And it's a... I'm trying to hit the four-hour mark of deep focus. Great. I love it. It's important. Yeah. I'm really, really big believer. It's often torture, actually. It's really, really difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But one of the challenges, the larger the team is, And I'd like to be involved in a lot of different kinds of stuff, including engineering stuff, robotics work, research. All of those interactions, at least for me, take away from the deep work, the deep focus. Unfortunately, I get drained by social interaction, even with the people I love and really respect and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You're an introvert. Yeah, like fundamentally an introvert. So to me, it's a trade-off, getting shit done versus collaborating. And I have to choose wisely because without collaboration, without a great team, which I'm fortunate enough to be a part of, Like you wouldn't get anything really done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But as an individual contributor to get stuff done, like to do the hard work of researching or programming, all that kind of stuff, you need the hours of deep work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I'm really, after going to the jungle, I appreciate not using the device. I've played with the idea of like spending certainly maybe like one week a month not using social media at all. I used it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Again, no devices. But choose wisely the people you gather with. And I was clothed. Thank you for clarifying. I wasn't, which is very weird. Yeah, yeah, the friends you surround yourself with. That's another thing. I understood that from ayahuasca and from just the experience in the jungle is like, just select the people. Just be careful how you allocate your time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I just saw on somewhere, Conor McGregor has this good line, I wrote it down, about loyalty. He said, don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with. That guy's, I mean, he's big on loyalty. All the shit talk, all of that, set that aside. To me, like, loyalty is really big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Because then if you invest in certain people in your life and they stick by you and you stick by them, what else is life about? Yeah, well, hardship will show you who your real friends are, that's for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with. Yeah, so in that way, a hardship is a gift. It shows you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And it makes you stronger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
First of all, Pod 4 is an improvement over the Pod 3, which was already awesome. 2X the cooling power. I always love it when stuff is just improving. When smartphones are improving, LLMs are improving, like jump to Claw 3.5. It's just great. And GPT-5 might be coming out soon. It's just great. It's great to see improvement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, I love the idea of walking away and not be dramatic about it. Right. When it feels right, you can leave and you can come back whenever the fuck you want. Right. Jon Stewart did this well with The Daily Show. I think that was during the 2016 election when everybody wanted him to stay on and he just walked away. Dave Chappelle for different reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
reasons, walked away, disappeared, came back, gave away so much money, didn't care. And then came back and was doing like stand up in the park in the middle of nowhere. You have Habib who, undefeated, walks away at the very top of a sport. Is he coming back? No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, well, you're talking about the healthy way to do it. But there's also... a different kind of way where you have somebody like Grisha Grigori Perlman, the mathematician who refused to accept the Fields Medal. So he's one of the greatest living mathematicians and he just walked away from mathematics and rejected the Fields Medal. What did he do after he left mathematics? Life, private, 100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But also there's the Ultra part, which is an extra layer that adds the base that goes between the mattress and the bed frame, and the base can control the physical position of the actual mattress. So basically you can sleep in your bed and you can also read in your bed, which is a thing that I think a lot of people like doing. I have trouble reading too much in my bed because I fall asleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I respect that. He's become essentially a recluse. These photos of him looking very broke, like he could use the money. He turned away the money. He turned away everything. You just have to listen to the inner voice. You have to listen to yourself and make the decisions that don't make any sense for the rest of the world and make sense to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
The following is a conversation with Annie Jacobson, an investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of several amazing books on war, weapons, government secrecy, and national security, including the books titled Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon's Brain, Phenomena, Surprise Kill Vanish, and her new book, Nuclear War. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I imagine with Mossad, maybe the CIA now, the leadership of Hamas, of the military branch of Hamas, is much wanted from an assassination perspective. So to me, as an outside observer, it seems like it's more difficult than you would imagine. But perhaps that's the intelligence aspect of it, not the actual assassination of locating the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Speaking of Mossad, in your understanding of all the intelligence agencies, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the different intelligence agencies out there? CIA and Mossad? MI6, SVR and FSB and Chinese intelligence, all this kind of stuff. Is there some interesting differences, insights that you have from all your studying of CIA?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yes. Well, actually, the fascinating thing is because you've spoken to a lot of people about this AA, how do you know they're telling the truth? And this actually probably applies generally to your interviews with very secretive people. How do you get past the bullshit? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And I also would just like to say that I appreciate that you said, great question, I don't know. Not enough people say, I don't know, and that's a sign of a great journalist. But speaking about things you might not know about, let me ask you about something going on. Currently, so recently, Alexei Navalny died in prison, perhaps was killed in prison. What's your sense from looking at it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Do you think he died of natural causes in prison? Do you think it's possible he was assassinated? Russia, Ukraine, Mossad, CIA, whoever has interest in this particular war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So in the style of KGB assassinations. Is there something you can comment on about the ways that KGB operates versus the CIA when we look at the history of the two organizations, the Cold War, after World War II, and leading up to today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What about on the surveillance side? It seems like America is pretty good at mass surveillance, or at least has been revealed through NSA and all this kind of reporting and leaks and whistleblowers. Can you comment to the degree to how much surveillance is done by the U.S. government internally and externally?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So you're saying more and more you don't need an essay where we're giving over the data ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
publicly or semi-publicly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
If we could return to nuclear war, you've briefly mentioned that a lot of things go back to the Third Reich. and Hitler. If we go back to World War II, we look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dropping of the two bombs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I would love to get your opinion on whether we should or shouldn't have done that, and also to get your opinion on what would have happened if Hitler and Germany built the bomb first. Do you think it was possible he could have built the bomb first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Which is another great book and a terrifyingly complicated operation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Do you think it sent a signal? Like without that, we wouldn't have known perhaps about the power of the weapons. So in the long arc of that history, 70 years plus, it is the reason why deterrence has worked so far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
You open the book with a Churchill quote. The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world. And before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending. Do you think there will always be war? Do you think that there is some deep human way in which we're tending to this kind of global war eternally?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So deterrence, the polite implied assumption, is that nobody will launch, and if they did, we would launch back and everybody would be dead. But that assumption falls apart completely. The whole philosophy of it falls apart once the first launch happens. Then you have six minutes to decide, wait a minute, are we going to hit back and kill everybody on Earth?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It is very possible, and your book is such a stark and powerful reminder that human civilization as we know it ends in this century. It's a good motivator to get our shit together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Could end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But the power of our weapons is growing rapidly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And there's another complexity sneaking up into the picture in the form of artificial intelligence. And in cyber war, but also in hot war, the use of autonomous weapons, all of it starts becoming super complicated. as we delegate some of these decisions about war, including nuclear war, to more and more autonomy and artificial intelligence systems. It's going to be a very interesting century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Do you, just to zoom out a little bit, hope that we become a multi-planetary species?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And I too, while I'm for adventure, I'm all for backups in all forms. So I hope that humans start a civilization on Mars and beyond, out in space. And if you zoom out across all of it, what gives you hope about human civilization, about this whole thing we have going on here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Well, Annie, thank you for being a wonderful example of a great journalist, a great writer, a great human being. And I'm a big fan of yours. It's a huge honor to meet you, to talk with you today. So thank you so much for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Annie Jacobson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Or do we turn the other cheek in the most horrific way possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Cybersecurity, the attack and the defense is really the story of the 21st century. This is where the battles will be fought. This is where suffering may be created or alleviated or prevented. So this is a really, really, really important field, and it's not talked about enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So to you, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, maybe you can draw the line between a tactical and a strategic nuclear weapon that could be a catalyst. Like that's a very difficult thing to walk back from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
That one is a particularly terrifying one. So land-launched missiles, rockets with a warhead can't be recalled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So just to sort of linger on the previous point of tactical nukes. So you were describing strategic nukes, land launched, bombers, submarine launched. What are tactical nukes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
There's this sexy field of sort of AI safety where you talk about kind of the existential risk, the ethical risk, all of that kind of stuff of artificial intelligence as it becomes smarter and smarter and smarter. But sometimes it's the stupid stuff. It's the vulnerabilities. The stupid stuff is not the so stupid stuff. It's the basic capacity of an intelligence system to be hacked. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Can we talk about some other numbers? So you mentioned the number of warheads. So land launched. How long does it take to travel across the ocean from the United States to Russia, from Russia to the United States, from China to the United States? Approximately how long?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I'm a really big fan of Hidden Layer doing this kind of work of helping businesses figure out which are the secure models, which are not, which are the basic steps to take, the low-hanging fruit of it all. Visit hiddenlayer.com to learn more about how Hidden Layer can accelerate your AI adoption in a secure way. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But it's one of those things that can change all of world history in a matter of minutes. We just don't, as a human civilization, have experience with that. But it doesn't mean it'll never happen. It can happen just like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So there's a million other questions here. I think the details are fascinating and important to understand. So one, you also say nuclear submarines. You mentioned about 30 minutes, 26, 33 minutes. But with nuclear submarines, that number can be much, much lower. So how long does it take for a warhead to, a missile to reach the east coast of the United States from a submarine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
This is about securing your mind. I've been getting attacked more and more on the internet, such is the way of the internet, friends. But it's important to figure out systems for yourself. This isn't your own private life, even with just getting bullied in school by a few people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So wait, wait, wait. So nuclear subs are getting within 200 miles?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Undetectable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
As you write, they're called the handmaidens of the apocalypse. What a terrifying label. I mean, one of the things you also write about, so for the land-launched ones, They're presumably underground. So the silos, how long does it take to go from pressing the button to them emerging from underground for launch? Is that part detectable or it's only the heat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Not to ask top secret questions, but to what degree do you think the Russians know the locations of the silos in the U.S. and vice versa?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
First of all, you should learn how to fight, how to do jiu-jitsu, how to strike, all of those kinds of things, but that's besides the point. But the big thing you should learn to prepare yourself for the world is how to secure your mind
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
You've written about intelligence agencies. How good are the intelligence agencies on this? How much does CIA know about the Russian launch sites and capabilities and command and control procedures and all of this and vice versa?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
in a way that doesn't callous it, make it cynical, or make it unable to feel the beauty and the pain of the world, and yet make it so it doesn't descend in the depths of darkness as the human mind can. Talk therapy can help with this. BetterHelp is one of my favorite things because of just how easy it is to do. It's available everywhere. They've helped millions of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So most of your research is kind of looking at the older versions of the system. And presumably there's potentially secret development of new ones
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
We'll probably talk about DARPA a little bit One of the things that makes me sad about Lockheed, many things make me sad about Lockheed, but one of the things is because it's very top secret, you can't show off all the incredible engineering going on there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
The other thing that's more philosophical, DARPA also, is that war seems to stimulate most of our, not most, but a large percent of our exciting innovation in engineering. And so, But that's also the pragmatic fact of life on Earth, is that the risk of annihilation is a great motivator for innovation, for engineering and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But yes, I would not discount the United States in its ability to build the weapons of the future, nuclear included. Again, terrifying. Can you tell me about the nuclear football, as it's called?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Check them out at betterhelp.com slash flex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash flex. This episode is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for insurance, all kinds of insurance, life, auto, home, disability, all of that, and it gives you really nice tools for comparison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What is in that satchel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And it's probably super old school, like all top secret systems are, because they have to be tested over and over and over and over and over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It might literally be a Denny's menu from hell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I'm a huge fan of tools for comparing stuff, whenever I'm shopping for anything, whenever I'm researching anything. I would love it if there's a kind of pros and cons thing for every idea in the world. There's really nice pros and cons websites for very sort of heated political topics,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yeah, but as we discuss this procedure, each individual person that follows that procedure might lose the big picture of the whole thing. I mean, especially when you realize what is happening, that almost out of fear, you just follow the steps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Because a lot of that has to do with the weather system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So the doomsday plane from STRATCOM, what's that? Where's it going? It's on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
very popular political topics, but I would love it if there was that kind of pros and cons analysis and ratings and all that kind of stuff for very nuanced conversations. In general, there's also places, I think it's called like manifold markets where you can bet on the outcome of different ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And Bush had to make decisions quickly, but not so quickly, not as quickly as he would have needed to have done if there's a nuclear launch. Six minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Check them out in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. We got Hidden Layer for securing your neural networks as one must. BetterHelp for securing your mind. Policy Genius for securing your insurance on all fronts. And NetSuite for securing the awesomeness of your business. See what I did there? She was wise, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What is the interceptor capabilities of the United States? How many nuclear missiles can be stopped?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It's a pretty cool way to explore different possibilities about the future, but also to in so doing to debate different topics. I love it. So yeah, Whenever somebody does that kind of thing well, and Policy Genius does it well, the comparison, I really celebrate it. You should go check it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Is it possible that we only know about 44, but there could be a lot more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And how well tested are these interceptors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Why can't an Iron Dome-like system be constructed for nuclear warheads?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Head to policygenius.com slash Lex, or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I'm looking for a hopeful thing here about North Korea. How many deployed nuclear warheads does North Korea have? So does the current system, as we described it, the interceptors and so on, have a hope against the North Korean attack, the one that you mentioned people are worried about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
How likely are mistakes, accidents, false alarms, taken as real, all this kind of stuff in this picture? So like you've kind of assumed the detection works correctly. How likely is it possible? Like anywhere, you described this long chain of events that can happen. How possible is it just to make a mistake, a stupid human mistake along the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
37,000 companies make the switch to NetSuite. They help manage the different modules of a company. It's the machine inside the machine. They create the language where the different modules of a company can find a common language, a standard of communication. They manage HR, financials, e-commerce, all that kind of stuff. The messy stuff. They make the messy simple and efficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Can you speak to maybe, is there any more color to the feelings he was feeling? Like what was your sense? And given all the experts you've talked to, What can be said about the seconds that one feels once finding out that a launch has happened, even if that information is false information?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
People forget. You mentioned the kind of nuclear war scenarios that the Pentagon runs. I'd love to... What do you know about those?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
If you're running a company, you should use the right tools for that. The machine inside the machine should be good. such that the metal machine of capitalism can do its work to bring about a better world to the degree it does. And when it fails, we can point that out, and government can step in and call bullshit. It's a beautiful thing we have going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Almost always, so there's no mechanisms in the human mind, in the human soul that stops it, in the governments they've created. The procedure escalates always.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But, I mean, there is... To make a case for that, there is a reason to the madness. Because you want to threaten this gigantic response. But when it comes to it, the seconds before, there is still a probability that you'll pull back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Democracy overseeing the beautiful machinery of business that creates incredible stuff, but doesn't cross the line of unethical behavior. And that's the dance of it all. Capitalism, democracy, humanity. It's beautiful, really. But at the low level of the machinery of a single company, NetSuite is the thing you should be using.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And if one nuclear weapon does reach its target, I presume communication breaks down completely. Or like there's a high risk of breakdown of communication.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I'd like to believe that there's people in major nations that don't give a damn about the bullshit of politics and can always just pick up the phone, sort of very close to the top, but not at the very top, and just cut through the bullshit of it in situations like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Now through April 15th, NetSuite is offering a one-of-a-kind flexible financing plan. Go to netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex. This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Annie Jacobson. Let's start with an immensely dark topic, nuclear war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Who are the people around the President of the United States that give advice in this six-minute window? How many of them, just to, maybe you could speak to the detail of that, but also to the spirit of the way they see the world. How many of them are warmongers? How many of them are kind of big picture peace, humanity type of thinkers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Can you speak to the jamming the president? So your sense is the advisors would, by default, be pushing for aggressive counterattack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But what? The argument will be about which targets, not about if.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I hope that even the warmongers would, at this moment, because what underlies the idea of you wanting to go to war? It's power. It's like wanting to destroy the enemy and be the big kid on the block. But with nuclear war, it just feels like that falls apart. Do you think warmongers actually believe they can win a nuclear war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Not to be political and not to be ageist. but do cognitive abilities and all that kind of stuff come into play here? So if so much is riding on the president, is there tests that are conducted, is there regular training procedures on the president that you're aware of, do you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So that's one of the things you should really think about when voting for president is this scenario that we've been describing. These six minutes. Imagine the man or woman sitting there six minutes waiting for the pot of coffee.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
How many people would a nuclear war between the United States and Russia kill?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Well, I agree with you, first of all, but it feels like when nuclear war, one person becomes exponentially more important. With regular war, the decision to go to war or not, advisors start mattering more. There's judgment issues. You can start to make arguments for people sort of more leeway in terms of what kind of people we elect. It seems like with nuclear war, there's no leeway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It's like one person can resist this, the jamming, the president force, the warmongers, the like, all the calculation involved in considering what are the errors, the mistakes, the missiles flying over Russia, the full dynamics of the geopolitics going on in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Consider all of humanity, the history of humanity, the future of humanity, your loved, all of it just loaded in to make a decision. Then it becomes much more important that your cognitive abilities are strong and your judgment abilities against against powerful, wise people, just as a human being are strong. So I think that's something to really, really consider when you vote for president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But to which degree is it really on the president versus to the people advising?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
You go second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, what would happen if the nuclear war started. So there's a lot of angles from which I would love to talk to you about this. At first, how would the deaths happen in the short term and the long term?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What would you do if you were the commander of STRATCOM in that situation? What would you do? Because my gut reaction right now, if you just throw me in there, I would refuse orders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Why do you think? What's his intuition behind that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
You don't think there's a deep humanity there? Because his intuition is about everything we know so far, but this situation has never happened in the history of Earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Well, I mean, fundamentally, it feels like just looking at all the presidents of the United States in my lifetime, it feels like none of them are qualified for this six minutes. So like I could see, you know, I could see as being the commander of his track, I'm being like this guy, like basically respecting no president. I know you're supposed to the commander in chief, but in this situation,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
saying like, I mean, everybody, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, if I was a commander of Stratcom, I'd be like, what does this guy know about any of this? I would defy orders. I mean, in this situation, when the future of human civilization hangs in the balance, I mean, to be the person that says yes, launch,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
No matter what, I just can't see a human being on Earth being able to do that in the United States of America. That's a hell of a decision. Like, this is it. That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Also, I want to look up who's the commander of STRATCOM now. Speaking of which, you've interviewed a lot of experts for this book. Is there some commonalities about the way, you've talked about this a little bit, but in the way they see this whole situation, what scares them the most about it? This whole system and the whole possibility of nuclear war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, including to work with our amazing team, go to lexfreeman.com contact. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but friends, if you skip them, if you must, I shall forgive you in this life or the next. Both this life and the next, I will forgive you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
How much do you know? in the same way that you know about the United States, how much do you know about the Russian side, maybe the Chinese side, India and Pakistan, all of this? How their thinking differs, perhaps?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What do you know of the way Putin thinks about nuclear weapons and nuclear war? Is it just something to allude to in a speech, or do you think he contemplates the possibilities of nuclear war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
You would be more trigger happy, perhaps. So you would be more prone to respond to erroneous signals and-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And perhaps makes it less likely that the president would pick up the phone and talk to the other president.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
You were talking about the procedure with the football. Is there any concern for cyber attacks, for sort of security concerns at every level here, false signals, errors, shutting down the channels of communication through cyber attacks, all that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Well, let's talk about it. So, God forbid... If a nuclear weapon reaches its target, what happens? Perhaps you could say what you think would be the first target hit. Would it be the Pentagon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So one warhead reaches the Pentagon. Everybody in the Pentagon perishes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And there's then a radius where... People die immediately. And then there's people that are dead when found. And then there's people that will die slowly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Eccentric rings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And then the power grid goes out. Basically, everything we rely on in terms of systems in our way of life goes out. You write, quote, those who somehow managed to escape death by the initial blast, shockwave, and firestorm suddenly realize an insidious truth about nuclear war, that they're entirely on their own. Here begins a, quote, fight for food and water. I mean, that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
A wake-up call on top of a wake-up call. That we go back to a kind of primitive fight for survival, each on their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But it doesn't take too many people to start one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What do you think happens to humans? How does human nature manifest itself in such conditions? Do you think brutality will come out? People will, just for survival, will steal, will murder, will...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
communication lines are all gone, the food supply, all of it, all the supply chain is gone. It's terrifying. And that's just in the first few days, first few hours. In part five, you described the 24 months and beyond after this first hour we've been talking about. So what happens to Earth? What happens to humans if a full-on nuclear war happens?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So temperature drops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What are the different ways it could start? Like, literally, who presses a button? And what does it take to press a button?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Foods obviously dies, right? So the agriculture system completely shuts down. So the food sources shut down. So there's no food. There's no sun. Temperature drops completely. No electricity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Do you think it's possible that some humans will survive all of this? So if we look, I mean, how long would it be? Would it be decades? Would it be centuries before you start to have, Earth starts to have the capacity to grow food
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What would we remember about this time? It is terrifying to think that most of it will be forgotten. Everything we kind of assume will not be forgotten. We think maybe some of the technological developments will be forgotten, but we assume like some of history won't be forgotten.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But realistically, especially the, us descending into primitive survival, probably everything since the industrial age will be forgotten, like everything. Maybe some religious ideas will persist. Some stories and myths will persist. but like all the wisdom we've gathered, higher level sort of technological wisdom would be gone. That's terrifying to think about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And like, maybe even as you touch on the very fact of nuclear war might be forgotten. Like the lessons of nuclear war might be forgotten. That there are these weapons, sort of the obvious elephant in the room would be one of the things that's completely forgotten or become so vague in the recollection of humans that our understanding will change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It's almost as if a God descended on earth and destroyed everything. Maybe that's how it will persist. Sort of like mythological interpretation of what nuclear weapons are. That's terrifying, because then it could repeat again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Let me ask you about the great filter. When you look up into our galaxy, into our universe, look up at the sky... Do you think there's other alien civilizations that are contending with some similar questions? And perhaps the reason we have not definitively seen alien civilizations is because the others have failed to find a solution to this great filter, something like nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yeah, so in some deep way. So the mysteries of what's out there when we look out to the stars are the same mysteries that we find when trying to understand the human mind. And they're coupled in some way. For me, thinking about alien civilizations out there is really the same kind of question. which is what are we? What is this? What are we doing here? How do we come here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Why does it seem to be so magical and beautiful and powerful? Where's it going? Because it feels like we're really, perhaps for the first time in history, are in a moment where we can destroy ourselves. And so naturally you ask, well, where's others like us? Is it perhaps, are we inevitably going to a place where we'll destroy ourselves? Is it basically inevitable that we destroy ourselves?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
We become too powerful and insufficiently wise to know what to do with that power. But like you said, probably the answers to that are in here. We don't need to look out there. I'd love to ask you about the extrasensory perception. You've written, like you said, the book, Phenomena, on the secret history of the US government's investigations into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What are some of the more interesting extrasensory abilities that were explored by the government? And maybe just in general, ESB, what is it? What do you know of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Have they been able to find anything interesting in this squishy science analysis of trying to see how the human mind could be used as a weapon?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So the president, as part of the launch on warning policy, has six minutes. I guess can't launch for six minutes, but at six minute mark from that first warning, the president can...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yeah. I mean, placebo, as you've mentioned, is a fascinating concept. By the way, a short plug. I started listening to it. Andrew Huberman just released a podcast on placebo, the placebo effect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But you should still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. This episode with Andy Jacobson is terrifying on many fronts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Does that trouble you that so much of this is coming from the CIA first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
The placebo concept, but a lot of the sort of scientific investigations? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It turns out, as you write in that book, that the CIA assassinates people sometimes. And we'll talk about it. But anyway, like you said, conflicting feelings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I wonder if you could just speak to that. You've interviewed so many powerful people, so many fascinating people. And as you've spoken about, trust is fundamental to that. So they open up and really show you into their world. What does it take to do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And probably there's a bunch of human details that you can't possibly express in words, things left unspoken, but you saw in the silence, exchange between the two of you, the sadness, the Um, maybe you could see in his face, looking back at memories of, uh, the people he's lost, all that kind of stuff, all that kind of stuff. Uh, you mentioned you wrote a book on area 51.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
For people who don't know, you've written a lot about security, the military, secrets, all this kind of stuff. So Area 51 is one of the legendary centers of all of these kinds of topics. So high level first is what is Area 51? As you understand it, as you've written about the lore and the reality,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So you talked to a lot of people that worked there. What can you describe as sort of the history of technological development that went on there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of incredible technological work going on there. So the legend, the lore, like you said, aliens. Were there ever aliens in Area 51 as you understand it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
That worked there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Just at an Earth period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But for you, in terms of doing research on government agencies that do top secret military work, I mean, they would know, right? So you have interviewed a lot of people that have At every layer of the onion, you don't see evidence or a reason to believe that there was ever aliens or UFOs captured from out of this world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yeah, there's a lot of incentive for the CIA and other intelligence agencies to get you to look the other way on whatever is happening. Plus, from an enemy perspective, whenever two nations are at war, to try to create hysteria in the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Right, so I appreciate the possibility of acknowledging that you might be wrong. From everything you know about the US government, if there was an alien spacecraft, what do you think would happen? Would they be able to hold on to those secrets for decades? Would they want to hold on to those secrets? What would they do? What's your sense?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
But, of course, it's possible that it is alien spacecraft, if it is that, and they operate under a very different set of technological capabilities, in theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Just imagine sitting there. One person, because a president is a human being. Sitting there, just got the warning that Russia launched. You have six minutes. You know, I meditate on my mortality every day, and here you would be sitting and meditating, contemplating not just your own mortality, but the mortality of all the people you know, loved ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yeah. Yeah, I think this kind of flying saucer thing is... as a trivialization of what kind of, if there's alien civilizations out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
I tend to believe that there's like a very large number of alien civilizations out there. And I believe we would have trouble comprehending what that even looks like were they to visit. I tend to believe they are already here or have visited and we're too dumb to understand what that even means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And they certainly would not appear as flying objects that defy gravity for brief moments of time on a low resolution video. I tend to have humility about all this kind of stuff. But I think radical humility is required to even open your eyes to what an alien intelligence would actually look like. And to me, it's beyond military applications. It's like the basic human question of like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
what is even this thing? Like you mentioned, consciousness that's going on. Like, where does this come from? Why is it so powerful? Is it unique in the universe? I tend to believe not. Of course, I hang out a bunch with other folks, like Elon, who believe we are alone. But I think that belief, just like you said, has power because it actually manifests itself in reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So if you believe that we're alone in this universe, that's a great motivator to build rockets and become multi-planetary and save ourselves, especially in the case of nuclear war. Because otherwise, whatever this special sauce, this flame of consciousness will go out if we destroy ourselves on this earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And for people like Elon, it's too high of a probability that we destroy ourselves on earth, not to try to become multi-planetary. in your book on Area 51, you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized at the very end, that this might have been a disinformation campaign from, I guess, Stalin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
that the Roswell incident was a remotely piloted plane with a, quote, grotesque child-sized aviator. Just looking back at all that now, years later, what's the probability that it's true? What's the probability it's not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
The source?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Okay, who is the source?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
