text
stringlengths 28
334k
|
|---|
<s>[INST] So is that the most effective way to have a ripple effect? Essentially, it's supposed to directly having regulation from on top that says you can't do this. [/INST] Uh, so I would be more open to the regulation approach, but at least in the US there's quite intense regulatory capture from the agricultural industry and so attempts that we've seen to try and change regulation have it's been earlier uphill struggle, there are some examples of ballot initiatives, um where the people have been able to vote in a ballot to say we want to ban eggs from caged conditions and that's been huge. That's been really good. But beyond that, it's much more limited. </s><s>[INST] So I've, I've been really interested in the idea of hunting in general and wild animals and seeing nature as a form of cruelty that I am ethically more okay [/INST] with. Okay, </s><s>[INST] just from my perspective, and then I read about wild animals suffering. I'm just I'm just giving you the kind of uh notion of how I felt because animals, because animal factory farming is so bad that living in the woods seemed good. And yet when you actually start to think about it all, I mean all of the animals in the animal world, they're living in terrible poverty, right? So you have all the medical conditions, all of that. I mean they're living horrible lies that could be improved. That's a really interesting notion that I think may not even be useful to talk about because factory farming is such a big thing to focus on. But it's nevertheless an interesting notion to think of all the animals in the wild as suffering in the same way that humans and [/INST] poverty are suffering. Yeah, I mean, and often even worse, so many animals were produced by our selection. So you have a very large number of Children um in the expectation that only a small number survive. And so for those animals, almost all of them just live short lives where they starve to death. Uh So yeah, there's huge amounts of suffering in nature. They don't think we should um you know, pretend that it's this kind of wonderful paradise for most animals. Um uh yeah, their life is filled with hunger and fear and disease. Yeah, I agree with you entirely that when it comes to focusing on animal welfare, we should focus in factory farming. Um but we also, yeah, you should be aware to the reality of what life for most animals is like. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, so let's talk about the topic I've talked a lot about and you've actually quite eloquently talked about, which is um the third priority that effective altruism considers is really important is uh existential risks. When you think about the existential risks that are facing our civilization, what's what's before us? What concerns you? What should we be thinking about from? Especially from an effective altruism perspective. [/INST] So the reason I started getting concerned about this was thinking about future generations, where the key idea is just, well, future people matter modeling. Um, there are vast numbers of future people if we don't cause our own extinction, there's no reason why civilization might not last a million years. I mean, we last as long as a typical mammalian species or a billion years is when the earth is no longer habitable or if we can take to the stars, then perhaps it's trillions of years beyond that. So the future could be very big indeed. And it seems like we're potentially very early on in civilization. Then the second idea is just, well, maybe there are things that are going to really derail that things that actually could prevent us from having this long, wonderful civilization and instead, um, uh, could cause although a cause our own extinction or um otherwise perhaps like lock ourselves into a very bad state. Um and what ways could that happen? Well, causing our own extinction. Development of nuclear weapons in the 20th century, at least put on the table that we now had weapons that were powerful enough, that you could very significantly, despite society, perhaps, and all that nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter perhaps that would be enough um for the human race to go extinct. </s><s>[INST] Why do you think we haven't done it? Sorry to interrupt. Why do you think we haven't done it yet? Uh, is it surprising to you that having, uh, you know, always for the past few decades, several thousands of active, ready to launch nuclear weapons warheads, and yet we have not launched them. Yeah. Ever since the initial launch and cherishing the Nagasaki? [/INST] Uh, I think it's a mix of luck. So I think it's definitely not inevitable that we haven't used them. So john f, Kennedy Jr Cuban missile crisis put the estimate of nuclear exchange between the US and USSR that somewhere between one and three, and even so, you know, we really did come close. Um at the same time, I do think mutually assured destruction um, is the reason why people don't go to war. It would be um, you know, why nuclear powers don't go to war. </s> |
<s>[INST] and you start to think which of these d compositions are important to really dig. Yeah, [/INST] well then they'll strike me, it's like, okay, there's something there that that I've been maybe noodling around on that, I would like to investigate further and then I think, okay, how can I approach this problem? I think, well I have this story that I know have this story and I have this story but I haven't juxtaposed them before and there's gonna be some interesting interaction in the juxtaposition. So I have the question and I kinda have a framework of interpretation and then I have some potential narrative places I can go and then I think okay I can go juggle that and see what happens. And so then what I wanna do is concentrate on that process, well attending to the audience to make sure that the words are landing and then see if I can delve into it deeply enough, so that a narrative emerges spontaneously with an ending. Now, I'm sure you've experienced this in podcasts, right? Maybe I'm wrong, but my experience has been, if I fall into the conversation and we know about the time frame, there'll be a natural narrative arc and then so you'll kind of know when the midpoint is and you'll kind of see when you're reaching a conclusion and then if you really pay attention, you can see that's a good place to stop. It's kind of you come to a point and you have to be alert and patient to see that and you have to be willing to be satisfied with where you've got to, but if you do that and then it's like a comedian making the punchline works like got all these balls in the air and they're going somewhere and this is how they come together and people love that, right? To say this and this and this and this and this whack together and that's an insight and it is very much like a punchline. </s><s>[INST] Well, that's interesting because your mind actually some I'm a fan of your podcast two and you are always driving towards that, I would say for me in a podcast conversation, there's often a kind of Alice in wonderland type of exploration and then you just, and you think pops up, the more absurd the wilder, the better conversations with Elena like this. It's like actually the more you drive towards an arc, the more uncomfortable you start to get in a fun, absurd conversation because oh I I'm now one of the norm, ease. No, I don't want that. I want to be I want I want the rabbit, I want the crazy because it makes it more fun. But somehow throughout it there is wisdom he tried to grasp at such that there is a threat to [/INST] Well that's the thing man, you're following the thread. Yeah, well that's right. That's what we're trying to do. That thread. That thread is the proper balance between structure and spontaneity. And it manifests itself as the instinct of meaning. And that's the logos in the dialogue goes and it really is the logos and God only knows what that means. You know I mean the the biblical claim is that logos is the fundamental principle of reality. And I think that's true. I actually think that's true because I think that that meaning that guides you. Well, here's a way of thinking about I've been writing about this recently, what's real matter. It's like, okay, that's one answer. What's real what matters is real because that's how you act. Okay, that's different than matter. It's like okay what's the most reel of what matters? How about pain? Why is it the most real try arguing it away. Good luck. So pain is the fundamental reality. Alright, well that's rough. Doesn't that lead to nihilism and hopelessness? Yeah. Doesn't it lead to a philosophy that's antithetical towards being the most fundamental reality is pain? Yes. Is there anything more fundamental than pain? </s><s>[INST] Love? [/INST] Really? If you're in pain, love and truth, that's what you got. And you know, if they're more powerful than pain, maybe they're the most real things. When </s><s>[INST] you think about reality, what is real? That is the most real thing? Well, [/INST] it it's a tough one, right? Because you have to because if you're a scientist a materialist, think well, the matter is the most real. It's like, well, you don't know what the matter is. So and then when push comes to shove and it will, you'll find out what's most reel. </s><s>[INST] I I feel like this is um missing. Physical reality is is missing some of the things. So, of course, pain has a biological component and all those kinds of things. But it's missing something deep about the human condition that at least the modern science is not able to describe, but it's it is reaching towards that. And it's the reason 11 way to describe it as you're describing is the reason is reaching it is because underneath of science is this assumption that there's a deep [/INST] logos </s><s>[INST] thing to this whole thing we're trying to do. [/INST] Well, you know, there's two traditions, right? In some sense. There's two logos traditions? There's the the greek, rational enlightenment tradition. That's a logos tradition and it insists that there's a logos in nature and that science is the way to approach it. And then there's a Judeo christian logos which is more embodied and more spiritual. And I would say the West is actually an attempt to unite those two. And it's the proper attempt to unite those two because they need to be united. And I see the union coming in your terms. You know, I talked to France to wall for example, about the animating principle of chimpanzee sovereignty and that's pretty close biologically. Is it power? Because that's the claim even from the biologists, often the most dominant chimp has the best reproductive success. It's like, oh yeah, dominant. Hey, you mean using compulsion? Okay, let's look, are the chimps who use compulsion the most successful? And the answer is sporadically and rarely. And for short. Well that's sporadically for short periods of time. Why? Because they meet an unpleasant end. The subordinates over whom they exercise arbitrary control. Wait for a weak moment and then tear them into shreds. Right? Every dictator's terror. And for good reason. And the Wall has showed that the alpha chimps, the males who do have preferential mating access often are often and reliably the best peacemakers and the most reciprocal. And so even among chimps, the principle of sovereignty is something like iterative iterated reciprocity and that's a way better principle than power And it's something like I've been thinking, what's the antithesis of the spirit of power? I think it's the spirit of play. And you know, you, I don't know what you think about that, but when you have a good podcast conversation, you already described it in some sense as play. It's like there's a structure, right? Because it's an ordered conversation, but you want there to be play in the system and if you get that right, then it's really engaging and then it seems to have its own narrative arc. I'm not trying to impose that even that's another thing I don't do. I didn't come to this conversation at all thinking here's what I want out of a conversation with lex Friedman. Like instrumentally I thought I'll go talk to lex why I like his podcasts. He's doing something right? I don't know what it is. He asks interesting questions. I'll go have a conversation with him. Where's it gonna go wherever it goes, </s> |