knew it was him, and I knew his family, because I was an integral part of, you know, I was at his house, I met all his kids, grandkids, and... And we should say the source is the main expert advisor behind the story that it was, maybe you can explain what the story is that you report in the book, that it was a disinformation campaign created by Stalin, to cause mass hysteria in the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
The very kind that we've been speaking about with the CIA and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Just imagining, what would be going through my head is all the people I know and love. like personally, and knowing that there'll be no more, most likely. And if they somehow survive, they will be suffering and will eventually die. I guess the question that kept coming up is, how do we stop this? Is it inevitable that it's going to be escalated to a full-on nuclear war that destroys everything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Wow. Well, you received a lot of criticism over this story, and it confused me why, because it's, given the context of everything you've described, with this AA and other intelligence agencies, it is reasonable that such an action would be taken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And like you said, the programs, both on the Soviet side and the American side, conflicting, I think is the term we used previously, ethically, morally, on all fronts are people have done some horrible things in the name of security. In your book, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, you write about the CIA and the so-called president's third option.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It turns out, so first of all, first option being diplomacy and second option being war. So when diplomacy is inadequate and war is a terrible idea, we'll go to the third option. And this third option is about covert action and it's about assassination. So how much of that does the CIA do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And it seems like it will be. It's inevitable. In the position of the president, it's almost inevitable that they have to respond.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Well, at least they have a sense of humor to this dark topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
It's terrifying because you get to see just how close we are to the brink of self-destruction, just how few people are involved in saying, yes, launch nuclear war. Just how easy it is for little mistakes, little misunderstandings to lead to nuclear war. And on this point of hidden layer of cybersecurity, just how easy it is to hack a system that creates misinformation that results in nuclear war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Can you elaborate on what Title 50 says? It basically says assassination is allowed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
That's fascinating. So people talk about the Navy SEALs doing it, but it's really, legally speaking, to get the permission to do it within the whole legal framework of the United States, it was the CIA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
What do you think, and how much do they think, at the highest levels of power, about the ethics of assassination? And about the role of that in geopolitics and military operations? To you, maybe also, does assassination make sense as a good methodology of war?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So in the technical difficulty of those missions, just your big sense, how hard is it to assassinate a target on the soil of that nation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Yeah. I have a lot of friends who are Navy SEALs. It's such a guy conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
Can you comment on that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
The Special Operations, do you mean, is this part of the CIA?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
So women are also a part of the alleged assassination?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#420 – Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy
And you're saying they can, at times, be more effective? I'm just going to leave that pause there. The reason I ask of how difficult the assassinations are, you know, with bin Laden, it took a long time. So I guess the reconnaissance... the intelligence for finding the target.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
The following is a conversation with Wejas Lulevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the reign, and the fall of communism. Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics, the communist ideology that has led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century. We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And just a general culture of censorship and fear and all the same stuff we saw in the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So as the same question I asked about the Soviet Union, why do you think there was so much failure of policies that Mao implemented? Yeah. in China during his rule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And also that you have the rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Mao died in 1976. You wrote that the CCP in 81, looking back through the lens of historical analysis, said that he was 70% correct. Seven, zero, exactly 70% correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Not 71. The scientific precision, I mean, we should say that again and again. the co-opting of the authority of science by the Soviet Union, by Mao, by Nazi Germany, Nazi science. is terrifying and should serve as a reminder that science is the thing that is one of the most beautiful creations of humanity, but is also a thing that could be used by politicians and dictators to do horrific things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Exactly. Humility. Intellectual humility. So how did China evolve after Mao's death to today?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
In the West, China is often demonized. And we've talked extensively today about the atrocities that result from... atrocities both internal and external that result from communist nations. But what can we say by way of hope to resist the demonization? How can we avoid cold or hot war with China, we being the West or the United States in the 21st century?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour, what are we supposed to think about North Korea and their declaration that they're supposedly a communist nation? what can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just like a hopelessly simple answer of this is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, so there's a component here in the release of China as well. to bring somebody like John Mearsheimer into the picture. There's a military component here too, and that is ultimately how these nations interact, especially totalitarian nations interact with the rest of the world. So nations interact economically, culturally, and militarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
What about the sort of famous line that history of all existing societies is the history of class struggles? So what about this conception of history as a history of class struggle?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
and the concern with countries like North Korea is the way for them to be present on the world stage in the game of geopolitics is by flexing their military might. And they invest a huge amount of their GDP into the military. So I guess the question there to discuss in terms of analysis is, How do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a communist system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And what lessons can we take from history and apply it to that? Or should we simply just ignore and look the other way as we've been kind of hoping it doesn't get out of hand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Now let us jump continents and in the 20th century, look to North America. So you also have lectured about communism in America, the different communist movements in America. It was also founded in 1919 and evolved throughout through a couple of red scares. So what was the evolution of the communist party and just in general, communists in America?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, the Cold War and the extensive levels of espionage sort of created, combined with Hollywood, created basically firmly solidified communism as the enemy of the American ideal. Yeah. sort of embodied. And not even the economic policies of the political policies of communism, but like the word. And the color red with a hammer and sickle, Rocky IV, one of my favorite movies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah. I mean, it is a bit of a meme, but meme becomes reality and then enters politics and is used by politicians to do all kinds of name-calling. you have spoken eloquently about modern Russia and modern Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe. So how did Russia evolve after Stalin and after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And it's interesting to consider timing and also individual leaders. Zelensky, you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would have folded much easier. And Zelensky, I think, surprised a lot of the world by somehow, you know, this comedian, somehow becoming essentially an effective war president. Yeah. So, you know, put that in the bin of singular figures that define history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So let me ask a political question. I recently talked to Donald Trump and he said, if he's elected, before he is sworn into office, he will have a peace deal. What would a peace deal like that look like? And is it even possible, do you think? So we should mention that Russia has captured four regions of Ukraine now, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Also, Ukraine captured part of the Kursk region within Russia. So just like you mentioned, territories on the table. NATO, European Union is on the table. Also, funding and military help from the United States directly to Ukraine is on the table.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Do you think it's possible to have a fair deal that from people, like you said, far away, where both people walk away, Zelensky and Putin, unhappy, but equally unhappy, and peace is negotiated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So laying the foundation for worse things to come. So it's possible you have, A ceasefire that lays the foundation for a worse war and suffering in a year, in five years, in 10 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
If you look at the 20th century, it's what we've been talking about with horrendous global wars that happened then. And you look at now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And it feels like just living in the moment with the war in Ukraine, breaking the contract of you're not supposed to do territorial conquest anymore in the 21st century, that then the just intensity of hatred and military tension in the Middle East with Israel, Iran, Palestine just building, and then China calmly, but with a big stick, talking about Taiwan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Do you think a big conflict may be on the way? Do you think it's possible that another global war happens in the 21st century?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So as a historian, let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give on interviewing world leaders? whether it's people who are no longer here, some of the people we've been talking about, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or people that are still here, Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Kamala Harris, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping. As a historian, is it possible to have an interesting conversation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Maybe as a thought experiment, what kind of conversation would you like to have with Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in the 1920s?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And in fact, your body gets accustomed to that kind of hardness of training, if you're doing it correctly in terms of nutrition and in terms of avoiding injury. In fact, I never got any major injuries, knock on wood, any sort of breaking of anything doing, you know, I don't know how many years, over 20 years, 25 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, you put it brilliantly in several ways, but the moral compass, sneaking up to the full nuance and complexity of the moral compass, and one of the ways of doing that is looking at the various horizons in time about their vision of the future. I imagine it's possible to get Hitler to talk about the future of the Third Reich.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
and to see in ways like what he actually envisions that as and similar with Stalin. But of course, funny enough, I believe those leaders would be easier to talk to because there's nothing to be afraid of in terms of political competition. Modern leaders are a little bit more guarded because they have opposition often to contend with. And constituencies. And constituencies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
You did a lot of amazing courses, including four of the great courses. On the topic of communism, you just finished the third. So you did a series of lectures on the rise of communism, then communism and power, and then decline and fall. So when I was sort of listening to these lectures, I can't possibly imagine the amount of work that went into it. Can you just speak wisely?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
What was that journey like of taking everything you know, your expertise on Eastern Europe, but just bringing your lens, your wisdom, your focus onto this topic and what it takes to actually bring it to life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
The dictatorship of the working class is an interesting term. So what is the role of revolution in history?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And I should highly recommend that people sign up to the, first of all, there's the Great Courses where you can buy the courses individually, but I recommend people sign up for Great Courses Plus, which I think is like a monthly membership where you get access to all these courses and they're just incredible. And I recommend people watch all of yours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Since you mentioned books, this is an impossible question and I apologize ahead of time, but is there books you can recommend just in your own life that you've enjoyed, whether really small or some obvious recommendations that you recommend people read. It is a bit like asking what's your favorite band kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
The Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders. And you got a really nice beard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Okay, beautiful. What advice would you give to young people today that have just listened to us talk about the 20th century and the terrifying prospects of ideals implemented into reality? And by the way, many of the revolutions are carried out by young people. And so the good and the bad and the ugly is thanks to the young people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So the young people listening today, what advice would you give them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
It's a really interesting idea. So let me give a shout out to Perplexity that I'm using here to sort of summarize and take quick notes and get little snippets of stuff, which is extremely useful. But books are not just about information transfer. It's just as you said, it's a journey together with a set of ideas and it's a conversation. And getting a summary of the book
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
As the cliche thing is, it's really getting to the destination without the journey. And the journey is the thing that's important, thinking through stuff. And I've actually learned, you know, I've been surprised. I've learned, I've trained my brain to be able to get the same thing from audiobooks also. It's a little bit more difficult because you don't control the pacing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Sometimes pausing is nice, but you can still get it from audiobooks. So it's an audio version of books. And that allows you to also go on a journey together and sometimes more convenient because you could take it to more places with you. But there is a magical thing. And I also trying to train myself mostly to use Kindle, the digital version of books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
But there is unfortunately still a magical thing about being there with the page.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
The use case of AI as a companion as you read is really exciting to me. I've been using it recently to basically, as you read, you can have a conversation with a system that has access to a lot of things about a particular paragraph. I've been really surprised how my brain, when given some extra ideas,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
other recommendations of books, but also just like a summary of other ideas from elsewhere in the universe that relates to this paragraph. It sparks your imagination and thought, and you see the actual richness in the thing you're reading. Now nobody's, to my knowledge, has implemented a really intuitive interaction between AI and the text. Unfortunately, partially because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
the books are protected under DRM, and so there's like a wall where the eye can't access the thing. So if you want to play with that kind of thing, you have to break the law a little bit, which is not a nice thing, not a good thing. Just like with music, Napster came up. People started illegally sharing music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music revolutionize everything and made the sharing of music much easier. So there are some technological things that can enrich the experience of reading. But the actual... painful, long process of reading is really useful. Just like boredom is useful. It's also called just sitting there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And of course, you have to see the smartphone as an enemy, I would say, of that special time you have to think because social media companies are maximized to get your engagement. They want to grab your attention. and they grab that attention by making you as brain dead as possible and getting you to look at more and more and more things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So it's nice and fun, it's great, recommend it highly, it's good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counter, as a counter force to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time. taking a journey through an expert eloquently conveying that idea and growing by having a conversation with that idea in a book is really, really powerful. So I agree with you totally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
What gives you hope? about the future of humanity. We've talked about the dark past. What gives you hope for the light at the end of the tunnel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
How did he conceive of a revolution, potentially a violent revolution, Stabilizing itself into something where the working class was able to rule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, and the willingness of humans to explore all of that with curiosity, even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Vegas, thank you so much for your incredible work, your incredible lectures, your books, and thank you for talking today. Thank you for this. Such a fun chat. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vejas Ludovicius. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. History repeats itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
First, as a tragedy. Second, as a farce.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And I find that now that jiu-jitsu is a much, much smaller part of my life, it actually does become a different puzzle. It's a puzzle of how to avoid injury, how to still have fun, but also how to keep growing and learning and adapting to the changing environment of grappling, no-geek grappling especially. So it's been a fascinating puzzle to try and solve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
The Spotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Can you speak to this realm of ideas, which is fascinating, this battle of big ideas in the 19th century? What are the ideas that were swimming around here? Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Back to AG1, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
I remember, speaking of jiu-jitsu, one of the tougher things mentally for me, for anyone that does jiu-jitsu, that's one of the wonderful benefits you get from it is you get humbled. And there's all kinds of ways to get humbled. But there's just some training sessions. And it might not have to do with the skill of the people you're training with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Just to throw in the mix, there's interesting characters swimming around. So you have Darwin. He has a... I mean, it's difficult to... To characterize the level of impact you had, even just in the religious context, it challenges our conception of who we are as humans. There's Nietzsche, who's also, I don't know, hanging around the area. On the Russian side, there's Dostoevsky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So it's interesting to ask maybe from your perspective, did these people interact in the space of ideas? to where this is relevant to our discussion, or is this mostly isolated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
What we should say here, when you mentioned Karl Marx, maybe the color red comes up for people and they think the Soviet Union, maybe China, but they don't think Germany necessarily. It's interesting that... I mean, Germany is where communism was supposed to happen. That's right. And so can you maybe speak to that tension?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
It might just be one of those days that you just get smeshed. as they say in the MMA community when they're talking about Khabib Nurmagomedov. You just feel powerless. you know, somebody just crushes you knee on belly or mount or back control and you just over and over get submitted or just guard pass, whatever it is, just stuff is not working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
phenomenon which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in uh germany is such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different trajectories it could take and we'll talk about it but if we return to the 19th century you've said that um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Marxist chief rival was Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, quote, the passion for destruction is also a creative passion. So what kind of future did Bakunin envision?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And you just feel like there's nothing in the world that you can do right. You feel like you'll never get better, that it's just hopeless. And that feeling, especially in combat sports, where there's kind of a a masculine competitive energy, you just feel like this is it. There's no light at the end of the tunnel, this is it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
If we can take that tangent a little bit. So I guess anarchists were less organized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Why do you think anarchism hasn't been... rigorously tried in the way that communism was, if we just take a complete sort of tangent. I mean, in one sense, we are living in anarchy today because the nations are in an anarchic state with each other. But why do you think sort of there's not been an anarchist revolution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And that feeling's a beautiful feeling, because you just sit in that and sit with that pain, that disappointment, that emotional turmoil, and you channel that feeling into growth, into improving, into strengthening the engine of perseverance. And all of that is in the mind. And you should take care of your mind by checking out betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, it's an interesting stretch that a violent revolution will take us to a place of no violence or very little violence. It's a leap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So that's actually a disagreement with this idea that, you know, people sometimes say that The Soviet Union is an example of an atheistic society. So when you have atheism as the primary thing that underpins the society, this is what you get. So that's what you're saying is a kind of rejection of that, saying that there's a strong religious component to communism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It's probably my favorite integration of AI into the writing process. I haven't used it that much for the team collaboration aspect, but for the note-taking aspect. But I've heard really great things about the team collaboration thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, it's a very complicated sort of discussion when you remove religion as a big component of a society, whether something like a framing of political ideologies in religious ways is the natural consequence of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So this topic is one of several topics that you eloquently describe as contradictions within the ideas of Marx. So religious, there is a kind of religious adherence versus also the rejection of religious dogma that he stood for. We've talked about some of the others, the tension between nationalism that emerged when it was implemented versus
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
what communism is supposed to be, which is global, so globalism. Then there's the thing that we started talking with is individualism. So, you know, history is supposed to be defined by the large collection of humans, but there does seem to be these singular figures, including Marx himself, that are like really important. geography of global versus restricted to certain countries and tradition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
I've been preparing extensively to interview the Cursor team. Cursor is an editor and IDE for programming that is a fork of VS Code and makes sort of AI assistant coding. a foundation based on which they're kind of building the features. So it makes AI the primary citizen. And I've seen that Notion does the same kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
You're supposed to break with the past and the communism, but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions in history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
I would love to sort of talk about the works of Marx, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. What can we say that's interesting about the manifestation of his ideas on paper?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG1 for health, BetterHelp for your mind, Notion for team collaboration, Element for electrolytes, and Aidsleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
They really, really focused on empowering AI to help you, not just for a single document, but across entire projects and wikis and all that kind of stuff. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com. That's all lowercase, notion.com. To try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar, delicious electrolyte mix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Is there something you could say about the difference between Marxian economics and Marxist political ideology? So the political side of things and the economics side of things. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Whenever you see me drinking, sometimes I'll have something that looks like a Powerade bottle with a clear liquid. The clear liquid is cold water with one packet of watermelon salt, Element. It's the thing I drink before a run, after a run, before and after a hard training session, and just as throughout the day. It's a delicious way to consume water.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Let's step back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and let's steel man the case for communism. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the people there, not in this way we can look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
I continually am surprised how much of sort of physical and psychological problems can be solved with getting the right amount of electrolytes. I think that's like a meme on the various social media platforms of like a girlfriend complaining about something being wrong. And the suggestion is, well, have you tried drinking a glass of water?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, the certainty of science, in quotes, and the goal of utopia gets you in trouble. But also, just on the human level, from a working class person perspective, from the Industrial Revolution, you see the growing inequality, wealth inequality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And there is a kind of, you see people getting wealthy, and combined with the fact that life is difficult, life in general, life is suffering for many, for most, for all, if you listen to some philosophers. And there is kind of a... a powerful idea in that the man is exploiting me. And that's a populist message that a lot of people resonate with because to a degree it's true in every system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And so before you kind of know how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves, it is really powerful to say, here beyond the horizon, there's a world where the rich man will not exploit my hard work anymore. And I think that's a really powerful idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
The implication is that she's simply thirsty, but she doesn't want the boyfriend to give a solution to the problem. In fact, she wants to just be heard. That's the meme. But to sort of dig for the wisdom within the meme, really, you could solve so many problems by drinking water and getting enough electrolytes. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So let's go to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. How did communism come to power in the Soviet Union?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for ultra. Technology is being integrated in every part of our lives. The refrigerator is next, friends. There are some features I would love to have in a refrigerator, some intelligence. And in fact, I can anticipate that Asleep is probably working on some additional AI. They're already using a bunch of cool machine learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So even he was surprised how effective and how fast the revolution happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So you said that Bolsheviks saw violence and terror as necessary. So can you just speak to this aspect of their, because they took power, and so this was a part of the way they saw the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
How do you take the signal that comes from your body given a set of sensors and understand various metrics, various characteristics about how you're sleeping? They're already doing that. And so you have an app and you can analyze all the different ways that you're sleeping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Of course, for me, the thing I enjoy most is that it's a cool surface with a warm blanket and you can just disappear into the world of dreams and dragons and weird creatures that you may have seen on a hypothetical ayahuasca journey in the jungle. How amazing is the human mind that it can generate those worlds?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
It's interesting that nihilism, Russian nihilism, had an impact on Lenin. I mean, traditionally nihilist philosophy rejects all sorts of traditional morality. There's a kind of cynical, dark view, and where's the light?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Oh, boy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, Please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
For most people, I think nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work, I don't know if you're familiar with it, by the name of The Big Lebowski. Oh. nihilists appear there. And I think they summarize the nihilist tradition quite well. But it is indeed fascinating, and also it is fascinating that Lenin, and I'm sure this influenced Stalin as well, that hardness was a necessary element
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
human characteristics to take the revolution to its end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So let's talk about Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, this little interplay that eventually led to Stalin accumulating, grabbing, and taking a hold of power. What was that process like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And we should probably say that that treaty, to some small degree, maybe you can elaborate now or later, lays the groundwork for World War II. Because resentment is a thing that with time can lead to just extreme levels of destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Anyway, go explore the nature of your own consciousness at asleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the pod for Ultra. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vejas Lulevicius. Let's start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So from that perspective, there's a lot of fascinating things here. So one is that you can have a wolf, a brutal dictator in moderate clothing. So just because somebody presents as moderate doesn't mean they can't be one of the most destructive, not the most destructive humans in history. The other aspect is using propaganda, you can construct an image of a person
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
even though they're uncharismatic, not attractive, their voice is no good, all of those aspects, you can still have a, there's still to this day a very large number of people that see him as a religious type of godlike figure. So the power of propaganda there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Curating the image, but to the extent to which you can do that effectively. is quite incredible. So in that way also, Stalin is a study of the power of propaganda. Can we just talk about the ways that the power vacuum is filled by Stalin, how that manifests itself? Perhaps one angle we can take is how was the secret police used? How did power manifest itself under Stalin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Not that it's possible to look deep into a person's heart, but You know, if you look at Trotsky, you could say that he probably believed deeply in Marxism and communism. Probably the same with Lenin. What do you think Stalin believed? Was he a believer? Was he a pragmatist that used communism as a way to gain power and ideology as part of propaganda?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Or did he, in his own private moments, deeply believe in this utopia?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
It's terrifying, but it's really important to understand. If we look at when Stalin takes power, at some of the policies, so the collectivization of agriculture, why do you think that failed so catastrophically, especially in the 1930s with Ukraine and Poland and more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
It is a terrifying, horrific, and fascinating study of how the ideal, when meeting reality, fails. So the idea here is to make agriculture more efficient, to be more productive, so the industrialized model. But the implementation through collectivization had all the elements that you've mentioned that contended with human nature. So first with the kulaks, so the successful farmers were punished.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And so then the incentive is not just not to be a successful farmer, but to like hide added, to that, there's a growing quota that everybody's supposed to deliver on that nobody can deliver on. And so now, because you can't deliver on that quota, you're basically exporting all your food and you can't even feed yourself. And then you suffer more and more and more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And there's a vicious downward spiral of like, you can't possibly produce that. Now there's another human incentive where you're going to lie. Everybody lies on the data. That's right. And so even Stalin himself probably as evil or incompetent as he may be, he was not even getting good data about what's even happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Even if he wanted to stop the vicious downward cycle, which he certainly didn't, but he wouldn't be even able to. So there's all these like dark consequences of what on paper seems like a good ideal. And it's a fascinating study of like, Things on paper, when implemented, can go really, really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So there's a million questions I could ask there, but so on the utopian side. So there is a utopian component to the way he tried to conceive of his ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Again, a difficult question about a psychology of one human being. But to what degree do you think Stalin was deliberately punishing the farmers and the Ukrainian farmers. And to what degree was he looking the other way and allowing the large-scale incompetence, the horrific incompetence of the collectivization of agriculture to happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Speaking of peak performance, I'm trying to figure out in my life how many times a week to train jiu-jitsu. There's a long stretch in my life where jiu-jitsu was a big part of my life and I would often train twice a day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
following this as you've mentioned uh there was the process of uh the great terror or the intellectuals where the communist party officials the military officers the bureaucrats everybody uh 750 000 people were executed and over a million people were sent to the gulag What can you say by way of wisdom from this process of the great terror that Stalin implemented from 36 to 38?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, again, a fascinating study of human nature. There essentially was an emergent quota of confessions of treason. So even though the whole society was terrified and were through terror loyal, there's still... needed to be a lot of confessions of people being disloyal. So you're just making shit up now. Like at a mass scale, stuff is being made up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And it's also the machine or the secret police starts eating itself because you want to be confessing on your boss, on your, and it's just this weird, dark, dynamic system where human nature just is at its worst.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Why, if we look at this deep discussion we had about Marxism, To what degree can we understand from that lens why the implementation of communism in the Soviet Union failed in such a dark way, both in the economic system with agriculture and industrialization and on the human way with just violation of every possible human right and the torture and the suffering and gulags and all of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Now, it's hard to do counterfactual history, but to what degree is this basically that the communist ideals create a power vacuum and a dictator-type figure steps in, and then it's a roll of the dice of what that dictator is like? So can you imagine a world where the dictator was Trotsky? would we see very similar type of things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Or is the hardness and the brutality of somebody like Stalin manifested itself in being able to look the other way as some of these dark things were happening more so than somebody like Trotsky who would presumably be, see the realizations of these policies and be shocked?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
do some of the destructive characteristics of communism have to go hand in hand? So the central planning that we talked about, the censorship with the secret police, the concentration of power in one dictatorial figure, and well, let's say, again, with the secret police, the violent oppression
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
If we go to the 1920s, to the home of Karl Marx, fascism, as implemented by the Nazi party in Germany, was called the National Socialist German Workers' Party. So what were the similarities and differences of fascism, socialism, how it was conceived of in fascism, and communism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And maybe you could speak to the broader battle of ideas that was happening at the time and battle of political control that was happening at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So there is a long journey from capitalism to communism that includes a lot of problems. He thought once you resolve the problems, all the complexities of human interactions, the friction, the problems will be gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So let me ask you about Daryl Cooper, who is a historian and podcaster, did a podcast with Tucker Carlson, and he made some claims there and elsewhere about World War II. There are two claims that I would love to get your perspective on. First, he stated that Churchill was, quote, the chief villain of the Second World War.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
I think Daryl argues that Churchill forced Hitler to expand the war beyond Poland into a global war. Second, the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, gypsies in death camps was an accident, a byproduct of global war. And in fact, the most humane extermination of prisoners of war possible, given the alternative, was death by starvation. So I was wondering if you can respond to each of those claims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, you actually have an electron humor. I love it. And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way. Okay, there's, again, a million questions. So you outline a set of contradictions, but it's interesting to talk about his view. For example, what was Marx's view of history?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So do you think it was always the case that Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
The idea of Lebensraum, is it possible to implement that idea without Ukraine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
As I best understand. there is extensive and definitive evidence that the Nazis always wanted to invade the Soviet Union, and there was always a racial component, and not just about the Jews. They wanted to enslave and exterminate the Jews, yes, but the Slavic people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
the Slavs, and if he was successful at conquering the Soviet Union, I think the things that would be done to the Slavic people would make the Holocaust seem insignificant. In my understanding, in terms of the numbers and the brutality and the viciousness in which he characterized the Slavic people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And always repopulating the land conquered with the German, the Aryan race. So in terms of race, repopulating with race. And enslaving the Slavic people and exterminating them. Because there's so many of them, it takes a long time to exterminate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
One of the other things I saw Daryl tweet was that what ended up happening in the Second World War was the worst possible thing that could have happened. And I just also wanted to comment on that, which I can imagine a very large number of possible scenarios that could have happened that are much, much worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
including the successful conquering of the Soviet Union, as we said, the kind of things that would be done, and the total war ever ongoing for generations, which would result in hundreds of millions of deaths and torture and enslavement. Not to mention the other possible trajectory of the nuclear bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Now, let me steel man a point that was also made as part of this. That the oversimplified...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
narrative of sort of, to put it crudely, Hitler bad, Churchill good, has been used and abused by neocons and warmongers and the military industrial complex in the years since to basically say this particular leader is just like Hitler, or maybe Hitler in the 1930s and we must invade now before he becomes the Hitler of the 1940s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And basically my life was about sort of recovery from that training session. And during the recovery, I would be doing sort of the deep study or the deep work of programming for my PhD and then beyond. And it might sound counterintuitive, but when you're so... passionately pursuing a thing and it becomes such a big part of your day, it's actually much easier to integrate it into your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And that has been applied in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, and God forbid that can be also applied in the war with China in the 21st century. So yes, warmongers do sure love to use Hitler and apply that template to wage war. And we should be wary of that and be careful of that. both the over application of this historical template onto the modern world and of warmongers in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
And also, I just would like to say that probably as we've been talking about Stalin and Hitler are singular figures. And, uh, just as we've been talking about the implementation of these totalitarian regimes, they're singular in human history, that we never saw anything like it. And I hope from everything it looks like, we will never see anything like it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Let me go back to the 1920s and ask another counterfactual question. given the battle between the Marxists and the communists and national socialists, was it possible and what would that world look like if the communists indeed won in Germany as Karl Marx envisioned and it made total sense given the industrialized expanse that Germany represented?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Was that possible and what would it look like if it happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
What do you think Marx would say about the 20th century? Let's take it before we get to Mao and China, just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Not to put this on him, but would he be okay with the price of Baltimore for the utopian destination of communism? Meaning, is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So that takes us to the other side of the world. The side that's often in the West not considered very much when we talk about human history. Chinese dynasties, empires are fascinating, complex, and there's just a history that's not as deeply explored as it should be. And the same applies to the 20th century. So Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, in July 1921.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Among them, as you talk about, was Mao. What was the story of Mao's rise to power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Yeah, in the darkest of ways, he did outdo Stalin. That's right, in the statistics. The Great Leap Forward ended up killing approximately 40 million people from starvation or murder. Can you describe the Great Leap Forward?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
So there's a lot of other elements that are similar to the Soviet Union. Maybe you could speak to the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
The following is a conversation with Mark Rybert, a legendary roboticist, founder, and longtime CEO of Boston Dynamics, and recently the executive director of the newly created Boston Dynamics AI Institute that focuses on research and the cutting edge on creating future generations of robots that are far better than anything that exists today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
If you've been paying any attention, it's obvious that generative AI, machine learning, AI in general. It's going to transform basically every single industry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
If you're starting a business, if you're running a business, there's probably a lot of ways that language models or any of these generative system could be used to help automate certain things, to help empower certain things, improve certain things, all that kind of stuff, to work together with humans to improve the productivity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Well, yeah, I mean, we'll talk about what it means to, what is the actual thing we're trying to optimize for a robot. Sometimes, especially with human-robot interaction, maybe flaws is a good thing. Perfection is not necessarily the right thing to be chasing. Just like you said, maybe being good at fumbling an object
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Being good at fumbling might be the right thing to optimize versus perfect modeling of the object and perfect movement of the arm to grasp that object. Because maybe perfection is not supposed to exist in the real world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Okay, let's go back to the early days. First of all, you've created and led the legendary Leg Lab at MIT. What was that first hopping robot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Let's just pause here. For people who don't know, I'm talking to Mark Raber, founder of Boston Dynamics, but before that, you were a professor developing some of the most incredible robots for 15 years, and before that, of course, a grad student and all that. So you've been doing this for a really long time. So you skipped over this, but go to the first Hopping Robot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
There's videos of some of this. I mean, these are incredible robots. So you talked about the very first step was to get a thing hopping up and down. Right. And then you realized, well, balancing is a thing you should care about and it's actually a solvable problem. So can you just go through how to create that robot? Sure. What was involved in creating that robot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Now, what comes with great, powerful new technology is security threats. There's always bad guys out there and they want to find ways in. Adversarial attacks, they want to trick you. You need experts to help you incorporate the machine learning models that you're using in a secure way. That's what hidden layer does. I think that's really interesting because the kinds of attacks...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Did you see the possibility of where this is going? Why this is an important problem? No. The balance, I mean, it's legged. It has to do with legged locomotion. I mean, it has to do with all these problems that the human body solves when we're walking, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And have fun. And have fun. Pogo stick robot. Pogo stick robot. So what was, on the technical side, what are some of the challenges of getting to the point where we saw, like in the video, the pogo stick robot that's actually successfully hopping and then eventually doing flips and all this kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
on machine learning models is going to be really, really interesting. Because one way to do that is if you look at a model zoo repository, like Hugging Face, for example, one way is to get a model in there that looks legit, but has weirdness to it, that are hard to discover until they're actually way down the line being used at a large scale. So that's like one way to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So, okay, you mentioned inverted pendulum, but can you explain how a hopping stick in 3D can control, can balance itself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
What does the actuation look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
How far does it have to tilt before it's too late to be able to balance itself? Or it's impossible to balance itself, correct itself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I think it's really interesting to ask about the early days because believing in yourself, believing that there's something interesting here, and then you mentioned finding somebody else, Ben Brown. What's that like, finding other people with whom you can build this crazy idea and actually make it work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So when you talk about pogo stick robot or legged robots, whether it's quadrupeds or humanoid robots, did people doubt that this is possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Oh, it's not even an interesting problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
The other way is to do outside repositories and deliver the models that look legit, but again, in subtle ways, difficult to detect ways. It will look legit at first, it will look functional and correct at first, but then the kind of malware inside the machine will emerge. down the line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Did you ever have doubt about bringing Atlas to life, for example, or with Big Dog, just every step of the way, did you have doubt, like, this is too hard of a problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
But we anthropomorphize and we see the humanity. But also with Spot, you can see not the humanity, but whatever we find compelling about social interactions there in Spot as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
yellow spot so if we uh move around history a little bit so you said i think in the early days of boston dynamics that you quietly worked on making uh a running version of eyeball yeah sony's robot dog yeah it's just an interesting uh little tidbit of history for me um What stands out to you in memory from that task? For people who don't know, that little dog robot moves slowly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
How did that become Big Dog? What was involved there? What was the dance between how do we make this cute little dog versus a thing that can actually carry a lot of payload and move fast and stuff like that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So you want experts to be considering this rapidly evolving security threat that is laden within machine learning systems. Visit hiddenlayer.com slash Lex to learn more about Hidden Layer. These guys are great. They're great sponsors of this podcast. They do a really important service for the whole machine learning community. So check them out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
You rediscovered the soul of the company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And so from there, it was always about robots. Yeah. So you started Boston Dynamics in 1992. Right. What are some fond memories from the early days?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
What was that meeting like? Were you just like sitting at a table? You know what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
We're going to pivot completely. We're going to let go of this thing we put so much hard work into and then go back to the thing we came from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
just look at each other and said, let's build robots. What was the first robot you built under the flag of Boston Dynamics? Big Dog?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
This episode is brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. Russian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and more. I can keep going, but those are the ones I want to speak. German, Italian. I want to at least order stuff in Italian in a restaurant. And that's the kind of stuff you can learn with Babbel really quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
He has been leading the creation of incredible legged robots for over 40 years at CMU, at MIT, the legendary MIT Leg Lab, and then, of course, Boston Dynamics with amazing robots like Big Dog, Atlas, Spot, and Handle. This was a big honor and pleasure for me. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
It was a quadruped? The legs were four legs or two legs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And what did you learn from that experience of building basically a fast-moving quadruped?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So, uh, what, what came next in terms of, uh, what was a big next milestone in terms of a robot you built?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So testing in the real world. Testing. For people who don't know, Big Dog, maybe you can correct me, but it's a big quadruped, four-legged robot robot. It looks big, could probably carry a lot of weight. Not the most weight that Boston Dynamics have built, but a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
It's like practical conversational stuff. So when you're traveling, you can use it. Portuguese, obviously, you know. I practiced a martial art called Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Portuguese, Brazil, I got to do it. Spanish, same thing. I'm a huge fan of soccer, a.k.a. football, and of course dream of one day interviewing some of these said soccer players and the other languages like Russian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
on a hiking trail in the woods. Basically, forget the woods, just the real world. That's the big leap into testing in the real world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So if you fast forward, Big Dog eventually became Spot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Just a quick pause, it can carry 400 pounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Wow. And it can go for very long distances. It can travel 20 miles. Yeah. Gasoline. Gasoline, yeah. And that adventure, okay, sorry. So LS3, then how did that leave the spot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
What was the conversation with Larry Page like about, so here's a guy that kind of is very product focused and can see a vision for like what the future holds. That's just interesting kind of aside. What was the brainstorm about the future of robotics with him like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Is there a lot of technical challenges to go from hydraulic to electric machines?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
We're going to try to do a bunch of different translation and overdubbing very, very soon with the various podcast conversations I've been doing. I think one of the most powerful ways to bridge barriers between people is... breaking through the wall that language creates, automated translation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
One of the things that stands out about the robots Boston Dynamics have created is how beautiful the movement is, how natural the walking is and running is, even flipping is, throwing is. So maybe you can talk about what's involved in making it look natural.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And then when you actually meet them in person to speak their language or to attempt to speak their language, that's what, again, Babbel is great for. I use it, all the languages I mentioned, I've used it to learn that, even to practice my Russian. For a limited time, get 50% off a one-time payment for a lifetime Babbel subscription at Babbel.com slash LexPod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So how far ahead do you have to look in time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
How hard is it to stick a landing? I mean, it's very much under-actuated. Once you're in the air, you don't have as much control about anything. So how hard is it to get that to work? First of all, I did flips with a hopping robot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
He knew how humans do it. He just had to get robots to do the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So in some way, by building robots, you are in part understanding how humans do, like walking. Most of us walk without considering how we walk, really. Right. And how we make it so natural and efficient, all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
That's 50% off at Babbel.com slash LexPod. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash LexPod. Rules and restrictions apply. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch 180 classes from the best people in the world in their respective thing. Phil Ivey on poker. I'm a big fan of his. I'm just a big fan of poker. Aaron Franklin on barbecue and brisket.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
That's interesting, right, that running is closer to a human. It just shows that the more aggressive and kind of, the more you leap into the unknown, the more natural it is. I mean, walking is kind of falling always, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And that's a good motto. Because you also had Wildcat, which was along the way towards Spot, which is a quadruped that went 19 miles an hour on flat terrain. Is that the fastest you've ever built? Oh, yeah. Might be the fastest quadruped in the world. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So at the leg lab, I believe most of the robots didn't have knees. How do you figure out what is the right number of actuators? What are the joints to have? Do you need to have, you know, we humans have knees and all kinds of interesting stuff on the feet. The toe is an important part, I guess, for humans. Or maybe it's not. I injured my toe recently and it made running very unpleasant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So that seems to be kind of important. So how do you figure out for efficiency, for function, for aesthetics, how many joints to have, how many actuators to have?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I just love the idea that you, you, you two were studying kangaroos and ostriches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Dumb question. Do ostriches have a lot of musculature on the legs or no?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
What do you think is the most beautiful movement of an animal? Like, what animal do you think is the coolest? Land animal. Because fish is pretty cool. Like, the fish moves the water, but like, legged locomotion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Because they spend a lot of time in the air, I guess, as they're running that fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I just ate at Terry Black's, and I've also eaten at Franklin's. Those are great barbecue joints here in Austin, Texas, and it's just delicious. I love it. There's another place I really love called JNL Barbecue. They're great. I mean, they're all like incredible in their own way. And the personalities of people that are running these places is just incredible. They all really love barbecue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Is that a tail thing, or do you have to have contact with the ground?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Well, especially Olympic-level gymnasts. See, but there could be cheetahs that are Olympic-level. We might be watching the average cheetah versus there could be a really special cheetah that can do like... You're right. When did the knees first come into play in you building Legged Robots?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Is there something to be said about knees that go forward versus backward?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So a great design for a robot has a mechanical component where the movement is efficient even without a brain. Yes. How do you design that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So this might be a good place to mention that you're now leading up the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, newly formed, which is focused more on designing the robots of the future. I think one of the things, maybe you can tell me the big vision for what's going on, but one of the things is this idea that hardware still matters with organic design and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Maybe before that, can you zoom out and tell me what the vision is for the AI Institute?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And Aaron Franklin is one of those people, but he's also really good at communicating how to make barbecue. He has great cookbooks. He has great videos. He's just good. He's a great teacher. No, he's a great celebrator of the beauty of cooking. And cooking this particular thing, which is, in this case, brisket. I mean, I highly recommend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Maybe we can just take many of the things you mentioned, just take it as a tangent. Okay. First of all, athletic intelligence is a super cool term. And that really is intelligence. We humans kind of take it for granted that we're so good at walking and moving about the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
what are the big open problems in athletic intelligence? So Boston Dynamics, with Spot, with Atlas, just have shown time and time again, like, push the limits of what we think is possible with robots. But where do we stand, actually, if we kind of zoom out? What are the big open problems on the athletic intelligence side?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
It's like watching an artist describe what he loves to do. I watched it and I really enjoyed it. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at Masterclass.com slash LexPod. That's Masterclass.com slash LexPod.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So on the cognitive side, for the Eye Institute, what's the trade-off between moonshot projects for you and maybe incremental progress?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
What does success look like? What are some of the milestones you're chasing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system, ERP system as the kids call it, or the cool kids call it, or the experts call it. It's not really the cool kids, the experts. I think it stands for enterprise resource planning, but I could be wrong. Anyway, ERP, everybody knows what that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Is it possible to observe, to watch a video like this without having an explicit model of what a bicycle looks like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So operate successfully under a lot of uncertainty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Lack of specification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So how big of a role does machine learning play in all of this? Is this more and more learning-based?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
If you think of a company as a giant machine with different components and modules and so on, ERP is the kind of the brain of the operation that connects everything, make sure that everything speaks the common language and all that kind of stuff. That's what NetSuite does. It does it really well. manages financials, human resources, inventory and supply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So especially for the athletic intelligence piece, the traditional approach seems to be the one that still performs the best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
If I can talk to you about teams, you've built an incredible team at Boston Dynamics before at MIT and CMU and Boston Dynamics and now at the AI Institute. And you said that there's four components to a great team. technical fearlessness, diligence, intrepidness, and fun, technical fun. Can you explain each? Technical fearlessness, what do you mean by that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
The fearlessness comes into play because some of it has never been done before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So that's the really big challenge you're tackling now. Can we watch humans at scale and have robots by watching humans become effective actors in the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
If you do that kind of thing, if you sell a kind of thing, and if you sell that kind of thing online, it also does e-commerce. It is much, much more, much, much more cool stuff. Anyway, you can even check on Reddit. A lot of people are super positive about it. So my 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, and they're turning 25 this year. Wish them a happy birthday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Yeah, and you're referring to the fixing in the physical world. I can't wait until you can fix the psychological problems of humans and show up and just talk, do therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Yeah, it's different. Well, it's all part of the same thing. Again, humanity. Maybe, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Just do the marketing approach? Yeah, exactly. It's all, yeah, don't sweat the small stuff. Yeah, as opposed to fixing the dishwasher, it'll convince you that it's okay that the dishwasher's broken. It's a different approach. Diligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So really testing it in all conditions, perturbing the system in all kinds of ways. Right. And as a result, creating some epic videos. The legendary... The fun part, the hockey stick. And then, yes, tugging on spot as it's trying to open the door. I mean, it's great testing, but it's also... I don't know, it's just somehow extremely compelling demonstration of robotics in video form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
the limits of the system, the challenges involved in failure. Showing both failure and success makes you appreciate the success, yeah. And then just the way the videos are done in Boston Dynamics are incredible, because there's no flash, there's no extra production, it's just raw testing of the robot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Write them letters. Send them faxes. Shout out from the rooftops. Happy birthday. It is always good to celebrate. Others celebrate companies, especially when they lasted this long. It's not easy out there for a company. So you should let NetSuite make it a tiny, tiny, tiny bit easier for you. Download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Yeah. I mean, people always want to add more stuff, but the simplicity of just do something worth showing and show it, that's brilliant. And don't add extra stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
but also just show cool stuff in its raw form, the limits of the system, see the system be perturbed and be robust and resilient and all that kind of stuff, and dancing with some music. Intrepidness and fun, so intrepid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
We don't often see that, the story behind Spot and Atlas. How many failures was there along the way to get a working Atlas, a working spot in the early days, even a working big dog?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So the hardware failures and maybe some software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Okay. And you always are learning from that failure. Right. And how do you protect Atlas from not getting damaged from 109 attempts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
That's netsuite.com for your own KPI checklist. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. I've used them for many years. You know, it's the privacy thing, for sure. It's also the happiness thing. I press the button, turns on, I pick a location, instantaneously, space-time travel, solved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Yeah, if it falls 109 times, it's okay. Wow. So intrepid, truly. And that applies to spot, that applies to all the other stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And especially with systems in the real world, right? Yeah. And so fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Get paid to have fun. I mean, what do you love about engineering? When you say engineering, what does that mean to you exactly? What is this kind of... big thing that we call engineering?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And at the cutting edge, I think, when you talk about robotics, there is a possibility to do art in that you do the first of its kind thing. So then there's the production at scale, which is its own beautiful thing, but when you do the first new robot or the first new thing, that's the possibility to create something totally new.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Well, that metal to life moment, I mean, to me, that's still magical. Like, when inanimate objects comes to life, that's still, like, to me, to this day, it's still an incredible moment that human intelligence can create systems that instill life or whatever that is. into inanimate objects. It's truly magical, especially when it's at the scale that humans can perceive and appreciate directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I don't understand what all the hoopla is about, like, uh, Faster than light travel is not possible. You click a button. If you click it fast enough, right there, you're in a different location, a different country. It opens up all kinds of possibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
What to you is most beautiful about robotics? Sorry for the big romantic question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So faster, bigger, smoother, more elegant, more graceful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Well, we should mention that there is a choreography tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I mean, I guess I saw versions of it, which is pretty cool. You can kind of, at slices of time, control different parts at the high level, the movement of the robot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I think I would love to see a professional ballerina alone in a room with a robot, slowly teaching the robot. Just actually the process of a clueless robot trying to figure out a small little piece of a dance. So it's not like, because right now Atlas and Spot have done perfect dancing to a beat and so on, to a degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
But the learning process of interacting with a human would be incredible to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Just press the button, close your eyes, and imagine you're in London among all those people with the fancy accents that make you sound really smart. And that allows you to watch different content that's geographically restricted, for example. But again, I think the privacy thing is really the important thing. Everybody should be using VPN. ExpressVPN is my favorite one. It's fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
We got Hidden Layer for securing your AI and machine learning models, Babbel for learning new languages, Masterclass for learning, NetSuite for business management software, and ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the internet. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And making that process of a human teaching the robot more efficient, more intuitive, maybe part language, part movement. That'd be fascinating. That'd be really fascinating. One of the things I've kind of realized is... humans communicate with movement a lot. It's not just language. There's body language. There's so many intricate little things. Totally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
To watch a human and a spot communicate back and forth with movement, there's so many wonderful possibilities there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I think even with the limited degrees of freedom, we could still have some sass and flavor and so on. You can figure out your own thing, even if you can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
You mentioned about building teams and robotics teams and so on. How do you find great engineers? How do you hire great engineers?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Whatever that is, whatever the magic ingredient that makes a great builder, maker, that's the big part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
It works on any device, any operating system. Linux is the best, the sexiest, most powerful operating system, but not many people use it. Maybe because they're not cool. If you want to be one of the cool kids, you should be using Linux. To this day, Ubuntu is my go-to Linux flavor. It used to be Gentoo. And the reason I say that is because it rhymes with go-to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
There's a kind of, like the robotics students, grad students, and just roboticists that I know and hang out with, there's a kind of endless energy. They're just happy. I compare it, another group of people that are like that are people that skydive professionally. There's just like excitement and general energy that I think probably has to do with the fact that they're just constantly...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
first of all, fail a lot, and then the joy of building a thing that eventually works
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
You've actually built something. You've done something in the physical world. And probably the videos help, right? The videos help show off what robotics is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I mean, it's a big impact, not just on your company, but on robotics in general. Helping people understand, inspire what is possible with robots. Inspire imagination, fear, everything. The full spectrum of human emotion was aroused, which is great. Which is great for the entirety of humanity and also probably inspiring for young people that want to get into AI and robotics. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Let me ask you about some competitors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
You've been a complimentary of Elon and Tesla's work on Optimus robot with this, their humanoid robot. What do you think of their efforts there with the humanoid robot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Do you think Atlas and Optimus will hang out at some point?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Does the AI Institute work with spots and atlases? Is it focused on spots mostly right now as a platform?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So you should go to expressvpn.com for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Rybert. When did you first fall in love with robotics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
That's great. So it's like all these kinds of robots, legged, arms...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Hey, again, maybe you'll arrange it, uh, a robot meetup. Um, but in general, what's your view on competition in this space for, especially like humanoid and like the robots, are you, are you excited by the competition or the, the friendly competition?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
how much room is there for a quadruped and especially a humanoid robot to become cheaper? So like cutting costs and like how low can you go? And how much of it is just mass production? So questions of, you know, Hyundai, like how to produce versus like engineering innovation, how to simplify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Where there's a lot of humanoids and you're just not even... It's like iPhone versus Android and people are just buying both and it's kind of just... Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
There's got to be a moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Industrial robotics, yes. But there's got to be a moment when social robotics starts making real money, meaning like a spa-type robot in the home. And there's tens of millions of them in the home. And they're like, you know, I don't know how many dogs there are in the United States as pets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Many. It feels like there's something we love about having an intelligent companion with us that remembers us, that's excited to see us, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
But also some of it is, like you said, you can have a product, but people might not be aware of it. So also part of it is the videos or however you connect with the public, the culture, and create the category. Make people realize this is the thing you want. Because there's a lot of negative perceptions you can have. Do you really want a system with a camera in your home walking around, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
if it's presented correctly and if there's like the right kind of boundaries around it that you understand how it works and so on that a lot of people would want to. And if they don't, they might be suspicious of it. So that's an important one. Like we all use smartphones and that has a camera that's looking at us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And it's listening. Very few people are, you know, suspicious about it. They kind of take it for granted and so on. And I think robots would be the same kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So as you work on the cognitive aspect of these robots, do you think we'll ever get to human level or superhuman level intelligence? There's been a lot of conversations about this recently, given the rapid development in large language models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Absolutely, yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I think the fear is that they would be 10x, 100x smarter and operating under different morals and ethical codes than humans naturally do. And so almost become misaligned in unintended ways and therefore harm humans in ways we just can't predict. And even if we program them to do a thing, on the way of doing that thing, they would cause a lot of harm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And when they're 100 times, 1,000 times, 10,000 times smarter than us, we won't be able to stop it or we won't be able to even see the harm as it's happening until it's too late, that kind of stuff. So you can construct all kinds of like, possible trajectories of how the world ends because of super intelligent systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
What's the story behind the Hawaiian shirt? Is it a fashion statement, philosophical statement? Is it just a statement of rebellion? Engineering statement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
That says something about your personality. That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Have you had people tell you about, on the robotic side, that, like, I don't think you could do this? That kind of negative motivation. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So yeah, yeah, the Hawaiian shirt is almost like a symbol of why not. Okay. What advice would you give to young folks that are trying to figure out what they want to do with their life, how to have a life they can be proud of, how they can have a career they can be proud of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Yeah, the opportunities really are limitless. But at the same time, you want to pick a thing, right? And it's the diligence. And really, really pursue it, right? Really pursue it. Yeah. Because sometimes the really special stuff happens after years of pursuit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
I mean, you've been doing this for 40 plus years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And you're hoping to show it off also in the same way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
There might be a way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
sucking at a task is also compelling like the incremental improvement a robot being like really terrible at a task and then slowly becoming better even in athletic intelligence honestly like learning to walk and falling and slowly figuring that out i think there's something extremely compelling about that we like flaws especially with the cognitive task it's okay to be clumsy it's okay to be confused and a little silly and all that kind of stuff
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
It feels like in that space is where we can... There's charm. There's charm. There's charm and there's something inspiring about a robot sucking and then becoming less terrible slowly at a test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
That kind of reveals something about ourselves. Ultimately, that's one of the coolest things about robots is it's kind of a mirror about what makes humans special. Just by watching how hard it is to make a robot do the things that humans do, you realize how special we are. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Why are we here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Mark, you ever ask about the big questions as you try to create these humanoid, human-like intelligence systems?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
The ride is pretty short, so might as well have fun. Mark, I'm a huge fan of yours. It's a huge honor that you would talk with me. This is really amazing. And your work for many decades has been amazing. I can't wait to see what you do at the AI Institute. I'm going to be waiting impatiently for the videos and the demos and the next robot meetup for maybe Atlas and Optimus to hang out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Thank you so much for talking to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark Rybert. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Arthur C. Clarke. Whether we're based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
1974. So there's just this arm in pieces. Yeah. And you saw the pieces and you saw in your vision the arm when it's put back together and the possibilities that holds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
It's so interesting, the tension between the BCS, brain cognitive science approach, to understanding intelligence, and the robotics approach to understanding intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, an amazing sponsor called Hidden Layer. It's a platform that provides security for your machine learning models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
You said you were always kind of a builder. What stands out to you in memory of a thing you've built? Maybe a trivial thing that just kind of inspired you in the possibilities that this direction of work might hold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So it wasn't always about function. Well, Rocket was pretty much- I guess that is pretty functional. But yeah, I guess that is a question. How much was it about function versus just creating something cool?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
So one of the things that underlies a lot of your work is that the robots you create, the systems you have created for over 40 years now, have a kind of, they're not cautious. So a lot of robots that people know about move about this world very cautiously, carefully, very afraid of the world. A lot of the robots you built, especially in the early days, were very aggressive, under-actuated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics
They're hopping. They're wild, moving quickly. Is there a philosophy underlying that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, his second time on this, the Lex Friedman podcast. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got A Sleep for Naps, Ground News for a non-biased news aggregator, Better Health for mental health, and Element for delicious, delicious electrolytes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So it's not power like you're trying to destroy the other. It's powerful flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It is, no matter what, an escape from the world. It's the kind of escape that, once you return, you feel so refreshed, with new eyes, everything's brighter, everything's more hopeful. Everything radiates the possibility of something good happening. So I'm a big fan of naps. Go to asleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So if we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche's thought, the idea he first introduced and thus spoke Zarathustra of the Übermensch. Yeah. That's another one that's very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it's about power. Yeah, right. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
This episode is also brought to you by Ground News, a nonpartisan news aggregator I use to compare media coverage from across the political spectrum. The point is, you see every side of every story and you come to your own conclusion. Everything that I think is criticized almost to a cliche degree about the mainstream media or...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Okay, but if we lay on the table religion, communism, Nazism, they are all unifying ethos. They're unifying ideas, but they're also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion... has also divided people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Because in the nuances of how the different peoples wrestle with God, they have come to different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions, or perhaps the people in power use those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred, to divide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