<s>[INST] by almost all of his opponents. It's nice to see Gordon looking small relative to his opponents, which is absurd to say, but it is the open division, plus 99 kilos. It was plus 99 kilos. Right, that's what I mean, sorry, by open plus 99 kilos. [/INST] Everyone looks like the Incredible Hulk. Yeah, Hulk, yeah. So our big thing is when we fight bigger, stronger opponents, we always go in two directions. You either go for the legs or you go </s><s>[INST] for the back. And so we constructed strategies based around those two methods. So going for submissions, and we should also mention that ADCC rule set is for regular matches, I think it's five minutes and five minutes. Total is 10 minutes, and then for finals matches, it's 20 minutes, and half the time is spent with no points. [/INST] So these can be very, very long matches. I mean, to put this in a perspective, a modern judo match is five minutes. Yeah. A modern wrestling match, I believe, is six minutes in international freestyle. So these matches can be 40 minutes long. Now, that's a long, long grappling match. </s><s>[INST] Depending on how you compete in it, that can have a huge toll on you. [/INST] Absolutely. You can get to the finals and just be absolutely spent. So our whole thing is, okay, Gordon's got to not only get to the finals, then he's got to fight the toughest ADCC rapper of all time after that. So we were looking for quick and energy efficient matches, and that meant going to the back or going to the legs. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, that's exactly what he did. He was able to get some very, very quick matches, courtesy of leg lock finishes. And in the few cases where he didn't finish on legs, then he would simply take his opponents back. And that's a very low stress position to occupy. In one case, his opponent deliberately kept his back on the ground to prevent the backtake, and he just chose mounted position instead. And so he was able to go through his weight division with an extremely low energy expenditure, which set him up well to go into the finals. No injuries, very little energy expenditure. Now, it sounds easy to say that, okay, the strategy worked. But in order to get that strategy to work, you have to have one hell of a set of skills. And we can see those now. Would </s><s>[INST] you like to? Yeah, I would love to go through them. And I should also mention, for people just listening to this, I'll try to commentate on different things we'll look at. But the thing that was made clear is, maybe you can speak to that. Maybe to you, it looks like efficiency. But to me, it looked like Gordon was not even trying. There was a relaxed aspect to the whole thing. So maybe it had to do with saving energy, but he made it look very easy. And he made the path of submission look very easy. So here, the first match against an opponent [/INST] that, again, looks bigger than him. Okay, I'll just give an initial comment here. First, you'll see that Gordon elected to sit to the bottom position. The hardest work in submission grappling is when two athletes take the standing position and joust for takedowns. That's where most of the energy gets burned up. So working on the idea of energy efficiency, let's go out and we chose to sit into guard position and then start looking to access our opponent's back. Because if our opponent's head position of far side arm drag makes a lot of sense, Gordon's able to beat the arm and quickly get behind his opponent. Now the question is going to be getting into a scoring position. It's too early to score at this point, but we're just concerned at this stage of just </s><s>[INST] energy expenditure and make the other guy work harder than us. So Gordon did the arm drag to [/INST] the back and now is working on the hooks. The hooks are not particularly important here. He'll use it just to get stability on his opponent. But interestingly, his opponent here had an interesting strategy too, which was to occupy bottom turtle position and look to get to the critical five-minute demarcation point where points begin to get scored. His idea, I believe, I'm speculating here based on his actions, was to keep Gordon at bay in a defensive turtle position until a five-minute mark occurred, in which case he would shake Gordon off, walk away and force a </s><s>[INST] takedown battle. How many people are comfortable in that? And what do you think about the defense [/INST] of turtle position versus always trying to come back to guard? Turtle position is the second bottom position of you did. Many people only associate guard position with bottom position and you did that. That's naive. There's two. There's guard position and turtle position. Now as a general rule, guard position offers a much, much greater variety of attacking options than turtle position does. But that's not to say turtle position absolutely can be an effective bottom position. You can work effectively from there. </s><s>[INST] So there's some case to be made that to wait out five minutes, turtle might be. [/INST] I mean, I personally think it against Gordon Ryan, I mean, I admire the fellow's courage. It's not easy. But there was a logic to what he was doing. People think, oh, he just got his back taken so easily. But he did have a strategy. Now, did he pick the right person to use that strategy against? Probably not. </s><s>[INST] So Gordon is able to break the turtle down, get one hook in. At which point is this becoming an extremely controlling position with Gordon in the back? [/INST] At which point is there, are you happy with where it is? At this point, it just started to dawn on me at this point, this guy actually had a strategy, which was to maintain a prone position that he's in now, and then shake Gordon off after the five minute mark. So once that became obvious, and I was now excited to look at the clock and how close we are, if we can take it up to five minutes. Right now, this guy's only intention is to stop Gordon from strangling him and finish. Okay, now the guy's trying to go up and vertical freeze it there. Now, do you see how he's taking his elbows off the mat in turtle position? In juditsu, there's only one reason you take your elbows off the mat from turtle position. That's to stand up. So now it's clear at this point what his actual strategy is. It's to get up, force a standing confrontation, win a takedown battle, and beat Gordon by points. So he did have a strategy. Now, our counter strategy is always based around the power half Nelson. This is a common move in the sport of wrestling, and it's a great way to break people down as they try to stand up. That looks so heavy. Yeah, I mean, Gordon is a master of it. So there's a power half </s> |
<s>[INST] You know, a small tangent, you know, Jack, Jack bro, [/INST] of course, of course </s><s>[INST] uh Makita pa, you know those songs, those that song gets me every time. So [/INST] there's a cover of that song by one of my favorite female artists, </s><s>[INST] not Nina Simone, [/INST] no, no, no, no, </s><s>[INST] no carol [/INST] emerald, she's um from Amsterdam and she has a version of the market open where she's actually added some english lyrics and it's, it's really beautiful. But again, the Makita is just so, I mean it's you know the promises, the volcanoes that you know will restart. It's just so beautiful and I love so there's not many </s><s>[INST] songs that so shows such depth of desperation for another human being that's so powerful [/INST] and apologize and then high school now I'm starting to learn english. So I moved to new york, so Sting's englishman in new york magnificent song and again there's if manners. Magath man as someone said then he's the hero of the day. It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, be yourself no matter what they say and then takes more than combat gear to make a man takes more than a license for a gun, confront your enemies, avoid them when you can, A gentleman will walk but never run. It's again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live. I mean, this is one of them basically says it's not the combat gear that makes a man. Where's the part where he says, There you go. Gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society at night. A candle's brighter than the sun so beautifully basically says, well, you just might be the only one modesty propriety can lead to notoriety. You could end up as the only one. It's, it basically tells you you don't have to be like the others. Be yourself, show kindness. So generosity. Don't you know, don't let that anger get to you. You know, the song fragile, how fragile we are, how fragile we are. So again, as in Greece, I didn't even know what that meant, how fragile we are. But the song was so beautiful. And then eventually I learned english and I actually understand the lyrics and the song is actually written After the contrast, murdered Ben Linder in 1987 and the us eventually turned against supporting these Gorillas. And it was just a political song. But so such a realization that you can't win with violence basically. And that song starts with the most beautiful poetry. So if blood will flow when flesh and steel are one drying in the color of the evening sun. Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away, but something in our minds will always stay. Perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes through violence and nothing ever could for all those born beneath an angry star lest we forget how fragile we are. Damn! Damn right. I mean that's poetry. It was beautiful and he's using the english language is just such a refined way with deep meanings, but also words that rhyme just so beautifully. And evocations of when flesh and steel are one. I mean it's just mind boggling and then of course, the refrain that everybody remembers is on and on, The rain will fall etcetera. But like this beginning, Yeah. And again, tears from a star how fragile we are. I mean just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally. Something </s><s>[INST] it seems that more [/INST] meaning comes when there's a </s><s>[INST] rhythm that I don't know what that is that probably connects to exactly what you are. [/INST] If you pay close attention, you will notice that the more obvious words sometimes are the second verse and the less obvious are often the first verse because it makes the second verse flow much more naturally because otherwise it feels contrived, oh, you went and found this like unusual word in dark moments. The whole album of pink Floyd and the movie just marked me enormously as a, as a teenager just the wall. Um and there's one song that never actually made it into the album that's only there in the movie about when the tigers broke free and the tigers are the tanks of the Germans. And it just describes again that vivid imagery. It was just before dawn, one miserable morning in Black 44 when the forward commander was told to sit tight when he asked that his men be withdrawn and the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while. And the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few 100 ordinary lives. So that's a theme that keeps coming back and pink Floyd with ostracism us and them. God only knows that's not what we would choose to do. Forward he cried from the rear and the front rows dot from another song. It's like this whole concept of ostriches them and there's that theme of us versus them again, where the child is discovering how his father died when he finds an old and founded one day in a draught of old photographs hidden away and my eyes still grow damp to remember his majesty signed with his own rubber stamp. So it's so ironic because it seems the way that he's writing it that he's not crying because his father was lost. He's crying because kind old king George took the time to actually write mother a note about the fact that his father died. It's so ironic because he basically says, we are just ordinary men and of course we're disposable. So I don't know if you know where the root of the word pioneers. Yeah, but you had a chessboard here earlier upon in France. The people, they are the ones that you sent to the front to get murdered, slaughtered. This whole concept of pioneers having taken this whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that we're now treating us here is So anyway, there's this juxtaposition of that. And then the part that always just strikes me is the music and the tonality totally changes. And now he describes the attack. It was dark all around there was frost in the ground when the tigers broke free and no one survives from the royal fusiliers company Z They were all left behind, Most of them dead. The rest of them dying. And that's how the high command took my daddy from me. And that song, even though it's not in the album explains the whole movie because it's this movie of misery. It's this movie of someone being stuck in their head and not being able to get out of it. There's no other movie that I think has captured. So well this prison that is some one's own mind and this wall that you're stuck inside and this, you know, feeling of loneliness. And sort of is there anybody out there? Uh and you know sort of Hello? Hello, Is there anybody in there? It's not if you can hear me. Is there anyone who come on. Yeah, I hear you're feeling down just anyway. So </s> |