what do we call it, the heterodox media, I don't know, all the people that are kinda talking through the anti-establishment, almost conspiratorial kind of quote-unquote news, all of that is not present in ground news. I do think, for me at least personally, consuming news is so much more about protecting my brain from the assault of sort of talking points
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And good ideas from the bad ideas in your lecture on truth that Nietzsche also struggled with. So how do you know that communism is a bad idea versus it's a good idea implemented by bad actors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
and trivialized narratives as a first, like as a first step, just to protect my mind from all the people who are yelling, like they have this dogmatic certainty about what is true. So just protecting my head from that. And then calmly, just understanding what happened and what are the different perspectives and what do I think about it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, so for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil is fought within each individual human heart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So what would you say to Nietzsche, who called Christianity the slave morality? His critique of religion in that way was slave morality versus master morality, and then you put an umbrage into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that is the idea of the Ubermensch, that the great individual, the best of us, should create our own values.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
After I've put up the shields of defending myself from the assaults, at least for me, it helps kind of put into full context all the different kind of outrage that's going on on the internet. Go to groundnews.com slash Lex to get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan, giving you access to all of their features. That's Ground News. G-R-O-U-N-D news.com slash flex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But don't you think we both arrived to this conversation with rigid axioms that we have, maybe we're blind to them, but in the same way that the Marxists came with very rigid axioms about the way the world is and the way it should be. Aren't we coming to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides? This is what I'm trying to understand. The rigidity of that hierarchy... It's as rigid as play. Well, play is not rigid at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
There's some constraints.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. The mind is a super complex, both fragile and resilient engine. Both. I truly believe it is both. It is both a thing that can knock itself off the cliff and a thing that can find a way to fly before it hits the ground. What a life this is. My mind has been on a rollercoaster lately. It's been a rough one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, I would like to sort of... The reason I like talking about communism, because it has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity. But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I would like to understand from an engineering perspective, the characteristics of communism versus religion, where you can identify religious thought is going to lead to a better human being, a better society, and communist Marxist thought is not. Because there's ambiguity, there's room for play in communism and Marxism, because they kind of had a utopian sense of where...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
everybody's headed, don't know how it's going to happen. Maybe revolution is required, but after the revolution is done, we'll figure it out. And there's an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good and they'll figure it out once you remove the oppressor. I mean, all these ideas kind of, until you put them into practice, they can be quite convincing if you're in the 19th century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
If I was reading, which is kind of fascinating, the 19th century produced such... powerful ideas, Marx and Nietzsche. Oh, fascism too, for that matter. Fascism. So, you know, if I was sitting there, like, especially if I'm feeling shitty about myself, a lot of these ideas are pretty powerful as a way to plug the nihilist hole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep, the thing that makes me feel like home, the thing I miss when I'm traveling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's been a rough one. So if you're going through difficult things or just trying to solve little puzzles in your life or because they also do couples therapy in your relationships, you should try out BetterHelp. It's easy, discreet, affordable, available worldwide. Talking is one of the ways to shine a light on the Jungian shadow. Try to understand. Try to understand what's going on in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
This is a fascinating way to describe how ideas fail. So communism perhaps fails because just like what people believe, the earth is flat. When you look outside, it looks flat. but you can't see beyond the horizon, I guess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
In the same way with communism, communism seems like a great idea in my family and my people I love, but it doesn't scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that's a form of scaling too. Right. Well, I mean, whatever ways it breaks down, it doesn't scale. And you're saying religious thought is a thing that might scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And iterated. Does religious thought iterate? So, I mean, there's a fundamentally conservative aspect to religious thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Tradition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
How does that fit in? What does it mean to believe in God?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What are the roots of your particular malady, particular kind of psychological distress? What a fascinating little puzzle this whole thing is. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte drink that I'm currently drinking. Let me take a sip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So God is a call to adventure with some constraints.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
To true adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Delicious. Watermelon salt always has been, always will be, but there's a bunch of other flavors if you like them. There's like a chocolatey one, which I've tried a bunch of times, and it's actually amazing. But for me personally, it's almost a little too amazing. It almost feels like dessert versus like a refreshing, energizing kind of flavor, which is watermelon salt. But to each their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So basically, the maximally worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated with the hardest possible available adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Does it have to be voluntary?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
How do you define voluntarily?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So there's not a bell curve, like the struggle of moderation. Basically, you have to welcome whatever as hard as it gets. And the crucifixion in that way is a symbol of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I'm actually learning that people have... fundamentally different tastes in foods, in ice cream, whatever. And I think that's beautiful. For most of my life I get stuck on certain foods I like and I just keep eating that thing. So I'm a creature of habit in a sense. Because I find a thing that makes me happy and I just keep doing the thing that makes me happy. It's kind of logical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
If there's a young man in their 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground? With the eyes open to the world, how do they select the adventure?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I don't get bored. I guess I don't get bored easily because everything is so full of life. Everything is so full of awesomeness and I just don't need to go to a new thing that's full of awesomeness. But I also realize that there is a joy inherent to the exploration in itself. So I guess that's an argument for me to try different flavors of Element. I have. I gave them a chance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What do you do with the negative emotions? You didn't mention envy. There's some really dark ones that can really pull you into some bad places. Envy, fear...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I think envy is one of the biggest enemies for a young person because basically you're starting from nowhere. Life is hard. You've achieved nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, and they succeeded. And they could be your neighbor, they could be succeeding by a little bit, or somebody on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think that that can really pull a person down. That kind of envy can really destroy a person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's interesting. I don't know how it works. Maybe you can elucidate. But When you have envy towards somebody, if you just celebrate them, so gratitude, but actually, as opposed to sort of ignoring and being grateful for the things you have, like literally celebrate that person, it transforms, it lights the way. I don't know why that is exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I still like watermelon salt the most. What you gonna do? Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Peterson. You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So you kind of make it seem that reason could be the thing that takes you out of a place of darkness, sort of finding that calling through reason. I think it's also possible... when reason fails you, to just take the leap. Navigate not by reason, but by finding the thing that scares you, the risk, to take the risk, take the leap, and then figure it out while you're in the air.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It may be when you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But it does make me think, sort of in stark contrast to Nietzsche's own life, that perhaps getting laid early on in life is a useful starter. Step one, get laid, and then go for adventure. There's some basic recommendation of satiation of base desires.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
There's some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you lock in an idea, but then are struggling with that idea. All of that, that feels like it's a Nietzschean.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Right, right. But the lack of basic interaction... sexual interaction, I feel like is the engine that drives towards that cynicism of the incel in Dostoevsky's notes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What's the cause and effect there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Heroic adventure comes first.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Of course, but the family and society are not going to help you most of the time with a heroic adventure, right? They're going to be a barrier versus a catalyst.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's fascinating. I've heard you analyze it that way before, and I had a reaction to that idea because you focus on the positive of the parents. Yeah. I feel like it was the... Maybe I see biographies differently, but it feels like the struggle within the family is was the catalyst for greatness in a lot of biographies. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But see, okay, tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels like the engine of greatness, at least on the male side of things, has often been trying to prove the father wrong or trying to gain the acceptance of the father. So that tension where the parent is not encouraging, like you mentioned, but is basically saying, no, you won't be able to do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's a good definition of home, the place you miss the most when you're away from it. I think I've read a quote from like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, one of those like hardcore, maybe a bit cynical philosophers. Who was it? Anyway, the quote was something like, home is the place you have tried to escape the most, but failed. Oh boy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, I mean, that's why I say there's an archetype of a young man trying to gain the approval of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
of his father and i think that repeats itself in a bunch of biographies that i've read i don't know there must have been an engine somewhere that they found of approval of encouragement maybe in books maybe in the mother or maybe the the role of the parents is flipped well my my father was hard to please very did you ever succeed yes but it wasn't easy ever When was the moment when you succeeded?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Was it a gradual or a definitive moment when a shift happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Taking each sentence seriously and deconstructing it and really struggling with it. I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person. I think if we approach writing with that kind of respect, you can take Orwell, you can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sentences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It sounds like he's hit a pretty good optimal. But it's for each individual human that optimal differs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What about inside a relationship? A successful relationship, how much challenge, how much peace? Is a successful relationship one that is easy or one that is challenging?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And part of it is in the play you get to find out about yourself or what your temperament is, because I don't think that's clear until it's tested. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What's your, and what's in general, should a man's relationship with temper be?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah, I think he was criticizing if under the facade of niceness there's an ocean of resentment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Do you think you'll be in trouble for saying this on a podcast later?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it seems to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
If we can descend from the realm of ideas down to... history and reality, I would say the time between World War I and World War II was one of history's biggest testing of ideas and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand the nature of good and evil. I just want to ask you sort of a question about good and evil. Churchill in many ways, was not a good man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Stalin, as you've documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping an even worse human being in Hitler. So to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters? Do you need bad men to be able to fight off greater evils?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But there's a different level. I mean, if you look, to me, Churchill might represent the thing you're talking about, but... World War II, Hitler would not be stopped without Stalin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And if I may insert into this picture of complexity, Hitler would have not stopped until he enslaved and exterminated the entirety of the Slavic people. the Jewish people, the Slavic people, the gypsies, everybody who's non-Aryan. But then Stalin in the mass rape of German women by the Red Army as they marched towards Berlin is a kind of manifestation, the full monstrosity that a person can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
They know even less about Mao and the Great Leap Forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And how do you measure the intellectual output that was suppressed and killed off, the number of intellectuals, artists and writers that were put into the gulags?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Tricky nuanced topic, but if we look at the modern day and the threat of communism, Marxism in the United States, to me, it's disrespectful to the atrocities of the 20th century to call somebody like Kamala Harris a communist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
but I see the sort of escalation of the extremeness of language being used. When you call somebody like Donald Trump a fascist, then it makes total sense to then use a similar extreme terminology for somebody like Kamala Harris. But maybe I could ask your evaluation. If you look at the political landscape today, somebody like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So in the realm of social media, you mentioned yes, but are you also suggesting that they're overrepresented in the realm of politics, politicians, and so on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So how do you... You've interviewed a lot of people and you have a really powerful mind. You have a good read on people. So how do you know when you're sitting across from a psychopath?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
See, the problem is, it's hard to tell who is the psychopath and who is a heterodox truth seeker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, okay, this is fascinating because, again, you're a great interviewer. I would love it if you interviewed somebody like Putin. So this idea that you are a fool in the face of psychopathy just doesn't jive with me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But that's good because the way you reveal psychopathy is by being agreeable, not weak, but seeking with empathy to understand the other person and in the details, in the little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions the psychopathy is revealed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So from a, we're kind of, just to separate the two things, so one, over-representation of psychopathy online with anonymity, that's a serious, fascinating problem. But in the interview, one-on-one, I don't know if the job of a human being in conversation is to not talk to psychopaths, but to talk, I mean, like, how would you interview Hitler?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So how do you approach that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But see, here's the nice thing. There's a one-on-one conversation that's not recorded is different than one that's listened by a lot of people because I would venture to, I trust the intelligence of the viewer and the listener to detect even better than you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
To detect the psychopathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And that actually is the case for all the world leaders, I would say. one hour is too short. Something happens at like two hour plus mark where you start to leak. Am I trusting the intelligence of the listener to detect that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But of course, you know, it's complicated because ideas of Nazi ideology spread in the 20s. There was a real battle between Marxism and Nazism. Oh, yeah. And I believe there's some attempts at censorship of Nazi ideology. Censorship very often does the opposite. It gives the fringe ideologies power if they're being censored because that's an indication that the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
the man in power doesn't want the truth to be heard, this kind of idea. And that just puts fuel to the fire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's a fascinating technical challenge of how to make our society resilient to the psychopaths on the left and the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And so to generalize across psychopaths, you could also think about bots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
which behave similar to psychopaths in their certainty and not caring. They're maximizing some function. They're not caring about anything else. Attention, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Brutal. I just... I tend to not think there's that many psychopaths. So maybe to push back a little bit, it feels like there's a small number of psychopaths,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
In terms of humans, sure. But in terms of the pattern of stuff we see online, my hope is that a lot of people on the extreme left and extreme right or just the trolls in general are just young people kind of going through the similar stuff that we've been talking about, trying on the cynicism and the resentment. There's a drug aspect to it. There's a pull to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
To talk shit about somebody, to take somebody down. I mean, there is some pleasure in that. There's a dark pull towards that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And I think a lot of people... I mean, you see, when you say sadistic, it makes it sound like some kind of... It's a pathology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Right. But I just think that all of us have... The capacity for that. All humans have the capacity for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And when you're young, you don't understand the full implications of that on your own self. So if you participate in taking other people down, that's going to have a cost on your own development as a human being. Like it's going to take you towards a Dostoevsky's notes from underground, in the basement, cynical, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
which is why a lot of young people try it out. The reason is you get older and older, you realize that there's a huge cost to that, so you don't do it. But there's young people that... So I would like to sort of believe and hope that a large number of people who are trolls are just trying out the derision. No doubt. so they can be saved. They can be helped.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
They can be shown that there's more growth, there's more flourishing to celebrating other people. And criticizing ideas, but not in the way of derision, LOL, but by formulating your own self in the world, by formulating your ideas in a strong, powerful way, and also removing the cloak of anonymity and just standing behind your ideas and carrying the responsibility of those ideas, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it seems that it's more likely that the leaders of movements are going to be psychopaths and the followers of movements are going to be the people that we're mentioning that are kind of lost themselves to the ideology of the movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So be careful, the leaders you idolize and worship. But then it's not always clear to know who is the good and who's the evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's hard. You have been through some dark places in your mind over your life. What have been some of your darker hours and how did you find the light?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's obvious, but it's also just fascinating that hardship is the thing that ends up being the catalyst for delving deeply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
See, I got to push back and explore with you the question of voluntarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Let's look at Nietzsche.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
He suffered through several health issues throughout his life. Migraines, eyesight issues, digestive problems, depression with suicidal thoughts. And yet he is one of the greatest minds in the history of humanity. So were these problems that he was suffering, arguably involuntarily, a feature or a bug?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It's kind of like from the whole school of thought that life is suffering. And so happiness is the moments where you escape the suffering briefly, that kind of perspective on life. So probably Schopenhauer, probably one of those guys. Anyhoo, in that same vein, I could say that, you know, taking a nap on an eight-sleep bed, cold bed surface, warm blanket, is a kind of escape from the suffering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So if the words spring to the visual, full visual complexity, and then that can then transform itself into action.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But you leaned into that. So in a sense that there's this kind of transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary. Basically saying, bring it on. That act of bring it on turns the involuntary hardship into voluntary hardship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Change in perception, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
It might be too much to say, but nevertheless, it could be true. Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Was the roughest the physical or the psychological? Pain. Just literal pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What did you learn about yourself, about yourself? yourself and about the human mind from that, from all of those days?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You gain a greater ability to appreciate the mundane moments of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You know, but that still, there's this tension, as there is in much of Nietzsche's work, between the miracle of the mundane, appreciating the miracle of the mundane, versus fearing the tyranny of the mediocre.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yes, but that's you giving him a pass or seeing the good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
There's a kind of, I mean, the tyranny of the mediocre. I always hated this idea that some people are better than others. And I understand it, but it's a dangerous idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I think for myself, I'm just afraid of dismissing people because of my perception of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What's a better life? Cynical and safe or hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
So what do you do when you're betrayed, ultimately, by some people you come across?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And do it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Boy, this life, something else. So we've been talking about some heavy, difficult topics, and you've talked about truth in your Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere. When you think, when you write, when you speak, how do you find what is true? You know, Hemingway said, all you have to do is write one true sentence. How do you do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Is it like part of the process to cross the line, to go outside the Overton window, to dip a toe outside the Overton window for a bit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
There's a kind of sense that you're arguing with yourself when you're lecturing. It's beautiful. It's really beautiful and powerful to watch. Nietzsche does the same. There's contradictions in what you're saying. There's a struggle with what you're saying. But I do think that when you're doing the same on the internet, you get punished for the deviations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
You get punished for the exploration, especially when that explores outside the Overton window.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
I'm also, I guess this is a call to our fellow humans not to reduce a person to a particular statement, which is what the internet tends to want to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But it also just makes you not want to play. Yeah, right. Not want to take sort of radical thought experiments and carry out to a natural conclusion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
But in this case, it's an emergent one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
With psychopaths roaming the landscape.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, in totalitarianism, there's usually one psychopath, not multiple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Yeah. Does the study of the pathology of psychopaths online wear on you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Do you ever consider doing less of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And you can also oversample the darkness. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it can make you more and more cynical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea that for example, utopian ideas of Marx or utopian ideas, you could say dystopian ideas of Hitler, those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception with values and they focus you in a way where there's only a certain set of actions
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
That's great to hear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
As a fan in the arena watching the Gladiators fight, your mind is too important to be lost to the cynical, to the... To the battles with the abyss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Well, Jordan, thank you for being courageous and being the light amid the darkness for many, many people. And thank you for once again talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Thank you, Aaron. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche. I would like to learn more and more to see as beautiful that which is necessary in things. Then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning
And it's intense and it's direct and they're so powerful that they completely alter the perception and the words bring to life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
The following is a conversation with Bassem Youssef, a legendary Egyptian-American comedian, the so-called Jon Stewart of the Middle East, who fearlessly satirized those in power, even when his job and life were on the line. Bassem is a beautiful human being. It was truly a pleasure for me to get to know him and to have this fun, fascinating, and challenging conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
The revolution continues. Ah, yes. Bassem, you're a beautiful human being. It's truly a pleasure and honor to meet you. I could just feel the love radiating from you. I hope I get to see you perform live. I hope to get to see you many more times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Thank you, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bassem Youssef. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Jon Stewart. The press can hold this magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected, dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
i think a lot of the things you just said are a tiny bit slightly exaggerated so let me let me try let's please let's try so not everybody in israel so let's let's look at um several groups so people in government idf soldiers and citizens that are neither of those And not everybody of any of those sees Palestinians as less than human, just some percentage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So what percentage is that in your sense? It's the people who have the power. So it's mostly the focus of your commentary. When you say people in Israel, you really mean the people in power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But you made another point, which is an interesting point, and it's very difficult to see in the heart of people. But I wonder if you look at the average Palestinian and the average Israeli, and when they look at the other, do they have some hate in their heart? Well, everybody probably has some. What is that amount?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You know, when you look at a person that looks different than you, how much hate is there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But I say all that because I just drank AG1 and it gave me this little drop of happiness that I can cling to as I proceed to try to work through the day even though I feel like crap. And if you want to not feel like crap, try AG1. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
What is the justification that IDF provides? Terrorism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I used it at lexfreeman.com slash store to put up some shirts. I should be probably putting up a bunch of other shirts. I'm a big fan of being a fan. of being a fan of podcasts, of bands, of shows, of movies, of specific concerts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things you just said. So one is the methodology of killing. If you want to look at some horrific, large-scale killing, people often talk about the Holocaust. But that's visceral. You can look at Hall and Moore by Stalin, where the murder is through starvation. By Churchill in India. Churchill in India. And the great leap forward by Mao. Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So starvation is a thing we don't often think of it as murder because it's quiet, it's slow, and the interesting thing about starvation is that the people don't complain as they're dying because they're exhausted. That's one, and the other is the value of human life it does seem that every culture has a unequal valuation of human life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So those two things combined create a complicated military landscape of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I still have a Metallica, I have a few Metallica shirts. But anyway, I'm a big fan of celebrating and wearing your celebration of others on your shirt. It's like a great way to start a conversation. So I love it. I also love wearing just a black shirt, but a little variety is good for the soul. So if you want to inject a little bit of variety
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You just gave me this image of a dating app from hell, where leaders are just sitting there and kind of swiping left and right. Invade, destroy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And then turn off the phone, go to sleep. So I got, you know, I traveled to the West Bank and I mentioned to you offline that I really loved the people there. Just, you know, I've met a bunch of people like that in Eastern Europe where I grew up. Yeah, like the flamboyant, the big personalities, all of that. I also met a person who's in charge of a refugee camp who was shopping IDF soldier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And I'm not sure the words he said are important as the consequences of the thing that you mentioned, which is the deep hate in his eyes. That didn't feel repairable at all. It was pain. It was like a foundation of pain, and on top of that, a hatred. And I was like, wow, this is what... You kill one person, that's the way you create.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
into the metaverse of the internet by selling whatever stuff you want to sell, I suggest you sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep. It cools or heats up each side of the bed separately. It's like a little piece of heaven.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So there's some degree to the propaganda, so the beheaded babies and all this kind of stuff, is so over the top that it shuts down actual conversation about actual wrongs, war crimes on both sides. So it's overstating it to where everyone on social media and everywhere in the press and everywhere is arguing, almost become desensitized to actual horrors of death, which are more mundane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
They're not so dramatic as beheaded babies. Yeah, because people, a baby is shot, but decapitated babies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So I just did a very lengthy debate on Israel and Palestine. And the really painful thing from that, those two historians, it was deep, it was thorough, it was fascinating, but in constantly asking about sources of hope or solutions, there was none. There was a sense of, like a really dark sense of it's hopeless. From both sides, it's hopeless. So, you know, I look to you. For a source of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Or a source of hope. Is there any hope here? Solutions, short-term, long-term?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Cold bed surface with a warm blanket, whether I'm doing like a 10 or 20 minute nap. or I'm doing a full night's sleep, it's just an incredible experience. Sleep is such an important component of life, not just for your health, sort of from a physiological, neurobiological perspective, but from a spiritual perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But what were the biggest barriers to peace there? Do you think it's fundamentally leaders don't want a two-state solution? Or was there nuanced small differences that if solved could have led to a two-state solution?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So what is the source of hope? You know, Jon Stewart, who will talk about it from many angles, somebody you admire, a friend, he proposed a two-state solution. Look to the comedians for hope.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
It's hard to know what to do with those numbers. I mean, one baby is enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Wherever this need for sleep comes from, I think of sleep as a kind of celebration of our connection to nature. It's a mini death, but the beautiful version of that, especially when you dream, you travel to some place where your mind is reconfiguring itself to try to make sense of the world, to try to put together the puzzle in the most hallucinogenic way possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Is there some degree to where both leaderships, Hamas, PA, Palestinian Authority, Israel, all want war, like perpetual war to remain in power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Well, is that true though with how much support the Palestinian people have? So just like you said, there's a lot of Arab states that will voice their pro-Palestinian position. in order to distract from the own corruption and abuses of power in their own countries. But I don't think, if you look globally, there's a complete asymmetry of power and public opinion here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Maybe in the West, but if you look globally. But do they have the same kind of weapons that the Israeli have? The literally power? No, there's a major asymmetry of literal power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I mean, to which degree does Netanyahu represent the Israeli people is a real question. To which point does Trump or Biden represent the American people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You're giving a lot of power to Israel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But the Arab League- What should Hamas do? What do you think we should Hamas do? Continue doing what a charter says, which is trying to destroy Israel. And the role of the Palestinian people is to overthrow Hamas and get a more moderate leadership probably. And the role of the Israeli people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
is to vote out this right-wing government and elect a more moderate leader so that there's a chance at peace with two moderate leaders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
before you get to return to the real world where everything makes a little bit more sense. Like Alice in Wonderland, but it's Lex in Wonderland in Eight Sleep Wonderland. Check them out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element. Electrolytes that I'm sipping on right now, sodium, potassium, and magnesium.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Is it possible? So first of all, ceasefire. Yes. And longer term, is it possible for Arab states and the United States to get together and with power,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
See, I think they have the power. I don't know. Maybe they don't want to use it. They don't. Because there's a benefit. Maybe there's a benefit. That dark... The dark sense I have is that a lot of people win from the suffering that Palestinians are going through because they can point to that and distract from corruption in their own states.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And then obviously Iran can benefit also from the same kind of dynamic, distracting from the authoritarian nature of their regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. We got AG1 for health, Shopify for shopping, 8sleeve for naps, and Element for electrolytes. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me or maybe work with our amazing team, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
My favorite flavor is watermelon salt. It's the only one I drink. I drink it many times a day. It's great when I'm fasting. My diet these days is almost always eat once a day. Very low carb. And for that, especially when you're starting out, you have to get the electrolytes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Now, as it starts to warm up, and when I'm running long distance in Austin, Texas, I really have to get the electrolytes right. So you want to make sure you have a lot of salt in your body and a lot of water before you go on the long run, unless we're talking about crazy distances. I tend to prefer not to drink on the run. I don't know, there's something super inconvenient about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, you're right. That's actually an indirect threat. Yes. You know, even saying Muslims cannot feel safe in America or something like this. That means, like, that's a threat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You mentioned 1948, the Nakba, but before that, 41, 39, 41 to 45, the Holocaust. What do you do? What do you do with the Holocaust? How do you incorporate into the calculus of morality that leads up to the displacement of 700,000 people? Palestinians from the land, how do you work that out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
bring in a water bottle with you when you're out on the trail or just in the middle of nowhere. I just like to forget the world, forget the needs of the body, forget everything, forget time, and just focus on my thoughts or if I'm listening to an audiobook, focus on the thing that's being said and all the little changes that my brain creates from what's being said, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Several questions I want to ask there. So, but one, just zooming out, why do you think hatred of Jews has been such a viral kind of idea throughout human history? Oh, it's very easy. It all started from Christ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
That's a very sexy story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But if I have a story to support that hate, that's even better. But it's like one of the best stories, one of the stickiest stories about hate. Of course. It's probably the most effective. Because a lot of people hate other people. groups of peoples, but that's just like the sexiest story of them all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But before I go out on the run, I drink a bunch of element to get the electrolytes right, and again, it mixes the electrolytes and the water so you get both and you're all set. You can get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
How do you, into this calculus, incorporate that that group is pretty small? There's 16 million Jews worldwide. And you mentioned how is that the responsibility of the Arab peoples? You know, everybody should be to blame for not taking in Jews after the Holocaust. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But, you know, the reality of the situation, if we look at the religious slice of this, there's 16, let's say, million Jews, and there's, I don't know how many Muslims, but 1.8 billion? Yeah, yeah. Do you... that 100x difference, do you incorporate that into the sense that Jews in Israel might feel for the existential dread that we might, this small group might be destroyed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Can you speak to 1948? You know, because you mentioned taking land that's not yours. Maybe parallels with Native Americans. Yeah. There was a war. The Jewish minority fought that war against several Arab states and won that war. How do we incorporate that into the Catholic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And now, dear friends, here's Basim Youssef. Your wife is half Palestinian, and I've heard you say that you've been trying to kill her, but she keeps using the kids as human shields. So have you considered negotiating a ceasefire?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So to you, there was an asymmetry of military power even then. But what do you do with the fact that the war was won? So if you look at the history of the world,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And so now we have to confront the realities of war and empire and conquering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So isn't in some fundamental way, this whole thing that we're talking about, is us as a civilization on social media, in articles and books, in newspapers, we're just trying to figure out who are we as a people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