<s>[INST] That's fascinating. I never even thought about that. I just, I thought it kind of uh universe, I mean, adds to the texture of the meat, the chewiness of the meat. But you're saying it also adds to uh, how heat, how it reacts to heat, how the entirety of the meat reacts to heat and the fat is not as important to that as the college. [/INST] The fat will make the flavor more delicious. Like it'll add sumptuousness and mouth feel and things like that. But all the connective tissue in meat and in some of the cuts like that, we ate a skirt steak last night. You can see a web of that college and sheath on the outside, on a rib eye that same college and she has this big, there's only one, it goes around the outside because it's just that muscle, there's one large muscle fiber. So that specific it's um island sheath, right? That that material needs moisture and low and slow heat to become tender. The other side of that is that when it becomes tender, it liquefies and it adds all this beautiful gelatinous consistency. That's what bone broth is. That's why a like a slow cooked pork shoulder is so delicious. It's not that it's full of all that fat that that's also great. But a lot of that mouth feel comes from that really beautiful dissolved collagen. So when you're looking at like how do I understand how I'm going to cook a piece of meat that first fork in the road is how is this going to respond to heat? And what's the appropriate cooking technique? Then the second piece is that surface area to volume ratio. And that's important because the heat is going to impact the meat through the surfaces of the meat that are in contact with the heat. So if I have a steak that's three inches thick, I'm going to cook it extremely difficult differently from a, from a steak that's a half inch thick or three quarter of an inch thick and that's the major of, and that's the truth. If I have a piece of pork shoulder that's cut into cubes versus having a whole pork shoulder, that surface area to volume ratio. That's going to totally change how I cook it. And saying things like pot roast and a beef stew would be the same cut of meat, right? But how I cook them is going to change based on the surface area to volume because you've got to let moisture and heat work its way into the center of the meat and that's going to be determined by the amount of surface of the meat that's in contact with whatever cooking liquid or heat you've got. </s><s>[INST] Is there different sources of heat to play with like a big flame versus a small or maybe even like almost no flame like over coals, all that kind of stuff? Is there some science to the source of heat in how it plays with the meat, [/INST] indirect heat and direct heat and that really is mostly about temperature in more than actual. I mean, smoke is important as well that can permeate, but really the smoke doesn't go into the center of most cuts that you barbecue, it'll come. It's like the smoke ring, it's, it's a, it's a, you know, it's maximum like half an inch on the outside, maybe a little bit deeper on a really long slow cook. So they but the smoke that does create a ton of flavor on the surface of the mean. But that's so the indirect allows you to have smoked, contacting it and then a very, very low and slow heat. And what that does is indirect heat will be low and slow enough that the center of the meat will get warm at the same time as the exterior of the meat and it'll all cook equally and all get equally tender. If you go very hot and fast, you risk the interior of the meat not getting that. You kind of create a shell on the on it. Um And you slow down the interior of the meat, which you actually want to do with something like a steak where you want to keep it rare on the inside. So it's really indirect versus direct. Then once you get into direct heat, right? Look in that category, there's wood, charcoal gas, right? That's about it. And those are meaningfully different. They're meaningfully different charcoal and wood that's more of, there's more poetry in wood. There's a little bit more flavor, not functionally very different, but gas versus charcoal. Wood is very different. Um And that's because of the actual scent of the, of the cook right at the center of the flavor. Um And then there's a, I think an evenness of heat distribution that comes off of charcoal that's different from gas because no matter how awesome your gas grill is, you do have hotter and cooler spots. So gas grills are typically, you can kind of control for that if you just are going really hot and fast, which is why gas grills are fine. If you're just like throwing that steak on, getting hard sear on those burgers, put a cross on gas fabulous for that. Perfect. When you're doing things that do better with a low and slow cook um, like let's say a whole tenderloin or chicken thigh that's going to be a little bit less elegant on gas than on charcoal versus would. So when you have more more kind of nuance in the low slow cook over the natural fuels. </s> |
<s>[INST] You know, it's just not innate to them. I think a lot of us have the capacity to do that in some domain [/INST] Yeah, I think if you went about strategically if you surrounded yourself with fellow like-minded people and you know slowly over time switched it But if you just try to like hardcore do it, you're just gonna lose your mind </s><s>[INST] Do you ever worry about your mental health? Did you take step to protect it to? [/INST] Yeah, do it like for the long run to make sure you have the mental strength to go on. Yeah your mental health Did you just yeah? Yes, weirdly enough. The best thing for mine mental health was giving in to my innate nature to work Any and the most depressed I get is when I try to restrict it and like I don't work weekends I don't work this day. What's best for me is just to work when I feel like working and then Just not work when I don't like and just have no constraints because there are just some nights where I don't want to sleep Then whatever reason I feel compelled to go all night whatever, just do it, do whatever you want. It's what I tell my working brain, and I just give into it, and that's where I feel the happiest, and then it's typically like, when I'm really in the grind mode, it'll be like seven or eight days, just nonstop going, going, and then it's like, I'll realize, oh, I need some recharge time, and then go fucking binge a season of anime. Yeah, but that's the thing, people will tell you, don't work weekends, or don't do this, or don't work past this, or blah, blah, I'll give you all these constraints, but for me, and it's unconventional, </s><s>[INST] I just give into it, but that's the thing. I think there's something really to be said for that. I try to surround myself with people that, like when I pull an all-nighter, they don't go, like, you should get more sleep. There's a reason I pulled that all-nighter. Like, if I'm really passionate about something, they say, they basically encourage it, because I have no problem getting sleep and getting rest. What I need in my life is people that encourage you to kinda keep going, keep going with the stuff [/INST] you're passionate about. Normal people, they don't want that life, and they probably shouldn't, it's not good for you. But yeah, if you hang around people, like, just whatever, different people, you're gonna feel crazy, and it's gonna wear on you, whereas if you're around similar people, it's just, it's so much easier. Like, if you, you know, I've started weightlifting more, and like, one thing that's helped is just having JAC people around because they naturally just eat healthier. They do, like, they naturally just have fricking grilled chicken and all this shit and high protein meals and it's just like easier for me to just piggyback and be like, oh, can you just order me whatever you're getting, and they're like, oh, I gotta go to the gym, and I'll be like, oh, shit, I'll just join you, you know? And it's like it's just, it's cheat coats, you know what I mean? Just surround yourself with people that you wanna be and it makes it like 70% easier, in my opinion. It's like, that is the cheat coat to life and I wish, obviously, you audience is definitely a lot older, But, you know, to the older people listening, like if you are in a place of mentorship for someone younger or have influence over younger people, you should really try to drill that in their heads. Like the people, they are around 100% dictates the outcome. I would not be on 120 million subscribers if I didn't find when I was around a million, I had a couple of friends that were just also psychopaths, you know, I outgrew them, but at the time it was great and I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for them. And just all along the way, the friends that I hung out with had such a dramatic impact on where I am. Like I'd probably have 80 million less subscribers, you know, if it was, if I wasn't so strategic about hanging out with people that I had value to </s><s>[INST] and they also had value to me. They naturally just eat healthier, they do. So the advice for young people would be to [/INST] be very selective about the people you're so much so. So selective, it's crazy. Like Chris, you know, he's really funny and that's why he's great for the videos. And part of why he's so funny is he consumes copious amounts of cartoons and just funny content. And so I'll find, like when I spend more time with Chris, I'll start just quoting these weird cartoons and shows and I, like my speech will literally change just after like a week of spending more time with him. It has like, it's like that quick of an effect, you know. Now picture that over the course of years. I mean, yeah, it has such a huge influence. Like pluck one of their friends out and hypothetically put me in there and you know, there's no doubt if they're trying to become a content creator, their odds of success is 10X, right? Obviously you can't do that, </s><s>[INST] but you got to find your closest version of it. And just be selective, yeah. But this also applies not to see younger older people too. [/INST] Agree, but they, it's even more, I like, when I was a teenager, I just, you know, I couldn't relate to many people. I just thought it was like a freaking nature because no one was obsessed with building businesses or any of this kind of stuff. And so like back then, you know, that advice would have been helpful. Maybe not that particular, but just knowing that there are, you know, it's not that you're a freaking nature. </s> |
<s>[INST] I don't know why exactly. I'm bothered by philosophers talking about zombies because it feels like they're missing. It's like talking about it's reducing a joyful experience. So like um that's like talking about listen, when you fall in love with somebody, the other person is a zombie, you don't, you don't know if they're conscious and you're just making Presumptions and so on. It's like it says philosophers will do this kind of things, they might as well be a zombie or you know, there's no such thing as love. It's just a mutual calculate economists will reduce love to some kind of mutual calculation that minimizes risk and stability over time. It's like, alright, what I want to do with each of those people is I want to take, I want to find every one of those philosophers to talk about zombies and eventually give them one of those robots and watch them fall in love and then and see how their understanding of how humble they are by how little we understand. [/INST] That's the point of the zombie experiment. I mean, the </s><s>[INST] thought [/INST] experiment that I mean, I can't speak for any </s><s>[INST] zombies. [/INST] So for me, I mean, I don't like spending much time on it, I think it has limited use for sure. Um and I understand your annoyance with it, but for me, what's so useful about it is it gets you to ask the same questions you're asking when you're looking at robots. Um, if you just run the experiment and you say, okay, you know, I'm sitting here with lex what if I try to trick myself, what's different about the world? If someone tells me, actually, he's a robot is essentially what the zombie experiment is. He's over there, he has no conscious experience, he's acting is what, There's no experience there. So it gets you to ask some interesting questions. One is okay, when it seems impossible. I just think, no, that's that makes no sense. I can't I can't even imagine that. Okay, what do I think consciousness is responsible for? What is consciousness doing in that in that human over there? That is lex that I can't fathom all of your behavior and everything that you're you're doing and about without consciousness. So, it gets you to ask this question, This is these are the questions I begin my book with um what is consciousness doing? It gets you to ask that question in a deeper way. And then I kind of found this alternate. I don't know if other people have done this, </s><s>[INST] but I [/INST] found this alternate use for it which is even more useful to me. Which is I'm able to do it. Sometimes I'm able to just sit with someone and and you know, get my imagination going and imagine there really is no conscious experience there in that person. And what happened for me the first few times I was able to do this is it reminded me exactly of how I feel when I look at complex plant behavior and other behaviors in nature where I assume there's no conscious experience and to me it just flips everything. It just flips everything on its head. It just gets you to be able, it gets you to be open to possibilities that you were closed to before. And I think that's useful. </s><s>[INST] Does it enhance or dissipate your capacity for love of other human beings? What role does love playing the human condition article? [/INST] It's I mean in so many ways it's the most important role. I don't think any of these realizations. I mean if if anything, I think it enhances it, but I don't think they I mean it's it kind of goes back to the levels of usefulness. </s><s>[INST] Sometimes you want to picture your friends as a plant. It's helpful photo to appreciate the beauty that they are as an organism. [/INST] Yeah, I mean, I don't know, for for me, the more time I spend um practicing meditation, being seeing through these illusions. Um the more poignant my conscious experience becomes, and love is obviously one of the most powerful and one of the most positive experiences we have. And I don't know, there's just there's whatever its causes, there's just something miraculous about it in and of itself and for itself. </s><s>[INST] I think love romantic, love is a beautiful thing. Connection, friendship is a beautiful thing and it's so interesting how people can grow together, how interact together, disagree together and make each other. But like scientific collaborations like this to uh Daniel Kahneman Tversky. I mean there's and most people are not able to do that in the in the scientific realm they create. The more successful you become the more solitaire [/INST] and you recognize that when you have it when you have a great collaboration, I mean in science, but also in other areas in this this ted production. I'm working on, I just happened to be working with this producer where we had this instant connection and the chemistry is great and I have so much fun recording with her. It's like it's so great to have usually work alone and it's been wonderful to have. </s><s>[INST] It's like a it's like a conversation type of thing. [/INST] Yeah, she's taking my conversation, we're playing around with it. We're just working on the pilot. So I </s><s>[INST] love how you have no idea, it's going to turn out this is great. Yeah. [/INST] Um well I just started working without a clear, a clear image of the end result, although it started with an idea for a film um I don't know, I guess I have a feeling, I was just wondering if I talked about this with you before anywhere, but probably not. Yeah, because you and I have never spoken. </s><s>[INST] You [/INST] didn't see me when I was listening to that. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] I thought [/INST] you didn't hear that thought </s> |
<s>[INST] I had not anticipated that. And what is the nature of the letter or the op-ed that you write on why they shouldn't be disciplined [/INST] or if they, to the degree they should be or shouldn't be? There's not been one case, there's not been one case that has come to my attention in which it was even remotely sensible for the teacher to be disciplined. And what I say is that, number one, frankly, I go through, what I write is almost a synopsis of my book. Number one, this is an important word in American history. It is a word that is explosive, that's why people get so upset. It's a word that's volatile, it's a word that has typically been used in a terrible way. It's a word that is part of the soundtrack of racial terrorism in the United States. So people ought to know about this word. I mean, if you're interested in knowing the real history of the United States, if you're interested in knowing about lynching, if you're interested in knowing about the way in which black people have been terrorized in the United States, you need to know this word. You need to know that history. So you need to know why it is that people are upset about the word. But it doesn't end there. You have to know that. And if you know that, then that knowledge should equip you to be careful. It should equip you to know that, to know the range of context in which this word appears. But again, it doesn't just end there because especially young people, you tell that to young people, they nod, they read, they understand that. But then what? But then they turn on their radios and they turn on, they listen to Spotify. They listen to some of their favorite entertainers. They listen to Dr. Dre. They listen to the ghetto boys. They listen to Snoop. And they listen to NWA. What are they here? They listen to standup comedians. They listen to Dave Chappelle. They listen to Cat Williams. What do they hear? They hear the word nigger or nigga being used in a lot of different ways. And so they need to know about that as well. What are people doing? How does one explain the fact that Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory was a comedian, activist, friend of Martin Luther King Jr., a true activist? I mean, he had a flourishing career as an entertainer that he abandons in order to struggle for racial justice throughout the United States and including the Deep South. How does one explain the fact that he wrote several memoirs but his first memoir is called Nigger, a memoir. How does one explain that? How does one explain the way in which, how does one explain Richard Pryor? I mean Richard Pryor's best album is that niggers crazy. Well, was Richard Pryor trying to put down Black people? How does one explain that? One can only explain that by getting deeper into the word, by understanding that, yes, this is a word that has been used in a derogatory way. This is a word that has been used to put people down. This is a word that has been used to terrorize people. You gotta know that, but you also have to know that this is a word that has also been put to other uses. There are artists, there are entertainers who have used this word, like Dick Gregory used it, to put up a mirror to American society and say, look at this word and look at the terrible way in which it's been used. We don't want you to look away. No, don't look away. No euphemism, no asterisk, no n-word, no nigger. Now we want you to look at that and we wanna talk about that. James Baldwin, there was a documentary about James Baldwin a couple of years ago, highly lauded documentary. The title that was given in this documentary was, I Am Not Your Negro. That's not what James Baldwin said. Anybody can go to YouTube right now, take a look. James Baldwin said, I am not your nigger. And then he went on to talk about that. Well, James Baldwin wasn't, again, he wasn't starting to cover up anything. He wanted people to face the facts of American life. And it seems to me that if you're a teacher and you want to have your students face the facts about American life, well, you've got to grapple with the word nigger. Now, let me just quickly say, teachers have a tough job. And if we're talking about students, of course, there's a wide range of students. Am I saying that one ought to give my book to kindergartners? No, kindergartners are probably not ready for such a book. Third graders, probably no, not third grade. If we're talking however, about people in the 10th grade, do I think the 10th graders can read my book? Yeah, sure, absolutely. 11th graders, 12th graders, people in college, there are people in college, there are people in college, there are people in law schools. Teachers in law schools have been disciplined for, because the word nigger has come out of a teacher's mouth. Why? A couple of cases recently, a teacher would be reading a court opinion. The word appears in the court opinion, the teacher pronounces the word, students get up, leave in a huff, report the teacher. There's some instances in which teachers have been under those circumstances, have been disciplined. In my view, that's bad. And people ought to say it's bad. It's bad pedagogically. And frankly, in many of these instances, it's not only bad, it's stupid. And I don't mind saying that. I think that some of these instances in which teachers have been disciplined, absolutely stupid. People say, well, the teacher used the word, excuse me, used the word. It'd be one thing, it'd be one thing if a teacher looked at a student and called the student nigger. Get out of here, nigger. That'd be one, that'd be, you know, fine. Discipline, that's teacher, that's bad, but that's not what's going on. You don't have, none of these are cases in which you have an individual who is a stranger to another individual and this word just sort of comes out, no. What we have here is a class involving a person who is a teacher interacting with students, talking about subjects in which it would be perfectly understandable why this word would emerge as a subject of conversation. Now, under those circumstances, it's somehow wrong for a teacher to utter this word. In my view, the answer is no. And, you know, I said that 20 years ago, </s> |
<s>[INST] So I I feel pretty um you know, I'm pretty short on adjectives when I describe stuff adjectives a tricky. In fact, I try to avoid adjectives because I think that's a slippery slope that you just live in the land of adjectives and you never actually make a point. Anyway. I guess you're supposed to use an audio form words to describe the thing that you're describing so that you can understand have to convert the ideas of my brain into ideas in your brain and hence the beauty of human human communication. Anyway I feel pretty good in the thing I like the way it looks like the way it feels you should check it out to right now. You can get a special discount. Just go to mizzen and main dot com and use promo code lex. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker a service. I used to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans. Most included blood tests that uh use machine learning algorithms on that blood data, DNA data and fitness tracker data to give you suggestions on what you should do with your [/INST] life. </s><s>[INST] It's signs back recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. It's really exciting to me the kind of stuff you could do with machine learning algorithms on data that comes from the human body. But the first piece of that I think that's essential is to actually be collecting that data from you or give the algorithm enough data about you. They can make such predictions and a lot of that has to be done in a way that's uh privacy preserving and effective in terms of not just low number of samples, single instances of data collection but across the lifespan across many weeks, months years and so on. Anyway. Inside Tracker is one of the company's doing a great job of pushing that kind of idea forward. You can get special savings for a limited time and you go to inside tracker dot com slash lex This episode is also brought to you by eight sleep and its new pod three mattress. They recently launched the next generation. It's always nice when the number go up Anyway. I love the originals. I love that you want even more. [/INST] It's </s><s>[INST] a bunch of smart sensors that tell you stuff about your body in terms of your sleep in terms of basic health stuff. The reason I love it to be honest is that you can cool down the bed to as low as 55° or as hot as 110° on each side of the bed separately. Now I've never tried to heat it up. That sounds like it would be a lot of fun. But my favorite thing to do is to cool it down with a warm blanket. It's just heaven. It's like a cold hot sandwich. The hot coming from the blanket and a power nap. So we're talking about 20 to 30 minutes. I might even drink a coffee before hand and I just crash and there's nothing better than a power nap in one of these beds. So go to a sleep dot com slash lex for special labor day savings through september 11th. This show is also brought to you by athletic greens and it's a G one drink which is an all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I drink it twice a day. Now it's the first thing I drink to break fast later on the day. Oftentimes I'll do a two hour run, talking about 12, 13, 14 miles hot hot. It's hot in Austin right now, even though it's uh, pushing towards the fall, it's still hot. And what I do is I get back, I'm making athletic greens, I'll put it in the freezer, jump in the shower by the time I come out it's super cold, delicious refreshing. Just makes me feel great about having accomplished something difficult, especially because I'm doing a lot of deep thinking as I'm running, it's a kind of meditative process. So that's something I look forward to. Is that cold refreshing drink? Making sure I get all my nutritional bases done. I feel amazing. Anyway, they'll give you a one month supply official when you sign up at athletic greens dot com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by on it, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make Alpha Brain a new tropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus. I honestly can't get enough of doing the alpha Brain reads because um, I'm an old school joe Rogan experience fan and uh, just to think from flashlight sponsor all the way through on it, the journey that guy has taken and given all the increase in wealth and fame has become unchanged as almost become a better human being, primarily because of family and all those kinds of things. And now I'm just deeply honored and grateful that I can call him a friend. And so it just feels surreal that I can be doing this kind of ad read on a podcast that I host that. For some reason people are listening to, I don't know, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I can't even um put correctly or properly in towards how I feel. I'm really grateful. So you can get a special discount on alpha Brain at lex Friedman dot com slash on it. This is a lex Friedman podcast to support it. We check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends. Here's john Verbeke. You have an excellent 50 part lecture series online on the meaning crisis. And I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression, loneliness, cynicism, and wait for it bullshit. The term used technically by harry Frankfurt and adopted by you. So let me ask what is meaning, What are we looking for when we uh engage in the search for meaning. [/INST] So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life. That's some sort of metaphysical claim meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives is more meaningful, Worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure. And when you study that, what you see is it's a sense of connectedness, uh connectedness to yourself to other people to the world and a particular kind of connectedness? You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns. This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful because you're connecting to something that's going to have a life and a value independent of you. Now, the question that comes up for me, Well there's two questions. One is why is that at risk right now? And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first, which is well, yeah, but why is meaning so important? Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings? Why when it is lacking do they typically fall into depression, potentially mental illness, addiction, self destructive behavior. And so the first answer I give you as well, it's that sense of connectedness and people often express it metaphorically, they want to be connected to something larger than themselves. They want to matter. They don't mean it literally, I mean if I change you to a mountain, you wouldn't thereby say, oh now my life is so fulfilling, right? So what they're trying to convey their using this metaphor to try and say they want to be connected, they want to be connected to something real? They want to make a difference and matter to it. And one way of asking them, well, you know, what's meaningful is tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore. And how are you connected to it? And how do you matter to it? </s><s>[INST] That's one way of trying to get at what is the source of meaning for you? Is if you were no longer there, you would like it to continue existing. That's not the only part of the definition. Probably because there's probably many things that aren't uh, source of meaning for me that maybe I find beautiful that I would like to continue existing. [/INST] Yes. If it contributes to your life being meaningful, uh, you're connected to it in some way, and it and it matters to you and you matter to it and that you make some difference to it. That's when it goes from being just sort of true, good and beautiful to being a source of meaning for you in your life. </s><s>[INST] Is the meaning crisis a new thing? Or has it always been with us? Is it part of the human condition in general? That's [/INST] an excellent question. And part of the argument I made in awakening from the meaning crisis is there's two aspects to it. One is that there are perennial problems, perennial threats to meaning. And in that sense, human beings, right, are always vulnerable to despair. You know, the Book of Ecclesiastes is it's all vanity. It's all meaningless. But there's also historical forces that have made those perennial problems more pertinent, more pressing uh more difficult for people to deal with. And so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems, finding existing existence absurd, experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated, and then pressing historical factors which have to do with the loss of the resources that that human beings have typically cross historically and cross culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems. </s><s>[INST] Is there something potentially deeper than just a lack of meaning? Uh that speaks to the fact that we're vulnerable to despair. You know, Ernest Becker talked about the inn is booked in all of death, about the fear of death and being an important motivator in our life as William James said death is the warm at the core of the human condition. Is it possible that this kind of search for meaning is uh coupled or can be seen from the perspective of trying to escape the reality? The thought of one's own mortality? [/INST] Yeah, Becker and the Terror management theory that have come out of it? There's been some good work um around sort of providing empirical support for that claim? Um uh some of the work not so good. So, </s><s>[INST] so which aspects do you find convincing? Can you steal man that case? And then can you argue against [/INST] it? So what aspects I find convincing is that human being, human infinitive being finite, being inherently limited is very problematic for us </s><s>[INST] given the extensive use of the word problematic, I like that you use that word to describe one's own mortality is problematic because people sort of on twitter use the word problematic when they disagree with somebody. But this to me seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect of the human condition is that we die and it ends. [/INST] I think I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm trying to I'm trying to get you to consider that your mortality is not an event in the future. It's a state you're in right now. That's what I'm trying to get. That's what I have been trying to shift. Um so your mortality is just a we talk about something that causes mortality fatal. But what we what we actually mean is it's full of fate. And I don't mean in you know, in the sense of things that are prewritten. What I mean is the sense of the universe doesn't care about your personal narrative. You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life. It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die. That's mortality, mortality isn't just some for flung event. It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way. So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them. </s><s>[INST] The death is the indifference of nature of the universe to your, to your existence. And so in that sense, it is always here with us. [/INST] Yeah, but you're vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life. Um, because it's interesting if you rate what people fear most, death is not number one, they often put public speaking as number one because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for, for human beings, you drive them into despair. </s><s>[INST] So as the terror management folks would say, as Ernest Becker would say that, you know, a self report on a survey is not an accurate way to capture what is actually at the core of the motivation of a human being that we could be terrified of death. And we've from childhood since we realized the, the absurdity of the fact that the right ends, we've learned to really try to forget about it, tried to construct illusions that, um, that allow us to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time. The realization that we die. [/INST] Okay, so first I took it seriously, but now I want to say why there's some empirical work that makes me want to reconsider. So terror management theory is you do things like you give people a list of words to read and you and in those words and in those lists of words associated with death, cough and funeral. And then you see what happens to people. And generally they start to become more rigid in their thinking. They tend to identify with their world view. Um, they lose cognitive flexibility. That's if you present it to them in that third person perspective. But if you get them to go in the 1st 1st person perspective and imagine that they're dying and that the people that they care about are there with them. They don't show those responses. In fact, they show us an increase in cognitive flexibility and increasing openness. See so I'm trying to say we might be putting the cart before the horse. It might not be death per se, but the kind of meaning that is present or absent in depth. That's the crucial thing for us by </s><s>[INST] the way to push back. I don't think you took it seriously. I don't think you truly steel man the case because you're saying that death is always present with us. Yes, But isn't there a case to be made that it is one of the major motivators? Nietzsche will to power Freud, wanting to have sex with your mother? All the different explanations of what is truly motivating as human beings. Isn't there a strong case you made that this death thing is a really damn good. Um, if not anything a tool to motivate the behavior of humans. I'm [/INST] not saying that the avoidance of death is not significant for human beings, but I'm proposing to you that human beings have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful and certain deaths meaningless and people and we have lots of evidence that people are, are willing to sacrifice their biological existence for a death they consider meaningful. Are </s><s>[INST] you personally afraid of your death? Do you think about it as as somebody who produces a lot of ideas, records them, writes them down is a deep thinker, admired thinker and as the years go on become more and more admired. Does does it scare you that the right ends? [/INST] Um, no, I mean you have to talk to me in all my levels. I'm a biological organism. So something's thrown at my head, I'll duck and things like that. But if you're asking me, do I long to live forever? Uh, no. Um, in the buddhist tradition, there are practices that are designed to make you aware of simultaneously the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality. The thought of living forever is actually horrific to me. </s><s>[INST] Are those the only two options you like. Um, When you're