It reads, Islamo-Nazi comedian Bassem Youssef. Comedian in quotes, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, because I'm not funny. So Islamo-Nazi comedian Bassem Youssef is now denying, I love that you retweeted this like twice. Yeah. I guess suppose because it's advertising some upcoming dates. He's now denying October 7th massacre.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
The Muslim radical, Bassem Yusuf, is notorious for his radical, radical said twice, for his radical hatred of Jews and Israel. In a recent clip, he claims that the atrocities committed on October 7th are fabricated or are looking for all information regarding Israel. any of his upcoming shows, as well as the venues which host The Scumbag, where Jews feel safe around this Nazi. Nazi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I've never, this is my first time interviewing a Nazi. It's the first time I actually get called a Nazi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the attacks? I mean, this goes back to the decision to do the interview with Piers Morgan. How do you psychologically do all of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Let's go to the beginning. Let's go to your childhood. You grew up in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt. My childhood. Well, let's figure out how you came to be who you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, exactly. It's a long journey. I do like the swastika tattoo on your ass, which I didn't... How did you see my ass? You know what you did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
This is your me too moment. All right. So Cairo, what's a, what's a, what's a memory defining memory, positive or negative from your childhood?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You must. Yeah, and for her, I am her terrorist too, so it's equal. Terrorists on both sides. On a more serious note, when you found out about the attacks of October 7th, what went through your mind?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But psychologically, you were always like, when you were by yourself, you felt like an outsider.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Why salsa? Why did that attract you? Can you explain what salsa is? So I mentioned to you offline that I've been doing a little bit of tango, trying to learn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So you mentioned heart surgery. So what motivated you to become a doctor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You're damn good at it though. That's a hard path though. Yeah. And it's a fascinating one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Is it also possible, I like how this is a therapy session where we're psychoanalyzing it. Is it also possible that you always just pick the hardest thing you could possibly do? Maybe, but. Maybe that's the Piers Morgan thing too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You still did it. You still did it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You understand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
At least in your own mind, you couldn't compete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
see but that's the foundation of like creating a great person yeah because if you're pretty you don't need to do much i probably wouldn't recommend it but it is it is true that so if you are pretty do some disfigurement find the flaws and be extremely self-critical about them. So you saw Jon Stewart on TV for the first time in 2003, I believe. How did that change your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I wonder what that is that you saw. It's like the timing of the humor. I mean, there is, Jon Stewart is one of a kind. His biting... criticism of power, I would say, and also ability to highlight the absurdity of it all. But you understand, I didn't understand any of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
It's like, I want to know John Stewart. So that was in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And I did it and it worked. Can you talk about 2011? I mean, what is it? The Arab Spring, what is it? People here in America, you know. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I got hit pretty hard today by allergies, and I'm just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
By the way, speaking of which, because it was a joke in your Mark Twain speech. I got teary-eyed just watching that. That was great. You're like fucking great. Like what you did with Mark Twain Awards for Jon Stewart. It's great. I mean, your comedy is great in general. And I wanted to go to your show. I definitely will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But that's like a little stroll on the complete tangent of just the masterful introduction and celebration of Jon Stewart. Anyway, Mubarak. 30 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You said there's a lot of aspects of that sudden fame that were just horrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I mean, there's a lot of things to say there, but one of the difficult things of fame in your situation is you're not just having fun, you're criticizing power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Okay, well, it's hilarious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So they went through kind of official channels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Was there a worry of non-legal things like assassination?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So you're not funny. It goes deeper. Yeah, certain things get to you better than others. Especially if you have like a secret suspicion that you are like maybe not funny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But what about the weight of the responsibility of speaking truth to power? So like walking on eggshells, like what did that feel like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And you couldn't see. I couldn't see. I was just like the lens of the camera. Just like a surreal dream or nightmare. Yeah. Hello, Wassim. I was like, hello, Wassim. I was like, hi. And it could end at any moment. Your career and everything. Everything. Yeah. Yeah. So what was the drive that got you to actually do it, to overcome that fear? Multiple things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
That's brilliant. So like, you are walking on eggshells, but you're doing it masterfully, that you're revealing sort of the flaws in the propaganda, the absurdity of the propaganda, and so doing or criticizing them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
That's the art form. Yeah. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, a lot of the criticism came from like children's stories and children's cartoons. Double meaning, double in the window stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
That is the brilliance. Yeah. But everyone knows. Everyone knows. Because you are like putting a mirror, you're mirroring the society. It's fascinating, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And that is a scary one, the army. You see that in Ukraine. Everybody supports the army. That's why Zelensky getting rid of the head of the army was a big, big deal. It's a really dangerous thing. And everyone was afraid to say anything negative about the army, especially during war in that case. And in this case, maybe there's civil war, that kind of thing. But think about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You're a famous guy talking shit in the middle of all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I think Elon tweeted, never went to therapy. It's going to be on my headstone. Terry, you're our best buds. Okay. I mean, that is terrifyingly difficult. After being a surgeon, after being a superstar, super famous, going to eat shit at local tiny clubs in the United States. I mean, eating shit, period. Bombing is really, really, really difficult. Really difficult for 20-year-olds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I mean, how did you survive? I know you blocked off most of it, but what gave you, like, strength through all that? Because I didn't have any other choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I would not have people who come and be disappointed. I gotta say, the timing of October 7th is very suspicious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I don't know. I'm just asking questions. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, you, Hamas, and Bibi together orchestrated all of this. Oh my God, that's the trilogy. You guys should go on the road together. I'm telling you, that phone call is coming. Yeah, but Hamas has to open. And they would really bomb, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I love dark humor. You do a show, like you were saying, in English and in Arabic. And the story is very different. Totally different. Two different stories. I would love just the language difference. Because the music of the language is also different. How can you convert it into words? But what's the difference in the music of the languages? I'll tell you. Because I thought about that a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Oh, wow. Yeah, fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So no swearing, conservative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So I went in and I went and I changed the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So it's really very much about self-reflective on language and the limits of language that's allowed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Which countries would you go to and not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Is it personal, is it worry about your safety?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
yeah their view of that place is from a different time i have that you know my parents but everybody that left the soviet union i mean it's such a complicated relationship with that it's sometimes borders on hate disappointment in the uh in the case of the soviet union perhaps similar to egypt is the promises sold when you're younger
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And the promise is broken by the possibility of what it was supposed to be. With the Soviet Union, I'm sure with Egypt is the same. Iran is the same. So they have a very complicated relationship with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Would you ever perform in the West Bank? No. Gaza?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, there's a demeaning aspect to that whole thing. Very. Even in subtle ways, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, that little bit of a humiliation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Oh, sometimes it's major, but I noticed that even a little bit, after a lifetime of that, it can turn to hate towards the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Resentment. And then how do you do anything with that resentment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
What do you do from your, what do we do? What do people do? to nudge this towards peace, towards flourishing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
One of your favorite words, jihad. That's my favorite hobbies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Okay. Sam Harris has done several episodes on jihad, and people should go listen to it, even if you disagree with it. But the basic idea... that he's proposing is that this idea of jihad, in the negative connotation of it, of martyrdom is a thing that gets, is counterproductive, is destructive to the possible future flourishing of Palestinian people. What do you think of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
There's just the idea of martyrdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
We don't talk about that. I think he would say that the presence of a story that you can tell yourself when you're in a really shitty place, that you can go to a much better place by sacrificing your own life, just the fact that the presence of that story is there is harmful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I dare you to talk shit about Buddhism and Jainism, though. Try.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
The flying monster. As a person who tries not to eat carbs, I'm deeply offended by that. I mean, they're Scientologists. All they do is actually buy real estate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So even there, Mormons sometimes, they're some of the nicest people I've ever met. But I'm sure there's also darkness there too. Oh boy, religion. There's soaking in Mormons. There's what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
What's soaking?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
There's 72 virgins waiting for all of us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, can we... If you want to upgrade. Yeah. Can we do a trial period? But in general, if you just zoom out, do you think religion is... In what way is it good for the world? In what way is it harmful?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
The thing that was bothering you, was it what was being said or how it was being said?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And there's an aspect of religion where you humble yourself before a thing that is much greater than you. So that has a I would say a very positive effect of humbling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
in this place where nothing makes any sense. Noses running, scratchy throat, all that kind of stuff. Just a mess. Just a beautiful, wonderful mess that makes me appreciate all the other days when such things are not felt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, we always ruin a good thing. Don't we? That ego. You've been outspoken recently. with Piers Morgan, but just on this topic, and you talked about the Superman story, which I would love it if you were in a Superman movie, but have you lost job opportunities?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, you had a chart akin to crypto. Yeah. You analyzed it from an investing perspective, of course, in the dark. It's the ROI on that. ROI. And you were saying that a certain year was a good year. Yeah, 2014. 2014 was a good year for investment purposes. And also to refer to the family member that you called the loser, you were saying that –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And you also said that you don't want to be a victim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You know? There's a wisdom in that. Even if you weren't doing great, that's a choice a lot of people can come to, which is like, do I play victim here or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, and that becomes a slippery slope and somehow victimizing yourself. Goes to more victimizing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, I mean, Israel and Palestine currently both have that temptation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You called him, had a conversation with him, and he keeps saying that he's not using anybody for human shields, and then you called him a loser. You can't even give a job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
We all know this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
All that said, I do believe in the power of the little guy, the individual, to overthrow the government. I don't know if you heard, but the Arab Spring happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Still, the fire, I mean, we are in Texas. Everybody's armed to the teeth here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Well, you said the American military is unique in this way. I know, but for now. For now, the tanks are... First of all... I believe Russia has more tanks than the United States. Tanks, I don't know. I'm not an expert in military strategic deployment of arms, but the United States uses different kinds of weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, and they sell a lot of those things to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But still, I mean, America's holding pretty strong despite the criticisms on the free speech front. But if you look at the freedom of the press, freedom of the speech index, America is not at the top. It is not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, there's a kind of several layers of bullshit, almost sometimes hiding the obvious horror of the situation with kind of politeness and all this kind of stuff, just the basic value of human life. That said, it's a difficult situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Why do you do that? One of the things that's really difficult to know is where to find the truth. It does seem that both sides use propaganda and both sides lie a lot. but both sides as in... Both Israel and Palestine, pro-Palestine, pro-Israel. There's a lot of lies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Who has more power, in your view?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
In fact, disproportionately so. This is my problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yes, I can. They're both propagandists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, but the problem with the people in TikTok, It's the drug, the dopamine rush of getting a lot of likes. So instead of talking about the death of civilians, they'll talk about beheaded babies or the equivalent. They're going to actually make up stories because the made up stories are going to be more viral. And so now we're just in this scene, this muck of lies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And there's a lot of people who actually exposed those lies on TikTok.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
It is. What would you do if you were Israel? Bibi called you. Awesome. Big fan. Big fan of your comedy. First of all, would you hang up right away? Would you hear him out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And that's worse. You're supposed to be journalists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
You're supposed to be reporters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, but I see that this is like a catalyst, an inspiration for the citizen journalist to rise up. This is what you're doing. Oh, this? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I mean, both have a place. Both are exciting. But I can't... It is very dangerous because you can't look away. And I almost never... Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I almost never feel better ever after having used TikTok.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So you don't check it at all? You try not to check it at all? It is very intense. I don't. I don't. I just like, I post something and I run. Posting ghosts. So you're doing comedy here in the United States right now. Joe Rogan has the Comedy Mothership, which is an incredible club. Have you considered doing that club? I would love to. I mean, I- Do you know Joe? Of course no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Who doesn't know Joe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, he really believes in creating this place where comedians can be really free. And one of the cool things about the Comedy Mothership is like, Comedian is king there. Yeah. Like, you have to bow down to the... Because, you know, the comedian who came there came after, like, eating shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, it just shows up that way. I mean, what would you do? What would you do in this situation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
It's great. You already told me what you think about the state of politics in the United States, but now tell me what you really think. What do you think of the choice of Trump versus Biden? How do we end up here? I don't know. I mean, like the fact that like you have two people over the age of 90.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Yeah, but I also believe in great leaders that go against all of that. But unfortunately- Bernie Sanders was like that. Bernie Sanders- Yes, but also age. I don't want to be ageist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
But even with like, because I remember listening to Bernie Sanders 20 years ago on Tom Hartman Show, and I don't want to say anything against Bernie, but like he was sharper then. Of course. There's a thing with age. Yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
That's what I hear from people who suffer from migraines, that chronic migraines are so terrible that they make you intensely hate when a migraine is going on and intensely love when it's not. Every time anything goes wrong, it's a great chance to celebrate all the times when stuff didn't go wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
And that is very concerning for Americans. Everybody. Everybody becomes corrupt after. I mean, that's why two terms is a good limit. For everybody. Yeah. And, you know, maybe half a term for Egyptian leaders. Well, you know, our half term is 15 years. Quarter term. You should come back and run for office there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
They might make a statue of you, though. Make you look good. After my death? I look very good dead in a statue. Yeah, when you look at what happened with Navalny. since you kind of really thought about this in Egypt. What happened with Navalny in Russia? What do you think about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
It's like a, it's a television show. Maybe that's what attracts us to that part of the world is that it's so much on display, this game of power, of geopolitics, of war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
All right, if we zoom out, do you think there will always be war in the world? Always be suffering? Yes. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Just looking at nuclear weapons, the fascinating thing about nuclear weapons that I've gotten to learn recently just how few people are involved in a full on nuclear war that kills basically kills everybody. Well, three plus billion people right away. And the consequences of the nuclear winter, it's unlivable. But all it takes is, I mean, one president can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So it could be even a false alarm, misunderstanding. Like what happened in the Cuba missile crisis. But again- And now there's more nations are prepared and ready to launch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
That's crazy. There's a dark perspective on this where there's certain members of the media that would kind of enjoy the prospect of nuclear war, like a little bit. Just let's get as close to it as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Somebody who's really in a hurry. Well, I have good news for you. Maybe we'll become a multi-planetary species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
Maybe he's one of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I asked you offline to not mention the lizard people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
I actually have to be honest. I haven't fully looked into lizard people. I probably should. You should. Yeah. Well, maybe I'm afraid of the truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
So let's say you're wrong about the end of the world. I hope so. And it all turns out great and humanity flourishes. Why would that happen? What gives you hope for that trajectory for humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#424 – Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame
They're getting nervous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
The following is a conversation with Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman, his second time on the podcast. He is a Palestinian American, a Muslim scholar, a civil rights leader, president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and is one of the most influential Muslims in the world. Our previous conversation was focused on Islam. This time, the focus was on Gaza and Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So you mentioned settlements. So to you, this is bigger than Gaza. It is the West Bank. It is the Palestinian people broadly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
What are the Palestinians in the diaspora feeling?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
In fact, it's nearly impossible to make money with art. And still they do. And still they persevere. And still they fight the odds. And still they long to create. And oftentimes, for no reason besides the act of creation itself, the beauty laden in the act of creation, the money doesn't matter, the fame doesn't matter, none of it matters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You're somebody who's always rushed into the midst of a crisis. So what does it feel like on a personal level to not be able to do that here, to go to Gaza to help?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Speaking of the people, the faces, the voices, one of the people you've talked about, you've posted about, you've written about is Wael al-Khattouh, him being hospitalized. He's a Palestinian journalist and bureau chief of Al Jazeera in Gaza City. What can you tell me about this man?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Just loving the process of going from the idea to the final thing. And I've just seen some incredible works of art. And a couple of artists have reached out, wanting to create some art. I'm always deeply, deeply honored by that. Anyway, I bring that up because maybe some of those arts will end up on a t-shirt. And that t-shirt will be sold on Shopify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You have posted videos and written about what is happening in Gaza since October 7th. What has been happening there, the individual stories and the broader impact on the two million people there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all in one cloud business management system As the kids in the biz call it, ERP system. Takes care of all the messy stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So pragmatically and psychologically, it is very difficult to flourish when you're just waiting for more bombardment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
I've gotten a chance to witness a destroyed school in Ukraine. It's something that is really difficult to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Everything from the financials to the HR to the inventory and supply to the e-commerce and much, much more. You can check out Reddit. Reviews on Reddit. And those people can sometimes be a little bit cranky. And when it comes to NetSuite, they're not cranky. They're positive. That's how you know Netflix is legit. There's a lot of ways to know Netflix is legit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So those kids growing up in Gaza now, to you, they have almost no choice but to have hatred for Israel? It's human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So when I had a conversation with Elon Musk, he suggested that what Israel should do is conspicuous acts of kindness. So do as much positive things. things in Gaza as possible on a basic individual human level and at a policy level at every level. What do you think about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
That's kind of like one of the perspectives. I often think about the stress, the drama, the complexities, the anxiety, the fears involved in running a company. You know, doing research at a university and then hosting a podcast and It's such a beautifully simple existence, especially in a close-knit team where everybody likes each other. We're all inspired by each other. And I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
To take a leap into the unknown of a startup is exciting and terrifying. And I think the terrifying part is not just the sort of sexy things like product design and innovation and the actual sort of engineering, but all the stuff that makes the company work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
That said, you did talk about Waal al-Haqqaqduq and dignity. And you mentioned transgressions. So there is places where violence can go too far. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management software, BetterHelp for mental health, AidSleep for naps, and AG1 for delicious health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
It feels like the little things, the details, can matter a lot in defining the culture, how efficient the thing works, the machine of a company works, especially when it has to scale quickly. They asked me very nicely to mention that 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, and they asked me to say that NetSuite turned 25 this year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So to you, violence becomes terrorism when women and children, noncombatants are killed, no matter who is doing the killing. Absolutely. Absolutely. In America... For you, for other Palestinians, other Muslims in your community, what has all of this been like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Can you tell the story of this boy, Wadi Al-Fayyum? He's a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed 26 times in his home in Plainfield Township, Illinois. It was found to be a hate crime motivated by Islamophobia. And the attacker said, you Muslims must die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com slash lex. That's netsuite.com slash lex for your own KPI checklist. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. They got therapy for individuals. They got therapy for couples.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
The couples thing I recently found out, that's pretty cool. That's really cool. Anyway, the thing is easy, discreet, affordable, available worldwide. On their website, they have a counter of various kinds. I like numbers, especially when numbers go up. Numbers go up is a really exciting thing. I have to be honest. And the number I want to mention is 350 million.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Over 350 million messages, chat, phone, and video sessions. Over 34,000 licensed therapists. Over 4.4 million people got help. Ma'am, talk therapy. can be an important part of getting your mind right. So BetterHelp is easy and accessible, so you should try it. It's a great, great, great first step. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
There is a deep geopolitical connection between the United States and that part of the world. What is the role of US politicians in all of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by A-Sleep and its Pod 3 cover. You can control temperature with an app. It is such a fundamental part. of a joyful existence at home for me. That's the thing I look forward to when I'm traveling. That's the thing that makes me feel like I'm at home. I think more than probably anything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So there's money that you just mentioned and bills, and then there's rhetoric, which you also criticized, that he spoke about the beheaded babies and things of that nature. So where has... Joe Biden fallen short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So Biden has lost or is losing the hearts and the support of the Muslim community. Palestinian people and Muslim people in America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
It's just that process of either going to take a nap or going to sleep for the night. It's the cold bed. The ritual of it, the experience of it, the sensation of it, cold bed with a warm blanket. The sleep world period is just a fascinating place. It really is a journey to another place. I do feel like I travel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
I travel when I lay down and I'm reading a book and then I slowly get tired and then just fade away. But I'm not fading. I'm being teleported to another place. Sometimes with a dream, sometimes with a calm nothingness. The book I was currently just yesterday reading, it's not something you can read for very long, it's tiny, is The Little Prince. And it just always makes me smile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Do you think there's something that Donald Trump can do to help move this in the right direction?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You spoke at the November 4th demonstration in Washington called the Free Palestine March. It had a lot of people, several hundred thousand people there. What do you remember from that experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
I recommend it highly if you haven't. It's a kind of children's book, but deeper in meaning. It really reverberates through the years in its simplicity, in its profundity of its simple message. Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, the thing I'm going to have in about 10 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
What do you think about the protests on campus against Israel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but friends, if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I've been getting back on the road. When I'm in Austin, Texas, you know, all through the winter...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So the average sentiment is anti-occupation, not anti-Semitic?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Do you think the protests ever go too far?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
The temperature does dip sometimes, but really it can comfortably be at like 50 or 60 where you can just throw on a sweatshirt and still in shorts and just do a good 10, 8, 10, 12 miles, sometimes 5 miles depending on what I'm feeling like. Fast five, slow five, slow 12, slow 15. One of these days I should do like a double loop and do a marathon. Just on a random Tuesday. Screw it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Do you think there has been a rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate in the U.S. ? Yeah, I think that's factual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
I think we spoke last time about a year ago. How has your view on Benjamin Netanyahu evolved over time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So the claim that security of Israel is the primary concern is you're saying a dishonest claim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
I'm just going to step outside at some 1.30 p.m. on a Tuesday and just go like Forrest Gump. And then when I do a full loop, it's going to be about 12 miles. I'll do it again. Just say, you know, you're supposed to be done with the run, and you say, you know what? I can keep going. I can do this again. Still to this day, I've not run a marathon. I've run 48 miles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Do you think Israel has the right to defend its borders?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Can you speak to this term occupation in Gaza? Because the people that say it is not an occupation say that Israeli troops have been pulled out from there before October 7th for many years. And to you, it still is a de facto occupation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
What do you think about Yemen's Houthi rebels attacking Israel in response to October 7th? And then the United States and the UK initiating bombing of multiple targets in Yemen in response to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
That's part of a David Goggins challenge, but that wasn't continuous miles. There's a lot of rest in between. but continuous 26 miles, I don't know, even 48 miles continuously, I don't know. Of course, your body's capable of much more than you realize, and I'm sure that is true for my body as well. Anyway, at the end of the run, I almost always include a nice AG1 drink.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You mentioned paying respects to the legacy of E.B.J., Eddie Bernice Johnson, and remembering Palestinian child prisoners. Can you explain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Omar Suleiman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
And to you, big peace agreements of the like of Abraham Accords should include Palestine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
But do you think something like that, agreements of that nature, of that scale, could be made that include the Palestinian people, and that would actually make progress?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
There's a lot of questions I want to ask you about the nature of resistance and what is the proper way to resist? What is the practical, pragmatic, effective ways of resisting? So one example that is often brought up is the difference between MLK and Malcolm X. One emphasized nonviolent resistance, the other emphasized any means necessary resistance. Which do you side with?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
in general and in this particular case of what has happened over the past 100 plus days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
What do you think about the seeming fact that majority of Palestinians support the October 7th attacks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So as Malcolm X did, you're calling for... highlighting the asymmetry in violence and asymmetry in moral reasoning. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
It just hurts me to think how long it takes to heal. Even if the healing begins now with a knife metaphor, it's just going to be generations because people don't forget when your father and mother were murdered or somebody that you know in your family was killed. They don't forget. Look,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
I was wondering if you can comment on... and a notion that comes up often in conversations about this, of why can't other nations in the region take in Palestinian refugees?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I use it to sell merch, shirts. I use it to also go to other people's merch stores and buy it. Shopify enables me to wear a bunch of stuff that I'm a fan of. Also, if we're talking about T-shirts, they do...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You wrote a statement on October 9th. I was hoping to read it, if it's okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Our Palestinian casualties are always your footnotes. The daily humiliation of occupation ignored. The aggression by settlers and soldiers alike on holy sites and souls. The annihilation of entire families that follows. The devastation of whatever scraps remain in the open-air prison of Gaza. Unsustainable and inhumane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Do you ever imagine that if your family did not flee and you were now living in in, say, in Gaza, what you would be doing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You mentioned that Palestinians invoke the plight of indigenous people, like Native Americans. What works and doesn't work about this analogy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So if you're waking up to a sudden interest in the region and want to know what's been happening, dig a bit deeper than two weeks and try to read beyond the headlines of a media that has been dehumanizing us for decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Why is Palestine a special place, a holy land?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So you mentioned Abraham, prophets. Prophet Muhammad is deeply venerated in Islam, obviously, but other prophets are as well, Jesus being one of them. What are the similarities and differences in the teachings from these two prophets?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So the message is fundamentally the same. Is there a difference in emphasis? For example, the emphasis on love for Jesus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
you have been longtime friends with and had amazing conversations with people of other faiths, Christian, Jewish. How has the events of October 7th and the days after affected this in the United States, your ability to have interfaith conversations connections, relationships, friendships?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So you wish more rabbis would be able to have a conversation like we're having today and also not allow it to be seen as them turning their back on their religion?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Yeah, one of the things, since we last spoke, I've gotten to meet a lot of Palestinian Christians, including in West Bank. And that was fascinating, and those are beautiful people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
One of the criticisms of Islam points to specific verses of the Qur'an and the criticism being that it is not a religion of peace. Can you speak to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Why do you think these narratives have taken hold in present discourse, at least in the United States?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
If it's okay, you've mentioned Al-Aqsa Mosque a couple of times. I would love it if you can describe why it is such an important place, a holy place for Muslims in general, but also for this particular crisis that we have been speaking about today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
That's a really powerful idea. The value of a human being is greater than even Al-Aqsa Mosque. So that's a foundational idea for Islam?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You mentioned to me that since October 7th, a lot of young people in the United States and in general have been showing interest in Islam. First of all, can you explain what you've been seeing and experiencing in terms of that trend?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
What's a good way to get introduced to Islam? The faith, the spiritual experience of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Okay. What's involved?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Because for you, as a Palestinian American, this year, the Ramadan, perhaps would be especially difficult. Spiritually, what are you anticipating? What do you think is the difference this year?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So a general heaviness permeates... just your prayers and your thoughts throughout this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Not to put you on the spot, but in your sermons, in your private life, what is the passage in the Quran that is one you find yourself returning to often?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
So there's an eternal...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
When you look far into the future, 20, 30, 40 years from now, we're doing another podcast in the 80s and 90 years old. What do you hope to see in the Middle East? What do you hope to see change in the Middle East and the United States as a people, as a set of policies, cultures, nations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
You have been fearless in walking through the fire. what gives you strength psychologically to keep going, to speak out, but just also maintain an optimism and a hope for the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
Well, Omar, Imam, this is a huge honor to once again speak. And with you, and I just want to say thank you, not just for this, but for many private notes you have sent me of kindness and support and love through some of the low points for as silly as they are for me personally. So it's just great to be able to call you a friend and to be able to have you in my corner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
I'm forever grateful to you for that. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And thank you for talking today. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Omar Suleiman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#411 – Omar Suleiman: Palestine, Gaza, Oct 7, Israel, Resistance, Faith & Islam
a lot, thousands of integrations and third-party apps, including on-demand printing for T-shirts. So you sell on Shopify, and then another company does the printing. I've had a few incredible artists contact me about sharing their art. First of all, I'm just grateful that artists exist in the world, that artists create. It's not the easiest way to make money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, DJ Sa, Matthew McDougall, Bliss Chapman, and Noland Arbaugh about Neuralink and the future of humanity. Elon, DJ, Matthew, and Bliss are, of course, part of the amazing Neuralink team. And Noland is the first human to have a Neuralink device implanted in his brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So speaking of challenges, Neuralink published a blog post describing that some of the threads are attracted. And so the performance as measured by bits per second dropped at first, but then eventually it was regained. And the whole story of how it was regained is super interesting. That's definitely something I'll talk to Bliss and to Nolan about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But in general, can you speak to this whole experience? How was the performance regained? just the technical aspects of the threads being retracted and moving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of signal loss there in that process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But it sounds like one of the fascinating challenges here is for the system and the decoding side to be adaptable across different timescales. So whether it's movement of threads or different aspects of signal drift, sort of on the software of the human brain, something changing, Like Nolan talks about cursor drift that could be corrected and there's a whole UX challenge to how to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it sounds like adaptability is like a fundamental property that has to be engineered in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, there's, like you said, built in-house. This whole paragraph here from this blog post is pretty gangster. Building the technologies described above has been no small feat. And there's a bunch of links here that I recommend people click on. We constructed in-house microfabrication capabilities to rapidly produce various iterations of thin film arrays that constitute our electrode threads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We created a custom femtosecond laser mill. to manufacture components with micro-level precision. I think there's a tweet associated with this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, this, okay. What are we looking at here? This thing. Yeah. So in less than one minute, our custom-made femtosecond laser mill cuts this geometry in the tips of our needles. So we're looking at this weirdly shaped needle. The tip is only 10 to 12 microns in width, only slightly larger than the diameter of a red blood cell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The small size allows threads to be inserted with minimal damage to the cortex. Okay, so what's interesting about this geometry? So we'll look at this geometry of a needle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What's interesting about the robot that it takes to do that, that's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy that a robot is able to get this kind of precision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And it's far superior to a human surgeon at this time for this particular task.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So continuing the paragraph, we developed novel hardware and software testing systems such as our accelerated lifetime testing racks and simulated surgery environment, which is pretty cool, to stress test and validate the robustness of our technologies. We performed many rehearsals of our surgeries to refine our procedures and make them second nature. This is pretty cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We practice surgeries on proxies with all the hardware and instruments needed in our mock or in the engineering space. This helps us rapidly test and measure. So there's like proxies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And there's wisdom you can gain through doing the same thing over and over and over. It's like your dreams of sushi kind of thing. Because then, it's like Olympic athletes visualize the Olympics. And then once you actually show up, it feels easy. It feels like any other day. It feels almost boring winning the gold medal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because you've visualized this so many times, you've practiced this so many times, that nothing about it is new. It's boring. You win the gold medal, it's boring. And the experience they talk about is mostly just relief. Probably that they don't have to visualize it anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think it's a good place to actually ask sort of the big question that people might have is how do we know every aspect of this that you described is safe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So those are kind of the details of an extremely high standard procedure. of safety that has to be reached. Um, FDA supervises this, but there's in general, just a very high standard and every aspect of this, including the surgery. I think, um, Matthew McDougal has mentioned that like the standard is, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
let's say, how to put it politely, higher than maybe some other operations that we take for granted. So the standard for all the surgical stuff here is extremely high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Speaking of which, you talked to me with excitement about the histology and some of the images that you were able to share. Can you explain to me what we're looking at?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Of course, there's big companies that have an implied trust because you and them understand that if you give your data over to them and they abuse that privilege, that they would suffer as a company. Now, I don't know if they fully understand that because I think even big companies can probably sell your data or share your data for purposes of making money, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so there's certainly no trauma. That's such a beautiful image, by the way. So the brown of the neurons, for some reason, I can't look away. It's really cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that presumably is one of the big benefits of having this kind of flexible thread.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But this is also a nice illustration of the size of things. So this is the tip of the thread.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And they're neurons. And this is the thread listening. And the electrodes are positioned how?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So what's designed for the future, the upgrade procedure? So maybe for Nolan, what would the upgrade look like? It was essentially what you're mentioning. Is there a way to upgrade sort of the device internally where you take it apart and sort of keep the capsule and upgrade the internals?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that would allow you to reuse the threads sort of? Correct. So, I mean, this leads to the natural question of what is the pathway to scaling the increase in the number of threads? Is that a priority? What's the technical challenge there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, it is a very interesting question for a super intelligent species. What use are humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's interesting that the brain, so basically close approximation is warm salt water, hot salt water is a good testing environment. Yeah. By the way, I'm drinking element, which is basically salt water, which is making me kind of, it doesn't have computational power the way the brain does, but maybe in terms of. in terms of all the characteristics is quite similar and I'm consuming it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you're doing a lot of iteration here in every aspect of this, the materials, the software, the hardware.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So, okay. So you mentioned scaling. Is it possible to have multiple neural link devices as one of the ways of scaling to have multiple neural link devices implanted? That's the goal. That's the goal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So focusing on a particular function, one neural link device. Correct. I mean, I wonder if there's some level of customization that can be done on the compute side. So for the motor cortex. Absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The way you said second product is both hilarious and awesome to me. That product being restoring sight for blind people. So can you speak to stimulating the visual cortex? I mean, the possibilities there are just incredible to be able to give that gift back to people who don't have sight or even any aspect of that. Can you just speak to the challenges of, there's several challenges here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
One of which is, like you said, from recording to the stimulation. Just any aspect of that that you're both excited and see the challenges of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So fundamental, that means you can't function effectively using sight in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So like 90% of distributed compute of the human species is spent on trying to get laid, probably. Like a large percentage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's incredible. This is really incredible. So you basically would be adding pixels and your brain would start to figure out what those pixels mean. Yeah. And like with different kinds of the system and the signal processing on all fronts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And if you're able to control the kind of raw signal, is that when we use our sight, we're getting the photons and there's not much processing on it. if you're being able to control that signal, maybe you can do some kind of processing. Maybe you do object detection ahead of time. Yeah. You're doing some kind of pre-processing and there's a lot of possibilities to explore that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's not just increasing sort of thermal imaging, that kind of stuff, but it's also just doing some kind of interesting processing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, man, not to distract from the topic, but I just took a very high dose of ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So yes, it's a nice way to think about it. You're swapping out different experiences. And with Neuralink, being able to control that, primarily at first to improve function, not for entertainment purposes or enjoyment purposes, but... Yeah, giving back lost functions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Giving back lost functions. And there, especially when the function is completely lost, anything is a huge help. Would you implant a Neuralink device in your own brain? Absolutely. I mean, maybe not right now, but absolutely. What kind of capability, once reached, you start getting real curious and almost get a little antsy, like jealous of people as you watch them get implanted?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I should say that watching Nolan, I get a little jealous because he's having so much fun and it seems like such a chill way to play video games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, the multitasking aspect of that is really interesting. So it's not just the BPS for the primary task, it's the parallelization of multiple tasks. If you measure the BPS for the entirety of the human organism, so if you're talking and doing a thing with your mind and looking around also, I mean, there's just a lot of parallelization that can be happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, attention, like cognitive load, I've done, I've read a lot of literature on people doing two tasks. Like you have your primary task and a secondary task, and the secondary task is a source of distraction. And how does that affect the performance of the primary task? And there's, depending on the task, there's a lot of interesting, I mean, this is an interesting computational device, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I think there's, to say the least, a lot of novel insights that can be gained from everything. I mean, I personally am surprised that Nolan's able to do such incredible control of the cursor while talking. and also being nervous at the same time, because he's talking like all of us are. If you're talking in front of the camera, you get nervous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So all of those are coming into play, and he's able to still achieve high performance. Surprising. I mean, all of this is really amazing. And I think just after researching this really in depth, I kind of wanted your link. Get in the line. And also the safety kit in mind. Well, we should say the registry is for people who have quadriplegia and all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there'll be a separate line for people. They're just curious like myself. Yeah. So now that Nolan, patient P1, is part of the ongoing prime study, what's the high-level vision for P2, P3, P4, P5, and just the expansion into other human beings that are getting to experience this implant?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So before the pivotal study, there's kind of like a rapid innovation based on individual experiences. You're learning from individual people, how they use it, like the high resolution details,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What if AGI was... This is happening as we speak. If we merge with AI, it's just going to expand the compute that we humans use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it's really cool how the app that Nolan is using, there's like calibration, all that kind of stuff. And then there's update. You just click and get an update. What other future capabilities are you kind of looking to? You said vision. That's a fascinating one. What about sort of accelerated typing or speech, this kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is where I get to the pothead questions. Do you think we can start getting insight into things like thought? So speech, there's a muscular component, like you said. There's like the act of producing sounds. But then what about the internal things like cognition, like low-level thoughts and high-level thoughts?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think we'll start noticing kind of signals that could be picked up, that could be understood, that could be maybe used in order to interact with the outside world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's just nice to not give over your contact data unless you need to. So Cloak solves that problem, makes it super easy. It's basically a password manager with extra privacy superpowers. Go to cloak.com slash Lex to get 14 days free. Or, for a limited time, use code LEXPOD when signing up to get 25% off of an annual cloaked plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. How does the, how does the subjective experience emerge from just a bunch of spikes, electrical spikes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then there'll be, you'd be continuously pleasantly surprised. Do you see a world where there's millions of people like tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people walking around with the Neuralink device, or multiple Neuralink devices in their brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it seems like the will is not just about the limbic system. There's a lot of interesting, complicated things in there. We also want power. That's limbic too, I think. But then we also want to, in a kind of cooperative way, alleviate the suffering in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Not to mention that every, most people on earth have a smartphone. And once BCI starts competing with a smartphone as a preferred methodology of interacting with the digital world, that also becomes an interesting thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, thank you so much for pushing ahead. And I look forward to that exciting future. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with DJ Saw. And now, dear friends, here's Matthew McDougall, the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink. When did you first become fascinated with the human brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
uh not everybody does but yeah sure some people do as a group of humans when we get together we start to have this kind of collective intelligence that is uh is more complex in its will than the underlying individual descendants of apes right so there's like other motivations and that could be a really interesting source of an objective function for AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, that's a fascinating way to look at human history. You just imagine all these neurobiological mechanisms, Stalin, Hitler, all of these, Genghis Khan, all of them just had like a brain. It's just a bunch of neurons, like a few tons of billions of neurons. gaining a bunch of information over a period of time. They have a set of module that does language and memory and all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And from there, in the case of those people, they're able to murder millions of people. And all that coming from There's not some glorified notion of a dictator of this enormous mind or something like this. It's just the brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I just went to the Amazon jungle for a few weeks. And it's a very visceral reminder that a lot of life on earth is just trying to get laid. They're all screaming at each other. Like I saw a lot of monkeys and they're just trying to impress each other. Or maybe there's a battle for power, but a lot of the battle for power has to do with them getting laid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And we'd like to think that we're somehow fundamentally different, but especially when it comes to primates, we really aren't. We can use fancier poetic language, but maybe some of the underlying drives that motivate us are similar. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And all of that is coming from this, the brain. Yeah. So when did you first start studying the brain as a biological mechanism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
One of the things I realized in the other direction, too, how... most of the systems in the body are integrated with the human brain, like they affect the brain also, like the immune system. I think there's just, you know, people who study Alzheimer's and those kinds of things, it's just surprising
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
how much you can understand of that from the immune system, from the other systems that don't obviously seem to have anything to do with sort of the nervous system. They all play together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So from there, the early days in neuroscience to surgery, When did that step happen, this leap?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So do you think people, when you have a neural link with 10,000, 100,000 channels, most of the use cases will be communication with AI systems?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What was the hardest part of the training on the neurosurgeon track?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I'm just kidding. I didn't say it. Now I'm making enemies. No. Okay. I get it. Wow. That's fascinating. Uh, so what was the second thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, so I have friends who know you, and whenever they speak about you, that you have the surprising quality for a neurosurgeon of humility. Which I think indicates that it's not as common as perhaps in other professions. Because there is a kind of gigantic...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
If we just take that tangent, there's a fascinating interdisciplinary team at Neuralink. that you get to interact with, including Elon. What do you think is the secret to a successful team? What have you learned from just getting to observe these folks? World experts in different disciplines work together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, you have to have the confidence to be able to walk away from an idea that you hold on to. And if you do that often enough, you're actually going to become the best in the world at your thing. I mean, that kind of rapid iteration. Yeah, you'll at least be a member of a winning team. Ride the wave. What did you learn? You mentioned there's a lot of amazing neurosurgeons at USC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What lessons about surgery and life have you learned from those folks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What's that like? You mentioned doing a surgery where the person is likely not to survive. Does that wear on you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, the amount of suffering that's endured when some of the things that we take for granted that our brain is able to do is taken away is immense. And to be able to restore some of that functionality is a real gift.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, can you take me through the full procedure for implanting, say, the N1 chip in Neuralink?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. So it's all the, like the finger movements, all this, all of that is just firing away. Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So cortical microinsertions that are via a robot and computer vision are... designed to avoid the blood vessels. So I know you're a bit biased here, but let's compare human and machine. So what are human surgeons able to do well, and what are robot surgeons able to do well? at this stage of our human civilization development?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there could be just a very large number of ways that you could be surprised as a surgeon. When you enter a situation, there could be subtle things that you have to dynamically adjust to. Correct. And robots are not good at that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then there could be a lot of sort of like semi-autonomous possibilities of maybe a robotic surgeon could say this situation is perfectly familiar or the situation is not familiar. And in the not familiar case, a human could take over. But basically like be very conservative in saying, okay, this for sure has no issues, no surprises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then let the humans deal with the surprises with the edge cases, all that. That's one possibility. You think eventually you'll be out of the job, you being neurosurgeon, your job being neurosurgeon. Humans, there will not be many neurosurgeons left on this earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's so fascinating, because I mean, if I have a line of work, I would say it's programming. And if you ask me, like, for the last, I don't know, 20 years, what I would recommend for people, I would tell them, yeah, go. You will always have a job if you're a programmer because there's more and more computers and all this kind of stuff. And it pays well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But then you realize these large language models come along and they're really damn good at generating code. So overnight you could be surprised like, wow, what is the contribution of the human really? But then you start to think, okay, it does seem that humans have ability, like you said, to deal with novel situations. In the case of programming, it's the ability to kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
come up with novel ideas to solve problems. It seems like machines aren't quite yet able to do that. And when the stakes are very high, when it's life critical, as it is in surgery, especially neurosurgery, then it starts, the stakes are very high for a robot to actually replace a human. But it's fascinating that in this case of Neuralink, there's a human-robot collaboration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I saw that there's a lot of practice going on. So, I mean, everything in Neuralink is tested extremely rigorously. But one of the things I saw that there's a proxy on which the surgeries are performed. So this is both for the robot and for the human, for everybody involved in the entire pipeline. What's that like, practicing the surgery?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there's a kind of dual track of medical and non-medical, meaning, so everything you've talked about could be applied to people who are non-disabled in the future?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there was a historic moment, a big milestone for Neuralink, in part for humanity, with the first human getting a Neuralink implant in January of this year. Take me through the surgery on Noland. What did it feel like to be part of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. Even with all that practice, all of that, just you've never been in a situation that's so high stakes in terms of people watching. And we should also probably mention, given how the media works, a lot of people you know, maybe in a dark kind of way, hoping it doesn't go well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It just sucks because I think it puts pressure on people. It discourages people from from trying to solve really hard problems, because to solve hard problems, you have to go into the unknown. You have to do things that haven't been done before, and you have to take risks. Calculated risks, you have to do all kinds of safety precautions, but risks, nevertheless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I just wish there would be more celebration of that, of the risk-taking, versus people just waiting on the sidelines, waiting for failure, and then pointing out the failure. Yeah, it sucks. In this case, it's really great that everything went just flawlessly, but it's unnecessary pressure, I would say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So did you get to actually front row seat, like watch the robot work? Like what, uh, you get to see the whole thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you were the one placing the targets?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Oh, cool. So the robot with the computer vision provides a bunch of candidates and you finalize the decision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world at their respective disciplines. Phil Ivey on poker, for example. Brilliant Masterclass. And also, reminds me of the other Phil, possibly the greatest, of all time, and if you ask him, he will definitely say he's the greatest of all time, which is Phil Hellmuth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I've seen images of this, and for me, with OCD, it's for some reason a really pleasant I think there's a subreddit called Oddly Satisfying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's oddly satisfying to see the different target sites avoiding the blood vessels and also maximizing the usefulness of those locations for the signal. It just feels good. It's like, ah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, yeah, so you said the feeling was of relief when everything went perfectly. How deep in the brain can you currently go and eventually go? Let's say on the neural link side, it seems the deeper you go in the brain, the more challenging it becomes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What are your eyes in that situation? What are you seeing? What kind of technology can you use to visualize where you are to light your way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's interesting because you have to avoid blood vessels somehow. Maybe there's creative ways of doing the same thing like mapping out high-resolution geometry of blood vessels, and then you can go and blind but how do you map out that in a way that's super stable? There's a lot of interesting challenges there, right? But there's a lot to do on the surface, luckily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's mind-blowing. That's just incredible. So, like, the effort there is to try to bridge the brain to the spinal cord to the peripheral nervous system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
uh how hard is that to do we have that working in uh in very crude forms in animals that's amazing yeah we've done similar to like with nolan where he's able to digitally move the cursor here you're doing uh the same kind of communication but with the actual effectors that you have yeah That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, and there's a lot of sort of... intermediate or extra options where you take an Optimus robot, like the arm, and to be able to control the arm, the fingers and hands of the arm as a prosthetic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, so that goes hand in hand. Although I didn't quite understand until thinking about it deeply and doing more research about Neuralink, how much you can do on the digital side, so this digital telepathy. I didn't quite understand that you could really map the intention, as you described in the hand knob area, that you can map the intention, just imagine it, think about it,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
that intention can be mapped to actual action in the digital world right and now more and more so much can be done in the digital world that it it it can reconnect you to to the outside world it can allow you to have freedom have independence if you're a quadriplegic yeah that's really powerful like you can go really far with that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
He's breaking world records left and right. And he's having fun with it. It's great. Just going back to the surgery, your whole journey, you mentioned to me offline, you have surgery on Monday. So you're like, you're doing surgery all the time. Maybe the ridiculous question, what does it take to get good at surgery?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And the same for vision. As you restore vision, there could be aspects of that restoration that are superhuman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, just step up. I mean, it's a real human being, a real human being that you can help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So every surgery, even if it's the same exact surgery, is there a lot of variability between that surgery and a different person?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
How much mushiness and mess is there? Because taking biology classes, the diagrams are always really clean and crisp. Neuroscience, the pictures of neurons are always really nice and very... But whenever I look at pictures of real brains, I don't know what is going on. So how much are biological systems in reality? How hard is it to figure out what's going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You could recognize the hand knob area. If I show you a thousand brains and give you one minute with each, you'd be like, yep, that's that. Sure. There is some uniqueness to that area of the brain in terms of the geometry, the topology of the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Also close to the surface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
By the way, you mentioned the Utah array, and I just saw a picture of that, and that thing looks terrifying. Because it's rigid, and then if you look at the threads, they're flexible. What can you say that's interesting to you about the flexible, that kind of approach of the flexible threads to deliver the electrodes next to the neurons?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What do most people not understand about the biology of the brain? We'll mention the vasculature. That's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's a really fascinating way to look at it. There's a lot of conditions we might think have nothing to do with the brain, but they might just be symptoms of something that actually started in the brain. The actual source of the problem, the primary source is something in the brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
on-off switches and knobs in the brain from which this all originates. Would you have a Neuralink chip implanted in your brain? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You know, you say the use case of the mouse... Because after researching all this and part of it is just watching Nolan have so much fun, if you can get that bits per second look really high with a mouse, like being able to interact. Because if you think about it, the way on the smartphone, the way you swipe, that was transformational.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
How we interact with the thing. It's subtle. You don't realize it, but to be able to touch a phone and to scroll with your finger and That's like, that changed everything. People were sure you need a keyboard to type. There's a lot of HCI aspects to that that changed how we interact with computers. So there could be a certain rate of speed with the mouse that would change everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's like, you might be able to just click around a screen extremely fast. And that, if it, I can see myself getting the Neuralink for much more rapid interaction with digital devices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It'd be hilarious if that is the reason people do it. Even if you have speech-to-text that's extremely accurate, it currently isn't, but it's gotten super accurate. It'd be hilarious if people went for Neuralink just so you avoid the embarrassing aspect of speaking, like looking like a douchebag speaking to your phone in public, which is a real, like... That's a real constraint.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think there will be – let me ask a Joe Rogan question. Do you think there will be – I just recently have taken ayahuasca.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, if it's done well on the UX side, it could change, I don't know if it transforms society, but it really can create a kind of shift in the way we interact with digital devices in the way that a smartphone did. Now, I would, just having to look into the safety of everything involved, I would totally try it so it doesn't have to go to some, like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
incredible thing where you have, it connects your vision or to some other, like it connects all over your brain. That could be like just connecting to the hand knob. You might have a lot of interesting interaction, human-computer interaction possibilities. That's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you're just thinking the word? Yeah. Thinking the word and you're able to get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Oh boy. Like you have to have the intention of speaking it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So like do the inner voice. Now it's so amazing to me that you can do the intention, the signal mapping. All you have to do is just imagine yourself doing it. And if you get the feedback that it actually worked, you can get really good at that. Like your brain will, first of all, adjust and you develop like any other skill. Like touch typing, you develop in that same kind of way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
To me, it's just really fascinating to be able to even to play with that. Honestly, like I would get a neural link just to be able to play with that. just to play with the capacity, the capability of my mind to learn this skill. It's like learning the skill of typing and learning the skill of moving a mouse. It's another skill. of moving the mouse not with my physical body, but with my mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Give it to a teenager. Anytime I think I'm good at something, I'll always go to... I don't know, even with the bits per second and playing a video game, you realize you give a neural link to a teenager, just a large number of them, the kind of stuff... They get good at stuff. They're going to get hundreds of bits per second. Yeah. Even just with the current technology. Probably. Probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because it's also addicting how the... the number go up aspect of it of like improving and training because it is it's almost like a skill and plus there's a software on the other end that adapts to you and especially if the adapting procedure algorithm becomes better and better and better you like learning together yeah we're scratching the surface on that right now there's so much more to do
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So on the complete other side of it, you have an RFID chip implanted in you. Yeah. So I hear. Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's a passive device that you use for unlocking a safe with top secrets? What do you use it for? What's the story behind it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you have some Bitcoin implanted in your body somewhere you can't tell where?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But it's a cool step, it's a cool leap to implant something in your body. I mean, it has, perhaps that's, it's a similar leap to a Neuralink, because for a lot of people, that kind of notion of putting something inside your body, something electronic inside a biological system is a big leap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, amongst the trees, myself. Yeah, must have been crazy. And the shaman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the insects, with the animals all around you, like jungle as far as I can see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So from all the surgeries you've done, from everything you understand in the brain, How much does neuroplasticity come into play? How adaptable is the brain? For example, just even in the case of healing from surgery or adapting to the post-surgery situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's the way to do it. Things are going to look pretty wild. Yeah, pretty wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's just a cool possibility that if you put a Neuralink in there, that the brain adapts, like the other part of the brain adapts too. Yeah. And integrates it. The capacity of the brain to do that is really interesting. Probably unknown to the degree to which you can do that. But you're now connecting an external thing to it, especially once it's doing stimulation. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The biological brain and the electronic brain outside of it working together, the possibilities there are really interesting. It's still unknown, but interesting. It feels like the brain is really good at adapting to whatever. But of course it is a system that by itself is already, like everything serves a purpose. And so you don't want to mess with it too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you see yourself doing, so you mentioned P1 surgeries, a P2, P3, P4, P5, just more and more and more humans?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
All right, I'll sign up for that. Did you ever anthropomorphize the robot, R1? Like, do you give it a name? Do you see it as like a friend that's like working together with you? I mean, to a certain degree, it's... Or an enemy who's going to take your job?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Keep telling yourself that. How have all the surgeries that you've done over the years changed? the people you've helped and the stakes, the high stakes that you've mentioned, how has that changed your understanding of life and death?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
like right off the bat or do you work your way up to it so i uh across across two days because on the first day i took two and i okay it was a it was a ride but it wasn't quite like uh it wasn't like a revelation it wasn't into deep space type ride it was just like a little airplane ride i saw some trees and some some visuals and all i just saw a dragon all that kind of stuff
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Maybe I've come to accept the intellectual certainty of it, but it may be the pain that comes with losing the people you love. I don't think I've come to understand the existential pain aspect of it, like that this is gonna end. And I don't mean like in some trite way. I mean like it certainly feels like it's not going to end. Like you live life like it's not going to end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And the fact that this light that's shining, this consciousness is going to no longer be one moment, maybe today. It's like, it fills me when I really am able to load all that in with Ernest Becker's terror. Like it's a real fear. I think people aren't always honest with how terrifying it is. I think the more you are able to really think through it, the more terrifying it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's not such a simple thing. Oh, well, it's the way life is. If you really can load that in, it's hard. But I think that's why the Stoics did it, because it like, helps you get your shit together and be like, well, the moment, every single moment you're alive is just beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And it's terrifying that it's gonna end and it's like, almost like you're shivering in the cold, a child, helpless, this kind of feeling. And then it makes you, when you have warmth, when you have the safety, when you have the love to really appreciate it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I feel like sometimes in your position, when you mentioned armor, just to see death, it might make you not be able to see that, the finiteness of life. Because if you kept looking at that, it might break you. So it's good to know that you're kind of still struggling with that. There's the neurosurgeon and then there's a human. And the human is still able to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
struggle with that and feel the fear of that and the pain of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