sitting with a loved one or watching a movie you just really love or a book you really love. You don't want it to end. You don't necessarily always flip it to the other aspect is the complete opposite of the thought experiment. What happens if the book lasts forever? There's gotta be a middle ground. Like the snooze button. Sure you don't want to sleep forever, But maybe press the snooze button and get an extra 15 minutes just there's surely some kind of balance. That that fear seems to be a source of an intense appreciation of the moment. In part, I mean that's what the stoics talked about, sort of the to meditate and wants mortality seems to be a nice wake up call to that. Life is uh full of moments that are beautiful and then you don't get an infinite number of them [/INST] right? And historic response was not the project of trying to extend the duration of your life, but to deepen those moments so they become as satisfying as possible so that when death comes, it does not strike you as any kind of calamity. </s><s>[INST] Does that project ring true for your own personal feelings? [/INST] I think. So </s><s>[INST] do you think about your mortality? [/INST] I used to I don't so much anymore. Um part of it as I'm older and your temporal horizon flips somewhere in your thirties or forties. You don't live from your birth? You live towards your </s><s>[INST] death. That's such a beautiful phrase. The temporal horizon flips. That's so true. That's so true. At what point is that the point before which the world of opportunity and possibility is infinite before you. [/INST] Yeah, it's like peter pan, there's all these golden possibilities and you fly around between them. Yes, very much. And then when it flips, you start to look for a different model. Uh the Socratic, the stoic model buddhism has also influenced me, which is more about wait, when I look at my desires, </s><s>[INST] I [/INST] seem to have two meta desires. In addition to satisfying a particular desire, I want whatever satisfies my desire to be real and whatever is satisfying my desire to not cause internal conflict but bring something like peace of mind. And so I'm more and more move towards how can I live such that those two meta desires are a constant frame within which I'm trying to satisfy my specific desires. </s><s>[INST] What do you think happens after we die? I [/INST] think mind and life go away completely when we die. And I think that's actually significantly important for the kind of beings that we are. Um, we are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness and then we have a responsibility uh, to decide how we're going to comport ourselves towards it. </s><s>[INST] Can you linger on what that means? The mind goes away? [/INST] Like when you're playing music and the last instrument is put down, the song is over. </s><s>[INST] Doesn't [/INST] mean the song wasn't beautiful, doesn't mean the song wasn't complex, doesn't mean the song like didn't add to the value of the universe and its existence, but it came to an end. Is </s><s>[INST] there some aspect in which some part of mind was there before the human and remains after something like panpsychism? Or is it too much for us? Limited cognitive beings to understand [/INST] something like panpsychism? Um, I take it seriously. I don't think it's a ridiculous proposal, but I think it has insoluble problems that make me doubt it. Um, </s><s>[INST] any [/INST] idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately immaterial substance also has for me, </s><s>[INST] just [/INST] devastating problems. Those are the two kinds of framework that people usually propose in order to support some kind of idea of immortality, I find both very problematic. Um, the fact that we participate in distributed cognition that most of our problem solving is not done as individuals, but in groups. This is something I work on. I've published on that. I think that's important. Um, but uh, most of the people who do work on systems of distributed cognition think that while there's such a thing as collective intelligence, there's no good evidence that there's collective consciousness. In fact it's often called zombie agency for that reason. Um, and so while I think it's very clear that no one person runs an airline and there's a collective intelligence that solves that problem, I do not think that collective intelligence supports any kind of consciousness. And so therefore I don't think the fact that I participate, which I regularly and reliably do in distributed cognition gives me any reason to believe that that participation grounds some kind of consciousness. </s><s>[INST] Okay, there's so many things to mention there. First of all, distributed cognition, maybe that's a synonym for collective intelligence. So that means a bunch of humans individually are able to think have cognitive machines and uh are somehow able to interact with the process of dialogue as you talk [/INST] about </s><s>[INST] two um more different ideas together like this idea landscape together. It's so interesting to think about. Okay, well you do have these fascinating distributed cognition systems, but consciousness does not propagate in the same way as intelligence. But isn't there a case if you just look at intelligence, if you look at us humans as a collection of smaller organisms which we are? And so there's like a hierarchy um of organisms, tiny ones work together to form tiny villages that you can then start to see as individual organisms that are then also forming bigger villages interact in different ways and function becomes more and more complex. And eventually we get to us humans to where we start to think well we're an individual, but really we're not, there's billions of organisms inside us both domestic and foreign. So isn't that building up consciousness is like turtles all the way up to us? Our consciousness. Why does it have to stop with us? Humans? Are we the only like, is this the face transition when it becomes a zombie like giant hierarchical village that first like [/INST] there's </s><s>[INST] like a singing angels and its consciousness is born in just us. Humans do bacteria have consciousness not bacteria, but maybe you could say bacteria does, but like the interesting, complicated organisms that are within us have consciousness? [/INST] I think it's proper to argue. And I have that? Like a paramecium or bacteria has a kind of agency and even a kind of intelligence, uh kind of sense making ability. But I do not think that we can attribute consciousness at least what we mean by consciousness. This kind of self awareness, disability to introspect, um etcetera etcetera. Um uh to bacteria. Now, the reason why distributed cognition doesn't have consciousness, I think is a little bit more tricky. Um And I think there's no reason in principle why there couldn't be a consciousness for distributed cognition, Collective intelligence. In fact, many, you know, philosophers would agree with me on that point. I think it's more an issue of certain empirical facts, band width, uh density of connection, speed of information transfer, etcetera. Um It's conceivable that if we got some horrible Frankenstein ian neuralink and we linked our brains and we had the right density and dynamics and bandwidth and speed, that a group consciousness could take shape. I don't have any argument in principle against that. I'm just saying those those contingent facts do not yet exist and therefore it is implausible that consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence. </s><s>[INST] So you talk about consciousness quite a bit. So let's step back and try to sneak up to a definition. What is consciousness [/INST] for me? There are two aspects uh to answering that question. One is what's the nature of consciousness. How does something like consciousness exist in an otherwise apparently non conscious universe. And then there's a function question which is equally important. Which is what does consciousness do? Um the first one is obviously uh you know, problematic for most people like Yeah, consciousness seems to be so different from the rest of the non conscious universe. But I put it to you that the function question is also very hard because you are clearly capable of very sophisticated, intelligent behavior. Without consciousness, you are turning the noises coming out of my face hole into ideas in your mind and you have no conscious awareness of how that process is occurring. So why do we have consciousness at all? Now, here's the thing, there's an extra question you need to ask. Should we answer? Attempt to answer those questions separately or should we attempt to answer them in an integrated fashion? I make the case that you actually have to answer them in an integrated fashion. What consciousness does and what it is, we should be able to give it a unified answer to both of those. </s><s>[INST] Can you try to elucidate the difference between what consciousness is and what it does, both of which are mysteries, as you say, state versus action. Can you try to explain the difference? That's interesting that that's useful? That's important to understand. So [/INST] that's putting me in a bit of a difficult position because I actually argue that trying to answer them separately is ultimately incoherent. But what I can point to our many published articles in which only one of these problems is addressed and the other is left unaddressed. So people will try and explain what quality A. R how they potentially emerge without saying, what do they do, What problems do they help to solve? How do they make the organism more adaptive? And then you have other people who say no, no, this is what the function of consciousness is. But I don't know, I can't tell you, I can't solve the hard problem. I don't know how quality A exist. So what I'm saying is many people treat these problems separately, although I think that's ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem. </s><s>[INST] So the hard problem is focusing on the what it is. So the quality of that, it feels like something to experience the thing, that's what consciousness is and does is more about the functional usefulness of the thing to to the whole beautiful mix of cognition and just function in everyday life. Okay. Uh you've also said that you can do very intelligent things without consciousness [/INST] clearly </s><s>[INST] is that obvious to you? [/INST] Yes, I don't know what I'm doing to access my memory. It just comes up and it comes up really intelligently. </s><s>[INST] But the mechanisms that create consciousness could be deeply interlinked with whatever is doing the memory access that's doing the [/INST] cognition. So </s><s>[INST] I guess what I'm trying to say and this will uh probably sneak up to this question a few times, which is whether we can build machines that are conscious uh or machines that are intelligent human level intelligence or beyond without ability in the consciousness. I mean, ultimately, that's one of the ways to understand what consciousness is, is to is to build the thing. We can we can either sort of from the chomsky way, try to construct models like he thinks about language in this way, try to construct models and theories of how the thing works, or we can just build the damn thing. [/INST] Exactly. And that's a mythological principle in cognitive science. In fact, one of the things that uh sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines uh dealing with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance it asks, well, could we build a machine that would not only simulate it, but serve as a bona fide explanation of the phenomena. Do </s><s>[INST] you find any efforts in cognitive science compelling in this direction? In terms of how far we are? There's there's on the computational side of things. Something called cognitive modeling. There's all these kinds of packages that you [/INST] can </s><s>[INST] construct, simplified models of how the brain does things And see if complex behaviors emerge. [/INST] Do </s><s>[INST] you find any efforts in cognitive or what efforts in cognitive science do you find most inspiring and productive? [/INST] I think the project of trying to create um a gi artificial general intelligence is where I place my hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance. This is independent of technological socioeconomic significance which is already well well established. But being able to say because of the work in ai we now have a good theory of cognition, intelligence. Perhaps consciousness. I think that's