but uh nine cups you went to pluto i think pluto yeah no deep space deep space no one of the interesting uh aspects of my experience is i was i thought i would have some demons some stuff to work through that's what people that's what everyone says no one's ever says yeah i had nothing i had all positive i just so full of your soul i don't think so i don't know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's the early steps of a potentially gigantic leap for humanity. It's a really interesting one. And it's cool because you read about all this stuff in history where it's like the early days. I've been reading, before going to the Amazon, I would read about explorers. They will go and explore even the Amazon jungle for the first time. It's just, those are the early steps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Or early steps into space. Early steps in any discipline, in physics and mathematics. And it's cool because this is like, on the grand scale, these are the early steps into delving deep into the human brain. So not just observing the brain, but you'll be able to interact with the human brain. It's going to help a lot of people, but it also might,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Help us understand what the hell's going on in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You can think about all the suffering that's going on in the world. Every single human being that's suffering right now, it'll be a glowing red dot. The more suffering, the more it's glowing. And you just see the map of human suffering. And any technology that allows you to dim that light of suffering on a grand scale is pretty exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We were supposed to do a podcast many, many times, but I'm just not sure I can handle the level of greatness that is Phil Hellmuth. No, I love him. We'll probably have a podcast at some point in the future. I'm not sure he has a masterclass, but he, his essence, his way of being, his infinite wisdom, and the infinite number of championships that he has won is in itself a masterclass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because there's a lot of people suffering, and most of them suffer quietly. And we look away too often. And we should remember those that are suffering, because once again, most of them are suffering quietly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. When you, all the surgeries you've done, have you seen consciousness in there ever? Was there like a glowing light?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But I kept thinking about, it had extremely high resolution thoughts about the people I know in my life. You were there. And it's just, not from my relationship with that person, but just as the person themselves, I had just this deep gratitude of who they are. It was just like this exploration. Like Sims or whatever, you get to watch them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That is so brilliant. It's the same way, it's the sensation of touch when you're touching a thing. Consciousness is the sensation of you feeling your brain working, your brain thinking, your brain perceiving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And as we said, it's one heck of a brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Everything we see around us, everything we love, everything that's beautiful came from brains like these. It's all electrical activity happening inside your skull. And I, for one, am grateful that it's people like you that are exploring all the ways that it works and all the ways it can be made better. Thanks, Lex. Thank you so much for talking today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matthew McDougall. And now, dear friends, here's Bliss Chapman, Brain Interface Software Lead at Neuralink. You told me that you've met hundreds of people with spinal cord injuries or with ALS and that your motivation for helping at Neuralink is grounded in wanting to help them. Can you describe this motivation?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I got to watch people and just be in awe of how amazing they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it was great. I was waiting for... When's the demon coming?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's both an engineering problem in terms of a BCI, for example, that can give them capabilities where they can interact with the world. But also on the other side, it's an engineering problem for the rest of the world to make it more accessible for people living with quadriplegia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Maybe I'll have some negative thoughts. Nothing. Nothing. I had just extreme gratitude for them. And also a lot of space travel. Space travel to where? So here's what it was. It was people... the human beings that I know, they had this kind of, the best way I can describe it is they had a glow to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there's a lot of fascinating aspects to what it takes to get Nolan to be able to control a cursor on the screen with his mind. You texted me something that I just love. You said, I was part of the team that interviewed and selected P1. I was in the operating room during the first human surgery, monitoring live signals coming out of the brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I work with the user basically every day to develop new UX paradigms, decoding strategies, and I was part of the team that figured out how to recover useful BCI to new world record levels when the signal quality degraded. We'll talk about, I think, every aspect of that, but just zooming out, what was it like to be part of that team and part of that historic, I would say, historic first?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And they used that brain to talk to you previously. And now it's right there moving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Actually, I didn't realize that in terms of the thread sending. So the Neuralink implant is active during surgery. So in one thread at a time, you're able to start seeing the signal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that's part of the way you test that the thing is working.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then I kept flying out from them to see Earth, to see our solar system, to see our galaxy, and I saw that light, that glow, all across the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So this is no signal processing, the raw data, and then the signal processing's on top of it. You're seeing the spikes detected. Right, yeah. And that's a UX too. Yes. That looks beautiful as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What was that like, seeing the robot do some of the surgery? So the computer vision aspect where it detects all the... all the spots that avoid the blood vessels, and then obviously with human supervision, then actually doing the really high precision connection of the threads to the brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. All the practice surgeries and the proxies. And this is just another day. Yeah. Yeah. So what about when Nolan woke up? Do you remember a moment where he was able to move the cursor, not move the cursor, but get signal from the brain such that it was able to show that there's a connection?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But always pointing in. Okay. Yeah. Past the Milky Way, past... I mean, I saw a huge number of galaxies, intergalactic, and all of it was glowing. But I couldn't control that travel because I would actually explore near... distances to the solar system, see if there's aliens or any of that kind of stuff. Zero aliens? Implication of aliens, because they were glowing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And when you say single channel, is that associated with a single electrode?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And there's 1,024 of those. 1,024, yeah. It's incredible that that works. That really, when I was... learning about all this and like loading it in, it was just blowing my mind that the intention, you can visualize yourself moving the finger, that can turn into a signal. And the fact that you can then skip that step and visualize the cursor moving,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
or have the intention of the cursor moving and that leading to a signal that can then be used to move the cursor. There is so many exciting things there to learn about the brain, about the way the brain works. The very fact of their existing signal that can be used is really powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But it feels like that's just like the beginning of figuring out how that signal can be used really, really effectively. I should also just, there's so many fascinating details here, but you mentioned the body mapping step. At least in the version I saw that Nolan was showing off, there's like a super nice interface, like a graphical interface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It just felt like I was in the future, because I guess it visualizes you moving the hand. And there's a very like... Like a sexy, polished interface that, hello. I don't know if there's a voice component, but it just felt like when you wake up in a really nice video game and this is a tutorial at the beginning of that video game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But it's not easy to pull that off. I mean, it needs to be simple, but not too simple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So maybe it'd be nice to get into a little bit more detail of what the signal looks like and what the decoding looks like. So there's a N1 implant. that has, like we mentioned, 1,024 electrodes, and that's collecting raw data, raw signal. What does that signal look like? And what are the different steps along the way before it's transmitted? And what is transmitted? All that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
They were glowing in the same way that humans were glowing. That life force that I was seeing, the thing that made... humans amazing was there throughout the universe. Like there was these glowing dots. So I don't know. It made me feel like there's life. No, not life, but something, whatever makes humans amazing all throughout the universe. Sounds good. Yeah, it was amazing. No demons, no demons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Quick tangents here. You mentioned electrode neuron. There's a local neighborhood of neurons nearby. How difficult is it to like isolate from where the spike came from?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Okay. So you have to do this kind of spike detection on board. And you have to do that super efficiently, so fast and not use too much power because you don't want to be generating too much heat. So it has to be a super simple signal processing step. Yeah. Is there some wisdom you can share about what it takes to overcome that challenge?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I looked for the demons. There's no demons. There were dragons and they're pretty awesome. So the thing about trees.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
No. dragons but they weren't scary they were friends they were protective so the thing is magic dragon no it was it was more like uh game of thrones they weren't very friendly they were very big so the thing is the giant trees at night which is where i was i mean the jungle's kind of scary yeah the trees started to look like dragons and they were all like looking at me
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So also in terms of communication, you're limited by the amount of data you can send. Yeah. And also because you're currently using the Bluetooth protocol, you have to batch stuff together. But you have to also do this keeping the latency crazy low, like crazy low. Anything to say about the latency?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Unless... uh people without paralysis are also allowed to implant right which is it is another way to interact with a digital uh device and there's some there's something to that if if it's a fundamentally different experience more efficient experience even if it's not like some kind of full-on high bandwidth communication if it's just the ability to move the mouse
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
uh 10x faster like the bits per second if i can achieve a bit per second at 10x what i can do with the mouse that's a really interesting possibility what they can do especially as you get really good at it uh with training it's definitely the case that you have a higher ceiling performance like you because you don't have to buffer your intention through your arm through your muscle you get just by nature of having a brain implant at all like 75 millisecond lead time on any action that you're actually trying to take
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, I suppose we've gotten used to that latency, that natural latency that happens. So is currently the bottleneck the communication? So like the Bluetooth communication? What's the actual bottleneck? I mean, there's always going to be a bottleneck, but what's the current bottleneck?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And it didn't seem scary. It seemed like they were protecting me. And the shaman and the people... They didn't speak any English, by the way, which made it even scarier. Because we're not even like... We're worlds apart in many ways. It's just... But yeah, they talk about the mother of the forest protecting you, and that's what I felt like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's a really cool challenge. I also like that for a t-shirt, the best mouse in the world. Tell me on the receiving end. So the decoding step. Now we figured out what the spikes are. We've got them all together. Now we're sending that over to the app. What's the decoding step look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Actually, even if we zoom out beyond that, what is the app? So there's an implant that's wirelessly communicating with any digital device that has an app installed. So maybe can you tell me at high level what the app is, what the software is outside of the brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the calibration process... the interface has to encourage precision. Meaning like whatever it does, it should be super intuitive that the next thing the human is going to likely do is exactly that intention that you need and only that intention. And you don't have any feedback except that may be speaking to you afterwards what they actually did. You can't, oh yeah. So that's fundamentally...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That is a really exciting UX challenge, because that's all on the UX. It's not just about being friendly or nice or usable. It's like- User experience is how it works. It's how it works. For the calibration, and calibration, at least at this stage of Neuralink, is like fundamental to the operation of the thing. And not just calibration, but continued calibration, essentially. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Me and this guy named Paul Rosalie, who basically is a Tarzan. He lives in the jungle. We went out deep, and we just went crazy. Wow. Yeah. So anyway, can I get that same experience in a Neuralink? Probably, yeah. I guess that is the question for non-disabled people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's really important to have very clean labels, yes? So like the problem becomes much harder from the machine learning perspective if the labels are noisy. That's correct. And then to get the clean labels, that's a UX challenge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
For that step, what are we supposed to be visualizing? There's a cursor and you want to move that cursor to the right or the left, the up and down, or maybe move them by a certain offset. So that's one way. Is that the best way to do calibration? So for example, an alternative crazy way that probably is playing a role here is a game like WebGrid. Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
where you're just getting a very large amount of data, the person playing a game, where if they are in a state of flow, maybe you can get clean signal as a side effect. Yep. Or is that not an effective way for initial calibration?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think that there's a lot in our perception, in our experience of the world that could be explored, that could be played with using Neuralink?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Okay, there's a lot of really fascinating things there. Yeah, actually, just to stay on the closed loop, I've... I've seen situations. This actually happened watching psychology grad students. They use a piece of software when they don't know how to program themselves. They use a piece of software that somebody else wrote and it has a bunch of bugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And they figure out like, and they've been using it for years. They figure out ways to work around it. Oh, that just happens. Nobody considers maybe we should fix this. They just adapt. And that's a really interesting notion that we're really good at adapting but you need to still, that might not be the optimal. Okay, so how do you solve that problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you have to restart from scratch every once in a while kind of thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the intention, not the physical movement or whatever. Yeah. There's obviously a very strong correlation between the two, but the intention is a more powerful thing to be chasing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, that's also super interesting. I mean, the intention itself is fascinating because, yes, with the BCI here, in this case with digital telepathy, you're acting on the intentions. not the action, which is why there's an experience of like, feeling like it's happening before you meant for it to happen. That is so cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And that is why you could achieve superhuman performance, probably, in terms of the control of the mouse. So for OpenLoop, just to clarify, so whenever the person is tasked to move the mouse to the right, you said there's not feedback. So they don't get to get that satisfaction of actually getting it to move, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there's a psychology element here. Yeah, absolutely. And again, all of that is UX challenge. How much signal drift is there, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month? How often do you have to recalibrate because of the signal drift?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
By the way, all of this is done by looking to the right side of the screen, selecting the mixer, and the mixer you have... It's like DJ mode. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, it's a really well done interface. It's really, really well done. And so, yeah, there's that bias that there's a cursor drift that Nolan talked about in a stream. Although he said that you guys were just playing around with it with him and they're constantly improving. So that could have been just a snapshot of that particular moment, a particular day. But he said that there was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
this cursor drift and this bias that could be removed by him, I guess, looking to the right side of the screen or left side of the screen to kind of adjust the bias. That's one interface action, I guess, to adjust the bias.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I love it. The qualia of the cursor experience. Yeah, I mean, it sounds poetic, but it is deeply true. There is an experience. When it works well, it is a joyful, a really pleasant experience. And when it doesn't work well, it's a very frustrating experience. That's actually the art of UX. It's like you have the possibility to frustrate people or the possibility to give them joy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Is there some kind of things along the lines of like Fitts' Law where you should move the mouse in a certain kind of way that maximizes your chance to hit the target? I don't even know what I'm asking, but I'm hoping the intention of my question will land on a profound answer. No. Is there some kind of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
understanding of the laws of UX when it comes to the context of somebody using their brain to control it. Like that's different than actual with a mouse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's so fascinating that assigning cost to every action when an error occurs. So every action, if an error occurs, has a certain cost. And incorporating that into how you interpret the intention, mapping it to the action is really important. I didn't quite, until you said it, realize there's a cost to like sending the text early. It's like a very expensive cost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Wow, that is really fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So maybe this is a good place to ask about how to measure performance, this whole bits per second. Can you explain what you mean by that? Maybe a good place to start is to talk about WebGrid as a game, as a good illustration of the measurement of performance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I speak with each of them individually, so use timestamps to jump around or, as I recommend, go hardcore and listen to the whole thing. This is the longest podcast I've ever done. It's a fascinating, super technical, and wide-ranging conversation, and I loved every minute of it. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What's the journey with Nolan on that quest of increasing the BPS on WebGrid? In March, you said that he selected 89,285 targets on WebGrid. Yep. So he loves this game. He's really serious about improving his performance in this game. So what is that journey of trying to figure out how to improve that performance? How much can that be done on the decoding side?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
How much can that be done on the calibration side? How much can that be done on the Nolan side of figuring out how to convey his intention more cleanly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Of course, with AI, just like you can repair photographs and fill in missing parts of photographs, maybe you can do the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But at which point does he no longer visualize the movement of his body and is just visualizing the movement of the cursor? How quickly does he go from, how quickly does it get there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I wonder if there's a way... through UX to encourage a human being to discover that. Because he discovered it, like you said to me, that he's a pioneer. So he discovered that on his own through all of this, the process of trying to move the cursor with different kinds of intentions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But that is clearly a really powerful thing to arrive at, which is to let go of trying to control the fingers and the hand and control the actual digital device with your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That is so fascinating. But I wonder on the biological side, how long it takes for the brain to adapt. So is it just simply learning like high level software or is there like a neuroplasticity component where like the brain is adjusting slowly?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But that is one of the most beautiful aspects of the human experience is remembering the good memories. Like we live most of our life, as Danny Kahneman has talked about, in our memories, not in the actual moment. We're collecting memories and we kind of relive them in our head. And that's the good times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Or maybe if that naturally happens for people, you can just occasionally encourage them to allow themselves to move the cursor. Right. Actually, sometimes just like with a four minute mile, just the knowledge that that's possible. Pushes you to do it. Yeah. Enables you to do it. And then it becomes trivial. And then it also makes you wonder, this is the cool thing about humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Once there's a lot more human participants, they will discover things that are possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And that because of them sharing it, they'll be able to do it. All of a sudden that's unlocked for everybody. Because just the knowledge sometimes is the thing that enables it to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So how often are the updates to the decoder? Because Nolan mentioned like, okay, there's a new update that we're working on and that in the stream he said he plays the snake game because it's like super hard. It's a good way for him to test like how good the update is. So, and he says like, sometimes the update is a step backwards. It's like, it's a constant like iteration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So how often, like, what does the update entail? Is it most on the decoder side? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
If you just integrate over our entire life, it's remembering the good times that produces the largest amount of happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's fascinating because one of the things you mentioned that there was 271 pages of notes taken from the BCI sessions and this was just in March. So one of the amazing things about human beings that they can provide, especially ones who are smart and excited and all like positive and good vibes like Nolan, that they can provide feedback, continuous feedback.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, and this is such an interesting space of UX design because there's so many unknowns here. And I can tell UX is difficult because of how many people do it poorly. It's just not a trivial thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, that's the old stories of Steve Jobs rolling in there. Yeah, the user is a useful signal, but it's not a perfect signal. And sometimes you have to remove the floppy disk drive or whatever. I forgot all the crazy stories of Steve Jobs making wild design decisions. But there, some of his aesthetic...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
that some of it is about the love you put into the design, which is very much a Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive type thing. But when you have a human being using their brain to interact with it, it also is deeply about function. It's not just aesthetic. And that you have to empathize with a human being before you while not always listening to them directly. Like you have to deeply empathize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating. And at the same time, iterate, right? But not iterate in small ways. Sometimes a complete, like rebuilding the design. He said that, Nolan said in the early days, the UX sucked, but you improved quickly. What was that journey like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so- Might be a good quick pause to say the mouth stick is the thing he's using, holding a stick in his mouth to scroll on a tablet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's exhausting. It's it hurts and it's inefficient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So if we can store them as accurately as possible, we basically achieve a kind of immortality. You've talked about the threats, the safety concerns of AI. Let's look at long-term visions. Do you think Neuralink is... in your view, the best current approach we have for AI safety?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, even the scroll on a smartphone with your finger feels extremely natural and pleasant. And it probably takes an extremely long time to get that right. And actually the same kind of visionary approach UX design that we're talking about. Don't always listen to the users, but also listen to them and also have like visionary big, like throw everything out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Think from first principles, but also not. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, it just makes me think that scroll bars on the desktop. probably have stagnated and never taken that like, because the snap, same as it's like snap to grid, snap to scroll bar action you're talking about is something that could potentially be extremely useful in the desktop setting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Even just for users to just improve the experience. Because the current scroll bar experience in the desktop is horrible. Yeah. It's hard to find, hard to control. There's not a momentum. And the intention should be clear. When I start moving towards the scroll bar, there should be a snap into the scroll bar action.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But of course, maybe I'm okay paying that cost, but there's hundreds of millions of people paying that cost nonstop. But anyway, but in this case, this is necessary because there's an extra cost paid by Nolan for the jitteriness. So you have to switch between the scrolling and the reading. There has to be a phase shift between the two. Like when you're scrolling, you're scrolling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So how much of the work on the decoder is generalizable to P2, P3, P4, P5, PN? How do you improve the decoder in a way that's generalizable?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the actual mechanism of open loop labeling and then closed loop labeling will be the same and hopefully can generalize across the different users as they're doing the calibration step. And the calibration step is pretty cool. I mean, that in itself, the interesting thing about WebGrid, which is like closed loop, it's like fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I love it when there's like, there used to be kind of an idea of human computation, which is using actions a human would want to do anyway to get a lot of signal from. And like WebGrid is that, like a nice video game that also serves as great calibration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, and just in case it's not clear, WebGrid is, there's a grid of, let's say, 35 by 35 cells, and one of them lights up blue, and you have to move your mouse over that and click on it. And if you miss it, it's red.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And what's your record, you said?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So one of the reasons I think I struggle with that game is I'm such a keyboard person. So everything is done with your keyboard. If I can avoid touching the mouse, it's great. So how can you explain your high performance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the first thing is- I have to fast for five days. I have to go up to the mountains.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Are you moving with your wrist or you're never- I move with my fingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. You know those, just on a small tangent, which I've been meaning to go down this rabbit hole of people that set the world record in Tetris. Those folks, they're playing, there's a way to, did you see this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, you could find a way to do it. where like it's using a loophole, like a bug that you can do some incredibly fast stuff. So it's along that line, but not quite. But you do realize there'll be like a few programmers right now listening to this cool fast and eat peanut butter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What do you think is possible, like 20?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What do you think it takes for Nolan to be able to do above 8,500? to keep increasing that number. You said like every increase in the number might require different. Yeah. Different improvements in the system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Would the number of threads increasing also potentially help?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the more we increase the data rate that humans can intake and output, then that means the higher the chance we have in a world full of AGIs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Right, so that's more about the number of actions. So actually, as you increase the number of threads, that's more about increasing the number of actions you're able to perform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Can you linger on reliability here? So first of all, when you say non-stationarity of the signal, which aspect are you referring to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool that I've used for a long time now. I've used it primarily for note-taking because, you know, you need a big team for team collaboration. but the people who I know who have used it for the team collaboration capabilities have really loved it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So can you just adjust to the baseline to make it relative to the baseline nonstop?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's interesting. Just on that point, it's kind of incredible to watch Nolan be able to multitask, to do multiple tasks at the same time, to be able to move the mouse cursor effectively while talking and while being nervous because he's talking in front of the camera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Kicking your ass. And talk trash while doing it. So all at the same time. And yes, if you're trying to normalize to the baseline, that might throw everything off. Boy, is that interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And that output rate would be by increasing the number of electrodes, number of channels, and also maybe implanting multiple neural links. Yeah. Do you think there will be a world in the next couple of decades where it's hundreds of millions of people have neural links? Yeah, I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You mentioned neural decoder. How much machine learning is in the decoder? How much magic, how much science, how much art? how difficult is it to come up with a decoder that figures out what these sequence of spikes mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think when people just, when they see the capabilities, the superhuman capabilities that are possible, and then the safety is demonstrated?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Is it a data constraint at this time? Which is what it sounds like. how do you get a lot of good labels?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But even like, even just the quantity, I mean, because it has to be trained on the interactions. I guess there's not that many interactions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is super cool because it feels like all of this is very solvable, but it's hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So what things are you excited about in the future development? of the software stack on Neuralink. So everything we've been talking about, the decoding, the UX.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it seems virtually impossible to me that a thousand electrodes is where it saturates. It feels like this would be one of those silly notions in the future where obviously you should have millions of electrodes, and this is where the true breakthroughs happen. You tweeted, some thoughts are most precisely described in poetry. Why do you think that is?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So being literal sometimes is a suboptimal compression for the thing you're trying to convey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it's resonating with some deep thing within you that the artist also experienced and was able to convey that through the pixels. And that's actually going to be relevant for full-on telepathy. You know, it's like if you just read the poetry literally, that doesn't say much of anything interesting. It requires a human to interpret it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's the combination of the human mind and all the experiences the human being has within the context of the collective intelligence of the human species that makes that poem make sense. And they load that in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so in that same way, the signal that carries from human to human meaning may seem trivial, but may actually carry a lot of power because of the complexity of the human mind and the receiving end. Yeah, that's interesting. Poetry still doesn't... Who was it? I think Yoshibaku, first of all, said something about all the people that think we've achieved AGI explain why humans like music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And until the AGI likes music, you haven't achieved AGI or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So breaking structure or breaking symmetry is something that humans seem to like, maybe as simple as that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What do you think is the meaning of human existence?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's interesting how much value you assign to the task of asking the right questions. That's the main thing. It's not the answers, it's the questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. The computer's talking to a tree, a slow-moving tree that's trying to swipe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, Bliss, thank you for everything you do. And thank you for being you. And thank you for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bliss Chapman. And now, dear friends, here's Nolan Arbaugh, the first human being to have a Neuralink device implanted in his brain. You had a diving accident in 2016 that left you paralyzed with no feeling from the shoulders down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
How did that accident change your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think it's exciting and scary for people because once you have a very high bit rate, it changes the human experience in a way that's very hard to imagine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's beautiful to see that you see the silver lining in all of this. I was just going back. Do you remember the moment when you first realized you were paralyzed from the neck down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Has there been low points along the way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Hey, if I can get like a thousand BPS. A thousand BPS. And it's safe and I can just interact with the computer while laying back and eating Cheetos. I don't eat Cheetos. There's certain aspects of human-computer interaction when done more efficiently and more enjoyably are worth it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
From everything I've seen of you online, your streams, and the way you are today, I really admire you. let's say, your unwavering positive outlook on life. Has that always been this way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's just great to see that cynicism didn't take over, given everything you've been through. Yeah. Was that a deliberate choice you made, that you're not going to let this keep you down?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What was the experience like of you being selected to be the first human being to have a Neuralink device implanted in your brain? Were you scared? Excited?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I got to visit Memphis. Yeah, yeah. You're going big on compute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You've also said play to win or don't play at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What does it take to win?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And the thing I very much appreciate about Notion is how effectively they've been able to integrate LLMs into their tool. Their AI assistant looks across multiple documents. You can ask questions about those multiple documents. Of course, you can do all the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What was the day of surgery like? When did you wake up? What did you feel?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Can you take me through the prank? Yeah, this is something... Do you regret doing that now?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So how can Grok, let's say, 3, that might be available next year? Well, hopefully end of this year. Grok 3. If we're lucky, yeah. How can that be the best LLM, the best AI system available in the world? How much of it is compute? How much of it is data? How much of it is post-training? How much of it is the product that you package it up in? All that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's a dark way to do it, but I love it. Yeah. What was the first time you were able to feel that you can use the Neuralink device to affect the world around you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you're imagining yourself moving each individual finger one at a time. Yeah. And then seeing like that you can notice something. And then when you did the index finger, you're like, oh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Maybe you could speak to what it's like to sort of wiggle your fingers, to imagine that the mental, the cognitive effort required to sort of wiggle your index finger, for example. How easy is that to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that's part of the recovery process is to keep trying to move your body.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And the nervous system does its thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's not like a third person perspective. It's a first person perspective. You're like, It's not like you're imagining yourself walking. You're like literally doing this, everything, all the same stuff as if you're walking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Like frustrating hard or like actually cognitively hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's really, really cool. So it's amazing to know because I've learned a lot about the body mapping procedure. Yeah. Like with the interface and everything like that, it's cool to know that you've been essentially like training to be like world class at that task.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's really awesome to hear because I think it's one of those things that can really pay off in the long term. Because it is training. You're not visibly seeing the results of that training at the moment. But there's an Olympic-level nervous system getting ready for something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And also just the signal that there's still a powerhouse of a brain there that's like, And as the technology develops, that brain is, I mean, that's the most important thing about the human body is the brain. And it can do a lot of the control. So what did it feel like when you first could wiggle the index finger and saw the environment respond like that little...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think we're just being way too dramatic according to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What did you like read up on the specs of the hardware you get installed? Like the number of threads?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
When was the first time you were able to move a mouse cursor?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, that's a fascinating difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But can you clarify, is there supposed to be a difference between imagined movement and attempted movement?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then theoretically, is that supposed to be a different part of the brain that lights up in those two different situations?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And by the way, on the mic is Bliss. So this is just different ways to prompt you to kind of get to the thing that you're around at. Attempted movement does sound like the right thing to try.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because imagine for me, I would start visualizing. Like in my mind, visualizing attempted, I would actually start trying to like, there's a, I mean, I, you know, I did like combat sports my whole life, like wrestling. When I'm imagining a move, see, I'm like moving my muscle. Exactly. Like there's a, there is a bit of an activation almost versus like visualizing yourself like a picture doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Because to you it felt for the first time like this was digital telepathy. Like you're controlling a digital device with your mind. Yep. That's a real moment of discovery. That's really cool. You've discovered something. I've seen scientists talk about a big aha moment, like Nobel Prize winning. They'll have this like, holy crap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
things you kind of expect and do them easily, like summarization or rewriting stuff or helping expand or contract the kind of stuff you've written or even generate a draft. But it can also kind of allow you to ask questions of a thing, like what's the progress of the team on a set of different tasks. Notion does a good job of integrating the LLMs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So I think that discovery is not just for you, at least from my perspective, that's a discovery for you. everyone else who ever uses a neural link that this is possible. Like, I don't think that's an obvious thing that this is even possible. It's like, I was saying to Bliss earlier, it's like the four minute mile. People thought it was impossible to run a mile in four minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And once the first person did it, then everyone just started doing it. So like, just to show that it's possible, that paves the way to like, anyone can now do it. That's the thing that's actually possible. You don't need to do the attempted movement. You can just go direct. That's crazy. It is crazy. For people who don't know, can you explain how the Link app works?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And optimus can go. So Tesla cars can, are unfortunately have to stay on the road. Optimus robot can go anywhere. There's more reality off the road and go off road.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You have an amazing stream on the topic. Your first stream, I think, on X, describing the app. Can you just describe how it works?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's really cool, because you often refer to the models. The model's the thing that's constructed once you go through the calibration step. And then you also talked about sometimes you'll play a really difficult game, like Snake, just to see how good the model is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Is the body mapping part of the data collection or is that also part of the collection?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What's the calibration step like? Is it like move left, move right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Can you actually speak to when you say follow?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You don't mean with your eyes, you mean with your intentions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Wait, wait, wait. So calibrated on attempted movement... will create a model that makes it really effective for you to then use the force. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So first of all, it's really cool that, I mean, you are a true pioneer in all of this. You're like exploring how to do every aspect of this most effectively. And there's just, I imagine so many lessons learned from this. So thank you for being a pioneer in all these kinds of different like super technical ways. And it's also cool to hear that there's like a different like feeling,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