where I place my bets is in the current endeavors around artificial general intelligence. And so tackling that problem head on which is now become central at least to a group of cognitive scientists is I think what needs to be done </s><s>[INST] and when you think about A. G. I do you think about systems that have consciousness? Let's [/INST] go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence. So right now compared to even our best machines, you are a general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains and some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer, they can learn this game and play a few other well designed rule bound games but they couldn't learn how to swim right or etcetera, things like that. And so what's interesting is what seems to come up and this is some of my published work and all these different domains of cognition across all these different problem types is a central problem. And since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability that's a significant component of our intelligence. I made up an argument as to what I think that general ability is and so it's happening right now. The amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatorial explosive. The amount of information you have in your memory, long term memory and all the ways you could combine it combinatorial explosive. The number of possibilities you can consider also combinatorial explosive. The sequences of behavior you can generate also combinatorial explosive. And yet somehow you're zeroing in the right memories are coming up the right possibilities are opening up the right sequences of behavior. You're paying attention to the right thing. Not infallibly so but so much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact with in order to solve the problem at hand. That's an ability that is still not Well understood within AGI two </s><s>[INST] filtering out the gigantic waterfall of data. [/INST] Right? It's almost like a zen koan what makes you intelligent is your ability to ignore so much information and do it in such a way that is somewhere between arbitrary guessing and algorithmic search </s><s>[INST] and to a fault sometimes of course that you based on the models you construct. You forget, you ignore things, you should probably not ignore [/INST] and that hopefully we can circle back to it. Lex is related to the meaning issue because the very processes that make us adaptive lee intelligent make us perennially susceptible to self deceptive self destructive behavior because of the way we miss frame the environment in fundamental ways. </s><s>[INST] So to you, meaning is also connected to ideas of wisdom and truth and how we interpret and understand and interact intellectually with the environment. [/INST] Yes. </s><s>[INST] So what is wisdom? Why do we long for it? How do we and where do we find it? What is it? [/INST] Intelligence is what you use to solve your problems? Because I was just describing rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self deception that emerge when you're trying to solve your problems. So it's that matter problem. And then the issue is do you have just one kind of knowing? I think you have multiple ways of knowing and therefore you have multiple rationality ease. And so wisdom is to coordinate those rationality ease so that they are optimally constraining and affording each other. So in that way wisdom is rationally self transcending rationality. </s><s>[INST] Right? So life is a kind of process where you jump from rationality to rationality and uh pick up a village of nationalities along the way that then turns into wisdom. [/INST] Yes, it's properly coordinated. </s><s>[INST] You mentioned framing. So what is framing? Is that a set of assumptions you bring to the table in how you see the world, how you reason about the world? Yeah, how how you understand the world. [/INST] So it depends what you mean by assumptions, if it by assumption you mean a proposition, representational or rule. I think that's much more downstream from relevance realization. I think relevance realization refers to um again, constraints on how you are paying attention. And so for me talking about framing is talking about this process you're doing right now of salience landscaping, what's salient to you and how is what salient constantly shifting in a sort of a dynamic tapestry. And how are you shaping yourself to the way that salience landscaping is aspect realizing the world shaping it into aspects for interaction. For me that is a much more primordial process than any sort of belief we have and here's why if we mean by beliefs, you know, representational proposition then we're in this very problematic position because then we're trying to say that propositions are ultimately responsible for how we do relevance realization and that's problematic because representations Presuppose relevance realization. So I represent this as a cup. The number of properties it actually has and that I even have epidemic access to is combinatorial explosive. I select from those a subset and how they are relevant to each other insofar as they are relevant for me. This doesn't have to be a cup that could be using it as a hat, I could use it to stand for the letter V all kinds of different things. I could say this was the 10th billion object made in north America, right, representations presupposed relevance realization. They are right. They are therefore dependent on it, which means relevance realization isn't bound to our representational structures. It can be influenced by them but they are ultimately dependent on relevance realization. </s><s>[INST] Let's define stuff relevance realization. What are the inputs and the outputs of this thing? What is it? What are we talking about? [/INST] What we're talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution. So if you think about the ad activity isn't in the organism or in the environment but in a dynamical relation. And then what does evolution do? It creates variation and then it puts selective pressure. And what that does is that changes the niche constructions that are available to a species. It changes the morphology. You also have a loop. It's your sensory motor loop and what's constantly happening is there are processes within you that are opening up variation and also processes that are putting selection on it and you're constantly evolving that sensory motor loop. So you might call your cognitive fitted nous, which is how you're framing the world is constantly evolving and changing. I can give you two clear examples of that one right? Your autonomic nervous system. Parasympathetic and sympathetic. The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat or opportunity. The parasympathetic is right, is biased to trying to interpret as much of the environment as safe and relaxing and they're constantly doing opponent processing. There's no little man in you calculating your level of arousal, there's this dynamic coupling opponent processing between them that is constantly evolving your arousal similarly your attention. You have the default mode network task network, the default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander to go off to drift, right? And then the task focused network is selecting out of those possibilities, the ones that will survive and go into. And so you're constantly evolving your attention. Okay? </s><s>[INST] So there's a natural selection of ideas that a bunch of systems within your generating and then you use the natural selection. What is the selector, the the object that you're interacting with? The glass relevance realization. Once again, you just describe how it happens. [/INST] Yes, </s><s>[INST] you can describe what the hell it is. So what's the goal? What are we talking about? The relevance realization is how you interact with things in the world to make sense of, make sense of why they matter what they mean to you, to your life? [/INST] Yes. And notice the language you just used your starting to use the meaning in life language </s><s>[INST] good or bad, [/INST] That's good. Okay, that's good. So what that what what does that evolution of your sensory motor loop do it it gives you and here I'll use the term from Marleau Ponty, it gives you an optimal grip on the world. So let's use your visual attention again. Okay, here's an object? How close should I be to it? Is there a right? Exactly. Exactly. So you have to evolve your sensory motor loop in order to get the optimal grip that actually creates the afford it's of you getting to a goal that you're trying to get to you, </s><s>[INST] but you're describing physical goals of manipulating objects, but so this applies the task. The process of relevance realization is not just about getting a glass of water and taking a drink. It's about falling in love. [/INST] Of course. </s><s>[INST] What else is there? [/INST] Well, there's </s><s>[INST] there's [/INST] obvious between </s><s>[INST] those two options. [/INST] I can show you how your optimally gripping in an abstract cognitive domain. Okay, so a mammal goes by and most people will say there's a dog now, why don't they say they might? But typically, you know, probabilistic lee they'll say there's a dog, they could say there's a german shepherd, there's a mammal, there's a living organism, there's a police dog. Why that why there? Why do they stop Eleanor Eleanor Rush called the basic level. What you find is that's an optimal grip because it's it's getting you the best overall balance between similarity within your category and difference between the other categories. It's allowing you to properly fit to that object insofar as you're setting yourself up to. Well, I'm getting so as many of the similarities and differences I can on balance because they're in a trade off relationship that I need in order to probably interact with this mammal that's optimal grip, not right, it's at the level of your categorization, </s><s>[INST] You evolve these models of the world around you and on top of them you do stuff like you build representations like you said, yes. What's the salience? Landscape? Salience meaning attention, Landscape. [/INST] So salience is what grabs your attention or what results from you directing your attention. So I clap my hands that salient, it grabs your attention, your attention is drawn to it as bottom up. But I can also say your left big toe and now it's salient to you because you directed your attention towards that's top down and again, opponent processing going on there. So whatever stands out to you, what grabs your attention, what arouses you, what triggers at least momentarily some affect towards it. That's how things are salient. What salient, I would argue is is how a lot of unconscious relevance realization makes information relevant to working memory. That's when it now becomes online for direct sensory motor interaction with the world. </s><s>[INST] So you think the salience landscape, the ocean of salience extends into the subconscious mind. I [/INST] think relevance does. But I think when relevance is recursive, lee processed relevance realization such that it passes through sort of this higher filter of working memory and has these properties of being globally accessible and globally broadcast, then it becomes the thing we call salience. Look that's that's that's really good evidence, there's really good evidence from my colleague at U. F. T. University of Toronto Lynn hasher that that's what working memory is. It's a higher order relevance filter. That's why things like chunking will get way more information through working memory because it's basically making it's basically monitoring how much relevance realization has gone into this information. Usually you have to do an additional kind of recursive processing and that tells you by the way when do you need consciousness? When do you need that working memory? And that salience landscaping. It's when you're facing situations that are highly novel, highly complex and very ill defined that require you to engage working memory. </s><s>[INST] Okay got it. So relevance realization is in part the thing that constructs that basic level thing of a dog when you see it when you see a dog you call it a dog, not a german shepherd, not a mammal, not a biological meat bag. It's a dog wisdom. So what is wisdom if we return? I think it's part of that we got to relevance realization. And then wisdom is the accumulation of rationality ease. He described the rationality as a kind of starting from intelligence. Much of puzzle