to the experience when it's calibrated in different ways. I imagine your brain is doing something different, and that's why there's a different feeling to it. And then trying to find the words and the measurements to those feelings would be also interesting. But at the end of the day, you can also measure your actual performance. Whether it's Snake or WebGrid, you can see what actually works well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And you're saying for the open-loop calibration, the attempted movement works best for now. So the open loop, you don't get the feedback that you did something. Is that frustrating?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Um, you're full of great references. Uh, is the, is the bubble game fun?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There you go. That's the way to get a score on the calibrations. Like the speed, how quickly can you get from bubble to bubble? So there's the open loop, and then it goes to the closed loop. And the closed loop can already start giving you a sense, because you're getting feedback of how good the model is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Let's talk business. So WebGrid. I saw a presentation where Bliss said by March you selected 89,000 targets in WebGrid. Can you explain this game? What is WebGrid and what does it take to be a world-class performer in WebGrid as you continue to break world records?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's like a gold medalist, like, well, where do I begin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But, you know, until you came along and started building Optimus, it was thought to be an extremely difficult problem. I mean, it still is an extremely difficult problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Only one blue cell appears and you're supposed to move the mouse to there and click on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And you've been able to achieve at first eight bits per second and you recently broke that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think you and Elon are basically the same person because last time I did a podcast with him, he came in extremely frustrated that he can't beat Uber Lilith as a droid. That was like a year ago, I think. I forget. Like solo. Yeah. And I could just tell there's some percentage of his brain the entire time was thinking like, I wish I was right now attempting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think he did it that night. He did it that night. He stayed up and did it that night. It's just crazy to me. I mean, in a fundamental way, it's really inspiring. And what you're doing is inspiring in that way because, I mean, it's not just about the game. Everything you're doing there has impact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
By striving to do well on WebGrid, you're helping everybody figure out how to create the system all along, like the decoding, the software, the hardware, the calibration, all of it, how to make all of that work so you can do everything else really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, that's also part of the thing, is making it fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
He told me he like does it on the floor with peanut butter and he like fasts. It's weird. That sounds like cheating. Sounds like performance enhancing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Oh, so you can't do the click. So you have to – so you click by dwelling. You said 0.3?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It can already do that. But like all kinds of objects. Yeah, yeah. All foreign objects. I mean, pouring water in a cup is not trivial. Because if you don't know anything about the container, it could be all kinds of containers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Wow, so you're slowing down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is like a lead performance, okay. But that's still, it sucks that there's a ceiling of the 0.3.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Can you click using your brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Oh, because what is it? You're supposed to do either a left click or a right click. Is it different colors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But so much of the intelligence of humans goes into what we do with our hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's the manipulation of the world, manipulation of objects in the world. Intelligence-safe manipulation of objects in the world, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That said, you were able to get, to work your way up, to get the performance back, so this is like going from Rocky I to Rocky II. So when did you first realize that this is possible, and what gave you sort of the strength, the motivation, the determination to do it, to increase back up and beat your previous record?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Again, this feels like I'm interviewing an athlete. This is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What was the process? What was the feedback loop on figuring out how to do the spike detection in a way that would actually work well for Nolan?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And most importantly, get that web grid number up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So how is the, on the hover click, do you accidentally click stuff sometimes? Like what's, how hard is it to avoid accidentally clicking?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
to avoid the clicking. I guess, does that create problems like when you're gaming, accidentally click a thing? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Anytime you lose, you could just say, that was accidental. Yeah. You said the app improved a lot from version one when you first started using it. It was very different. So can you just talk about the trial and error that you went through with the team, like 200 plus pages of notes? Like what's that process like of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Going back and forth and working together to improve the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com slash lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com slash lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by the thing I'm drinking right now called Element. It's my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. They sent me a bunch of cans of sparkling water that I loved and devoured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
As the BCI community grows, would you like to hang out with the other folks with Neuralinks? Like what relationship, if any, would you want to have with them? Because you said like they might have a different set of like ideas of how to use the thing. Would you be intimidated by their WebGrid performance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What advice would you have for, uh, The next participant in the clinical trial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And something like those tendons has to be re-engineered into the optimus in order to do all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Now you're a real pro athlete. Just keep it short. Maybe it's good to talk about what you've been able to do now that you have a neural link implant, like the… the freedom you gain from this way of interacting with the outside world. Like you play video games all night and you do that by yourself. And that's a kind of freedom. Can you speak to that freedom that you gain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
When you're up at 2 a.m. playing Web Grid by yourself, I just imagine it's darkness and there's just a light glowing and you're just focused. What's going through your mind? Or are you in a state of flow where the mind is empty, like those Zen masters?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Have you ever tried WebGrid with like two targets and three targets? Can you get higher BPS with that? Can you do that? You mean like different color targets? Or are you being multiple targets? Does that change the thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. And so you can go like, that's insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
He doesn't like it because it didn't show BPS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you also play Civilization VI. I love Civ VI, yeah. You usually go with Korea? I do, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
um nice yeah just work on the science yeah that's it you're making it sound so fun it's so much fun and i also saw civilization 7 trailer oh man i'm so pumped and that's probably coming out come on sim 7 hit me up all alpha beta tests whatever when is it coming out in 2025 yeah yeah next year yeah what other stuff would you like to see improved uh about the neural link app and just the entire experience
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And there might be- Like gain and friction and all that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So you want like advanced mode, you know, like in like there's menus usually there's basic mode and you're like one of those folks, like the power user advanced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Has speech been useful? Like just being able to talk also in addition to everything else?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And that's challenging. That's hard. That's a lot of work for you to kind of take that leap, but that would be awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What was the process in terms of training yourself to go from attempted movement to imagined movement? How long did that take? So how long would this kind of process take?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Would you get an upgraded implant device?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What future capabilities are you excited about sort of beyond this kind of telepathy? Is vision interesting? So for folks who, for example, who are blind, so you're like enabling people to see, or for speech?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So as you're figuring out this problem, you have to also figure out a way to do it so you can mass manufacture it so it's to be as simple as possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What you're referring to is things like people suffering from depression or things of that nature potentially getting help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Sounds legit. I would love memory replay. Just like actually like high resolution replay of old memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, so Black Mirror always kind of considers the worst case, which is important. I think people don't consider the best case or the average case enough. I don't know what it is about us humans. We want to think about the worst possible thing. We love drama. It's like, how is this new technology going to kill everybody? We just love that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. Yeah. I assume you're going to have to take over the world. I mean, you're, I love your Twitter. You, uh, you tweeted, I'd like to make jokes about hearing voices in my head since getting the neural link, but I feel like people would take it the wrong way. Plus the voices in my head told me not to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Please never stop. So you were talking about optimists, um, Is that something you would love to be able to do to control the robotic arm or the entirety of Optimus?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You think there's something fundamentally different about just being able to physically interact with the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So one of the things you would love to be able to experience is... Opening the book, bringing it up to you, and to feel the touch of the paper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So one of the things you miss is touch. I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What would be the first thing you'd do with a hand that can touch? Give your mom a hug after that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on? Human civilization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Can you just speak to what it takes for a great engineering team, for you, what I saw in Memphis, the supercomputer cluster, is just this intense drive towards simplifying the process, understanding the process, constantly improving it, constantly iterating it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And thank you for being one such human being and continuing to be a great human being through Everything you've been through. I'm being an inspiration to many people, to myself for many reasons, including your epic, unbelievably great performance on WebGrid. I will be training all night tonight to try to catch up. You can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I believe in you that you can, once you come back, so sorry to interrupt with the Austin trip. Once you come back, eventually beat bliss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Absolutely. I'm rooting for you. The whole world is rooting for you. Thank you for everything you've done, man. Thanks. Thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Nolan Arbaugh. And before that, with Elon Musk, DJ Saw, Matthew McDougal, and Bliss Chapman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And now, let me leave you with some words from Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. We live together. We act on and react to one another. But always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena. They are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence in vain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But its very nature, every embodied spirit, is doomed to suffer and enjoy its solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies, all these are private and, except through symbols and a second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
as much as you can devour a liquid, because I think that's usually applied to solid foods, but I devoured it, and it was delicious. But yeah, it's an instrumental part of my life. It's how I get the sodium, potassium, magnesium, electrolytes into my body. I'm going for a super long run after this, and I have been drinking element before, and I sure as heck going to be drinking element after.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So like you say, you run through the algorithm and basically show up to a problem, show up to the supercomputer cluster and see the process and ask, can this be deleted? Yeah, first try to delete it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I've seen you suggest just that, that something should be deleted and you can kind of see the pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
One of many that probably leads us astray.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, it's like, wow, I really wasted a lot of effort there. I mean, what you've done with the cluster in Memphis is incredible, just in a handful of weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Same goes for hard training sessions and grappling. Essential for me to feel good, especially when I'm fasting, especially when I'm doing low-carb diets, all of that. My favorite flavor still to this day always has been is watermelon salt, but there's a lot of other delicious flavors if you want to try them out. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelements.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So that's one of the main things you have to figure out. The cooling, the power, and then on the software as you go up the stack, how to do the distributed compute, all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, I wonder if you could speak to the fact that you, one of the things that you did when I was there is you went through all the steps of what everybody's doing just to get the sense that you yourself understand it and everybody understands it so they can understand when something is dumb or something is inefficient or that kind of stuff. Can you speak to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It looks pretty cool. It's like the human brain, but at a scale that humans can visibly see. It is a brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's what it felt like walking around in the supercomputer center. It's like we're walking around inside the brain. We'll one day build a super intelligent, super, super intelligent system. Do you think there's a chance that XAI, you are the one that builds AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think humans will never acknowledge that AGI has been built. Keep moving the goalposts. Yeah. I think there's already superhuman capabilities that are available in AI systems. I think what AGI is is one that's smarter than the collective intelligence of the entire human species.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This episode is also brought to you by Motific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs that are customized with RAG on organization data. This is another use case of LLMs, which is just mind-blowing. Take all the data inside an organization and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
and allow the people in said organization to query it, to organize it, to summarize it, to analyze it, all of that, to leverage it within different products, to ask questions of how it can be improved in terms of structuring an organization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, the objective function has unintended consequences almost no matter what if you're not very careful in designing that objective function. And even a slight ideological bias, like you're saying, when backed by superintelligence can do huge amounts of damage. But it's not easy to remove that ideological bias. You're highlighting obvious, ridiculous examples. Yep, they're real examples.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But you can swing the other way. Truth is not an easy thing. We kind of bake in ideological bias in all kinds of directions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Right, like, yeah, injecting our own human biases into the thing, yeah. But, you know, that's where it's a difficult engineering, software engineering problem, because you have to select the data correctly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's crazy. Yeah. So and is it generated by human? Yeah. I mean, the data, the data filtration process is extremely, extremely difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think it's possible to have a serious, objective, rigorous political discussion with Grok for a long time?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Also on the programming front, take all of the code in, take all of the data in, and start asking questions about how the code can be improved, how it can be refactored, rewritten, all that kind of stuff. Now, the challenge that Motific is solving is how to do all that in a secure way. This is like serious stuff. You can't F it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think it matters who builds the AGI, the people and how they think and how they structure their companies and all that kind of stuff?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Right, because in small ways becomes big ways. It becomes very big ways, yeah. And when it's used more and more at scale by humans. Yeah. Since I am interviewing Donald Trump. Cool. You want to stop by?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There was, tragically, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump. After this, you tweeted that you endorse him. What's your philosophy behind that endorsement? What do you hope Donald Trump does for the future of this country and for the future of humanity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Motific is created, I believe, by Cisco, specifically their outshift group that does the cutting edge R&D. So these guys know how to do reliable business deployment of stuff that needs to be secure. It needs to be done well. So, they help you go from idea to value as soon as possible. Visit motific.ai to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C dot A-I.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Do you think politicians in general, politicians, governments, how much power do you think they have to steer humanity towards good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, first of all, thank you for recommending Will and Ariel Duran's work. I've read the short one by now. The Lessons of History. One of the lessons, one of the things they highlight is the importance of technology, technological innovation, which is funny because they wrote so long ago, but they were noticing that the rate of technological innovation was speeding up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I would love to see what they think about now. But yeah, so to me, the question is how much government, how much politicians get in the way of technological innovation and building versus like help it and which politicians, which kind of policies help technological innovation. Because that seems to be, if you look at human history, that's an important component of empires rising and succeeding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Cloak for privacy, Masterclass for learning, Notion for taking notes, Element for hydration, Motific for generative AI deployment, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, these are the early, early days. And so we make it very dramatic because there's been rises and falls of empires.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours for individuals, for couples, easy, discreet, affordable, available worldwide. I think therapy is a really, really, really nice thing. Talk therapy is a really powerful thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
We tend to think that we're somehow different from those people. One of the other things that Durant highlights is that human nature seems to be the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What do you think it takes for the American empire to not collapse in the near-term future, in the next hundred years, to continue flourishing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I think what BetterHelp does for a lot of people is introduce them to that. It's a great first step. Try it out. For a lot of people, it can work. But at the very least, it's a thing that allows you to explore the possibility of talk therapy and how that feels in your life. They've helped over 4.4 million people. That's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
In fact, we should probably increase it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then there's other things like human freedoms and just giving people the freedom to build stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I wish you could just like for a week go into Washington and like be the head of the committee for making, what is it, for the garbage collection, making government smaller, like removing stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I think the biggest selling point is just how easy it is to get started, how accessible it is. Of course, there's a million other ways to explore the inner workings of the human mind, looking in the mirror and exploring the union shadow. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. So this is a good first step in exploring your own mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
How do you keep your just positivity, optimism about the world, a clarity of thinking about the world, so just not become resentful or cynical or all that kind of stuff? Just getting attacked by a very large number of people, misrepresented.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Can you speak to what it takes to be useful for somebody like you? Well, there's so many amazing, great teams. How do you allocate your time to being the most useful?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Given that, how do you take risks? How do you do the algorithm that you mentioned? I mean, deleting, given that a small thing can be a billion dollars. How do you decide to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. And now, dear friends, here's Elon Musk, his fifth time on this, the Lex Friedman podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And the other possible great filters, super powerful technology like AGI, for example. So you're basically trying to knock out... one great filter at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, in that way, I have miserably failed civilization, and I'm hoping to fix that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah. I've got to allocate more compute to the whole process. But apparently it's not that difficult. No. It's like unskilled labor. Yeah. Well, if I, one of the things you do for me and for the world is to inspire us with what the future could be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And so some of the things we've talked about, some of the things you're building, alleviating human suffering with Neuralink and expanding the capabilities of the human mind, trying to build a colony on Mars. So creating a backup for humanity on another planet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
and exploring the possibilities of what artificial intelligence could be in this world, especially in the real world AI with hundreds of millions, maybe billions of robots walking around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, thank you for building the future, and thank you for inspiring so many of us to keep building and creating cool stuff, including kids. You're welcome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Go forth and multiply. Thank you, Elon. Thanks for talking, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Elon Musk. And now, dear friends, here's DJ Sa, the co-founder, president, and COO of Neolink. When did you first become fascinated by the human brain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's fascinating that that is one of the ways to reveal the power of a thing by watching it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And by the way, the term plastic, as we'll use a bunch, means that it's adaptable. So neuroplasticity refers to the adaptability of the human brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
jarring i'd say okay uh okay so first let's step back and uh big congrats on getting neural link implanted into a human that's a historic step for neural link
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Also, if you want to maybe submit feedback or submit questions that I can answer in the podcast or just get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make these interesting, but if you do skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And the recording step would be the only one that requires any energy. So what would require energy in that little step?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So on the theme of parking very small computational devices next to neurons, that's the dream, the vision of brain-computer interfaces. Maybe before we talk about Neuralink, can you give a sense of the history of the field of BCI? What has been maybe the continued dream and also some of the milestones along the way with the different approaches and the amazing work done at the various labs?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And with each one, you're going to be learning a lot of lessons about the neurobiology of the brain, everything, the whole chain of the neuro, like the decoding, the signal processing, all that kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The abstract reads, the activity of single neurons in precentral cortex of anesthetized monkeys was conditioned by reinforcing high rates of neuronal discharge with delivery of a food pellet. Auditory and visual feedback of unit firing rates was usually provided in addition to food reinforcement. Cool. So they actually got it done. They got it done. This is back in 1969.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
After several training sessions, monkeys could increase the activity of newly isolated cells by 50 to 500% above rates before reinforcement. Fascinating. Brain is very plastic. And so from here, the number of experiments grew.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Okay, so going slowly towards Neuralink, one interesting question is what do I understand on the BCI front on invasive versus non-invasive from this line of work? How important is it to park next to the neuron? What does that get you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What improvements do you think we'll see in Neuralink in the coming, let's say, let's get crazy, coming years?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So what is the biophysics of the read and write communication that we're talking about here as we now step into the efforts at Neuralink?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, I suppose there's, on the biological level, at every level of the complexity of the hierarchy of the organism, there's going to be some mechanisms for storing information. and for doing computation, and this is just one such way. But to do that with biological and chemical components is interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Plus, like, when neurons, I mean, it's not just electricity, it's chemical communication, it's also mechanical. I mean, these are like actual objects that have like, that vibrate, I mean, they move.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Also not to mention as Roger Penrose talks about the, there might be some beautiful weirdness in the quantum mechanical effects of all of this. And he actually believes that consciousness might emerge from the quantum mechanical effects there. So like there's physics, there's chemistry, there's biology, all of that is going on there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
you'll be hearing other ones. So if you move another 100 micron, you'll be hearing chatter from another community. And so the whole sense is you want to place as many as possible electrodes and then you're listening to the chatter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Yeah, that BPS is an interesting metric to measure. There might be a big leap in the experience once you reach a certain level of BPS. Yeah. Like entire new ways of interacting with the computer might be unlocked. And with humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But once again, with the electrodes, the biophysics that you need to understand is not as deep because no matter where you're placing it, you're listening to a small crowd of local neurons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There are many, many of them. But then again, there's a whole field of neuroscience that's studying how the different groupings, the different sections of the seating in the arena, what they usually are responsible for, which is where the metaphor probably falls apart, because the seating is not that organized in an arena.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, they're mostly quiet, but like when they speak, they say profound shit, I think. That's the way I'd like to think about it. Anyway, before we zoom in even more, let's zoom out. So how does Neuralink work? From... the surgery to the implant to the signal and the decoding process and the human being able to use the implant to actually affect the world outside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And all of this, I'm asking in the context of there's a gigantic historic milestone that Neuralink just accomplished in January of this year, putting a Neuralink implant in the first human being, Noland.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And there's been a lot to talk about there about his experience because he's able to describe all the nuance and the beauty and the fascinating complexity of that experience of everything involved. But on the technical level, how does Neuralink work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there's onboard signal processing already just to decide whether this is an interesting event or not. So there is some computational power onboard inside, in addition to the human brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
All of this is really fascinating. But let's stick on the N1 implant itself. So the thing that's in the brain. So I'm looking at a picture of it. There's an enclosure. There's a charging coil. So we didn't talk about the charging, which is fascinating. The battery, the power electronics, the antenna. Then there's the signal processing electronics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I wonder if there's more kinds of signal processing you can do. That's another question. And then there's the threads themselves. with the enclosure on the bottom. So maybe to ask about the charging. So there's an external charging device.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Listen, I'm pretty sure nobody in their right mind listens to me at 1x. They listen at 2x. I can only imagine what 10x would feel like, or I could actually understand it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Those threads look tiny. That's incredible. That is really incredible. That is really incredible. And also, you're right, most of the actual volume is the battery. This is way smaller than I realized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
There's a lot of really fascinating design here to make it... I mean, you're integrating a computer into a complex biological system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This episode is brought to you by Cloaked, a platform that lets you generate new email address and a phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and your actual phone number to remain secret from said website. It seems that increasingly the right approach to the interwebs is trust no one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So let's talk about the threads themselves, those tiny, tiny, tiny things. So how many of them are there? You mentioned a thousand electrodes. How many threads are there and what do the electrodes have to do with the threads?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
It's crazy that that thing I'm looking at has the polymer insulation, has the conducting material, and has 16 electrodes at the end of it. On each of those threads? Yeah, on each of those threads. Correct. 16, each one of those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And I mean, to state the obvious, or maybe for people who are just listening, they're flexible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So what's some, maybe, can you speak to some interesting aspects of the material design here? Like, what does it take to... to design a thing like this and to be able to manufacture a thing like this for people who don't know anything about this kind of thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And what does the Utah Ray look like? So it's a rigid type of... Yeah, so we can actually look it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I'm still holding on to 1 because I'm afraid. I'm afraid of myself becoming bored with the reality, with the real world where everyone's speaking in 1X. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What are some of the challenges associated with flexible threads? For example, on the robotic side, R1, implanting those threads, how difficult is that task?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Correct. Correct. So this is fascinating. So you mentioned optics. So there's a robot, R1. So for now, there's a human that actually creates a hole in the skull. And then after that, there's a computer vision component that's finding a way to avoid the blood vessels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then you're grabbing it by the loop, each individual thread, and placing it in a particular location to avoid the blood vessels. And also choosing the depth of placement, all that. So controlling every, like the 3D geometry of the placement. Correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's a good way to put it. The effective bit rate. I mean, that is the question, is how much information is actually compressed in the low-bit transfer of language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the computer vision component finds great targets, candidates, and the human kind of approves them. And the robot does. Does it do like one thread at a time? It does one thread at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And the actual electrodes are placed at differing depths. I mean, it's very small differences, but differences. Yeah, yeah. And so there's some reasoning behind that, as you mentioned. It gets more varied signal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
This is fascinating. Okay, so there's a million questions here. If we could zoom in specifically on the electrodes, what is your sense, how many neurons is each individual electrode listening to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Okay, so that's a nice signal processing step from which you can then make much better predictions about if there's a spike, especially in this kind of context where there could be multiple neurons screaming. And that also results in you being able to compress the data better on the side of the day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So it's communication constraint. Is there some potential innovation there on the protocol used? Absolutely. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Hence the N1 and the R1. I imagine that increases. NX, RX. Yeah, that's the communication protocol because Bluetooth allows you to communicate against farther distances than you need to, so you can go much shorter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Well, it'd be interesting to step back and actually look at, again, the same pipeline that you mentioned for Nolan. So what does this whole process look like from finding and selecting a human being to the surgery, to the first time he's able to use this thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The estimate is 180,000 people live with quadriplegia in the United States, and each year an additional 18,000 suffer a paralyzing spinal cord injury. These are folks who have a lot of challenges living a life in terms of accessibility. in terms of doing the things that many of us just take for granted day to day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And one of the things, one of the goals of this initial study is to enable them to have sort of digital autonomy, where they by themselves can interact with a digital device using just their mind, something that you're calling telepathy. So digital telepathy, where a quadriplegic can communicate with a digital device in all the ways that we've been talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
control the mouse cursor enough to be able to do all kinds of stuff, including play games and tweet and all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of people for whom life, the basics of life are difficult because of the things that have happened to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And all of these are opportunities to help people. to help alleviate suffering, to help improve the quality of life. But each of the things you mentioned is its own little puzzle that needs to have increasing levels of capability from a device like a Neuralink device. And so the first one you're focusing on is, it's just a beautiful word, telepathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So being able to communicate using your mind wirelessly with a digital device. Can you just explain this, exactly what we're talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But the interesting thing here is, I think the thing that's not obviously clear is how exactly it works. So in order to move a cursor, there's at least a couple of ways of doing that. So one is you imagine yourself maybe moving a mouse with your hand, or you can then, which Nolan talked about, imagine moving the cursor with your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
But it's like, there is a cognitive step here that's fascinating, because you have to use the brain, and you have to learn how to use the brain, and you kind of have to figure it out dynamically. because you reward yourself if it works. So you like, I mean, there's a step that this is just a fascinating step, because you have to get the brain to start firing in the right way. And you do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
by imagining like fake it till you make it. And all of a sudden it creates the right kind of signal that if decoded correctly can create the kind of effect. And then there's like noise around that, you have to figure all of that out. But on the human side, imagine the cursor moving is what you have to do. Yeah, he says using the force. The force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
I mean, isn't that just like fascinating to you that it works? Like to me, it's like, holy shit, that actually works. Like you could move a cursor with your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So the machine is learning about the human and the human is learning about the machine. So there's adaptability to the signal processing, the decoding step. And then there's the adaptation of, Nolan, the human being. Like the same way if you give me a new mouse and I move it, I learn very quickly about its sensitivity, so I'll learn to move it slower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
You think there'll be emergent leaps of capability as you scale the number of electrodes? Like there'll be a certain, do you think there'll be like actual number where it just, the human experience will be altered?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
And then there's other kind of signal drift and all that kind of stuff they have to adapt to. So both are adapting to each other. That's a fascinating software challenge on both sides, the software on both, on the human software and the- The organic and the inorganic. The organic and the inorganic. Anyway, so sorry to rudely interrupt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So there's the selection that Nolan has passed with flying colors. Yeah. So everything, including that it's a BCI-friendly home, all of that. So what is the process of the surgery, the implantation, the first moment when he gets to use the system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
What do you think that number might be? Whether electrodes or BPS? We of course don't know for sure, but is this 10,000, 100,000?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
So when Nolan woke up, What was that like? What was the recovery like? And when was the first time he was able to use it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
That's a human being. I mean, what did that feel like for you? this device in a human being, a first step of a gigantic journey. I mean, it's a historic moment, even just that spike, just to be able to modulate that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
Just to linger on that, just a huge congratulation to you and the team for that milestone. I know there's a lot of work left, but that is really exciting to see. That's a source of hope. This first big step, opportunity to help hundreds of thousands of people and then maybe expand the realm of the possible for the human mind for millions of people in the future. So it's really exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity
The opportunities are all ahead of us, and to do that safely and to do that effectively was... It was really fun to see. As an engineer, just watching other engineers come together and do an epic thing, that was awesome.