solving and then rationality is like the meta problem of puzzle solving and then what wisdom is the meta meta problem of puzzle solving. [/INST] Yes in the sense that um the meta problem you have when you're solving your puzzles is that you can often fall into self deception. You can miss. </s><s>[INST] Right? [/INST] So whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance. Uh wisdom is about overcoming foolishness. If what we mean by foolishness is self deceptive. Self destructive behavior, which I think is a good definition of foolishness. And so what you're doing </s><s>[INST] is [/INST] you're doing this recursive relevance realization, you're using your intelligence to improve the use of your intelligence and then you're using your rationality to improve the use of your rationality. That's that recursive relevance realization I was talking about a few minutes ago, think about a wise person. They come into highly often messy, ill defined, complex situations, usually where there's some significant novelty and what can they do. They can zero in on what really matters, what's relevant. And then they can shape themselves salience, landscaping to intervene most appropriately to that situation as they have framed it. That's what we mean by a wise person, and that's how it follows out of the model I've been presenting to you. </s><s>[INST] So when you see self deception, I mean, part of that implies that it's intentional. Part of the mechanism of cognition, you're modifying what you should know some purpose. Is that is that how you see the word self deception? No, [/INST] because I belong to a group of people that think the model of self deception as lying to oneself, ultimately makes no sense, because in order to lie to you, I have to know something you don't and I have to depend on your commitment to the truth in order to modify your behavior, I don't think that's what we do to ourselves, I think, and I'm going to use it in the technical term. And thank you for making space for that earlier on. I think we can bullshit ourselves, which is a very different thing than lying. </s><s>[INST] So what is bullshit? And how do we bullshit ourselves technically speaking? [/INST] Yeah, Frankfurt. And this is inspired by Frankfurt and other people's work based on Frankfurt's </s><s>[INST] work on bullshit. [/INST] Yeah. Classic essay. </s><s>[INST] It's a pretty good title. [/INST] I think it's one of the best things he wrote. He wrote a lot of good things. </s><s>[INST] The title or the essay. [/INST] The essay titles good too. It's always an icebreaker in certain academic settings. Um, so let's contrast the bullshit artist from the liar. The liar depends on your commitment to the truth. The bullshit artist is actually trying to make you in depth indifferent to the question of truth and modify your behavior by making things salient to you so that they are catchy to you. So, you know, a prototypical example of bullshit is a commercial television commercial. You watch these people at a bar getting some particular kind of alcohol and they're gorgeous and they're laughing and they're smiling in their cleared. I'd you know, that's not true and they know, you know, it's not true, but here's the point. You don't care because there's gorgeous people smiling and they're happy and that's salient to you and that catches your attention and so all, you know, go into a bar, you know, that won't happen when you drink this alcohol, you know it, </s><s>[INST] but you [/INST] buy the product because it was made salient to you. Now, you can't lie to yourself. Lex salience can catch attention, but attention can drive salience. So this is what I can do. I can make something salient by paying attention to it, and then that will tend to draw me back to it again, which, and you see what happens, which means it tends to catch my attention more so that when I go into the store, that bottle of liquor catches my attention and I buy it, you, </s><s>[INST] and that's why is that bullshit, because [/INST] what you're doing is being caught up in the salience of things independent from whether or not that salience is tracking reality. </s><s>[INST] Is it independent, or is it loosely connected? Because it's not so obvious to me when I see happy people at a bar, that I don't in part believe that well, my experience has been maybe different logically, I can understand, but maybe there's a bar out there, it's all happy people dancing. [/INST] In fact, </s><s>[INST] most of the bars I go to these days in texas is pretty lots of happy people. [/INST] I think you can I mean, there's probably variation, although I think it's very the truth seeking in there, let's say they're the intent is at least to try and shut off your truth seeking, it might not completely succeed, but that's the intent at times it can completely succeed because I can give you pretty much gibberish and never let it will motivate your behavior. There's there's this symptom, there's an episode from the classic Simpsons, not the modern Simpson, the classic symptoms where the there's aliens and they're running for office in the United States. Now I'm Canadian. So this doesn't quite work for me, but right. And the speech goes like this. My fellow americans when I was young, I dreamt of being a baseball, but we must move forward, not backward upward, not forward, twirling twirling towards freedom and people go and there's a rush nothing, there's nothing there. And yet it's great satire because a lot of political speech is exactly like that. There's nothing there. Right? </s><s>[INST] Well, I'm [/INST] not saying all political speech I said a lot, </s><s>[INST] but there there's a fundamental difference between and it's so hilarious. I remember that episode, uh there's a fundamental difference between that absurd sort of non secular speech and political speech because one of the things is political speech is grounded in some sense of truth. [/INST] And so if that requires you talking about alternative facts and weird, self destructive oxymoronic phrases. Isn't that approaching pull pure bullshit? </s><s>[INST] No, I think I think pure bullshit. Uh like the vacuum is uh is very difficult to uh to get to, but I get the point. So what exactly is truth is it possible to know. I [/INST] think Spinoza is right about truth. That truth is only known by its own standard, which sounds circular. There's a way in which he didn't mean that circularly. And I think this is also converges with plato. These are two huge influences on me. I think we only know the truth retrospectively when we, when we go through some process of self transcendence, when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame so that we can see the limitations and the distortions of the earlier frame. You have this when you have a moment of insight, insight is you doing your you are really realizing what is relevant. You go, oh, oh! </s><s>[INST] I [/INST] thought she was aggressive and angry. She's actually really afraid. I was mis framing this right? And you change what you find relevant. You have those Aha moments. </s><s>[INST] So do you think it's possible to get a a sense of objective reality? So is it possible to have to get to the ground level of what something that you can call objective truth [/INST] or </s><s>[INST] is it are we always on shaky ground? [/INST] I think those moments of transcendence can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere. And so this is drew Highlands notion of finite transcendence. We are capable of self transcendence and therefore we are creatures who can actually raise the question of truth or goodness or beauty because I think they they all share this feature, but that doesn't mean we can transcend to a godhood to some absolute view from nowhere that takes in all information and organizes it in a comprehensive whole. But that doesn't mean that truth is thereby rendered valueless. Um I think a better term is real and real and illusory our comparative terms. You only know that something is an illusion by taking something else to be real. And so we're always in a comparative task, but that doesn't mean that we can we can somehow jump outside of our framing in in some final manner and say this is how it is from a God's eye point of view. </s><s>[INST] So what do you think if I may ask of somebody like Ayan rand and her philosophy of objectivism? So where the core principles that reality exists independently of consciousness and that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception. So they have that you do have that ability to know reality. [/INST] There's two things knowing that there's an independent reality is not knowing in that independent reality. Those are not the same thing. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] But I think objectivism would probably say that our human reason is able to have contact with that, [/INST] then I would respond and say, you have to I believe in fact, ultimately in in a conformity theory of knowing that what that the deepest kind of knowing is when there's a contact, a conformity between the mind when the embodied mind and reality. But and here's where I guess I'd push back on on rand. I would say you have to acknowledge partial knowledge as real knowledge because if you don't you're going to fall prey to minos paradox. Minos paradoxes. You know this in plato right to know P well if I don't know P I'm gonna go looking for it, but if I don't know P how could I possibly recognize it when I found it? I have no way of recognizing. I don't have no way of knowing that I found it. So I must know P but if I know P then I don't need to learn about it. I don't need to go searching. So learning doesn't exist. Knowledge is impossible. The way you break out of that paradox is saying, no, no, no. It is partially it is possible to partially know something. I can know it enough that it will guide me to recognizing it. But that's not the same as having a complete grasp of it because I still have to search and find what I don't yet possess in my knowledge. If we So </s><s>[INST] yeah, [/INST] partial knowledge has to be real knowledge, </s><s>[INST] right? Partial knowledge is still knowledge. [/INST] Yes. </s><s>[INST] What do you think about somebody like Donald Hoffman who thinks the reality is an illusion. So complete illusion that we're given this actually really nice definition or idea that you talked about that there's a tension between the illusory and the and what is real. He says that basically we taken that and we ran with the reel to the point where the reel is not at all connected to some kind of physical reality. I [/INST] hope to talk to him at some point. We were supposed to talk at one point and so I have to talk in his absence. Um, I I think that first of all, I think saying that everything is illusion is like saying everything is tall, it doesn't make any sense. It's a comparative term, um something you have to say against this standard of realness, this is an illusion. And he uses arguments like from evolution, which are problematic to me because it's like, well you seem to be saying that evolution is true that it really exists. And then </s><s>[INST] some [/INST] of our cognition and perception has access to reality. Math and presumably some science has access to reality. And then what he seems to be saying is, well, a lot of your everyday experience is illusory but we do have some contact with reality, whereby we can make the arguments as to why most of your experience, most of your everyday experience is an illusion. But to me that's not a novel thing. That's that's that's Deckert, that's the idea that most of our sense experiences untrustworthy. But the math is what connects us to reality. That's how he interpreted the copernican revolution. Oh look, we're all seeing the sun rise and move over and set and it's all an illusion, but the math, the math gets us to the reality. </s><s>[INST] Well, I think he makes it a deeper point that most of cognition is just is evolved and operates in the illusory world. [/INST] How does he know that things like cognition and evolution exist? </s><s>[INST] I think there's an important distinction between evolution and cognition. Right? [/INST] No, I'm just saying that's not the point I'm making. I'm making a point that he's claiming that there are two things that really exist. Why are they privileged? </s><s>[INST] He basically says that, look, the process of evolution makes sense, right? Like it makes sense that you get complex organisms from simple organisms through the natural selection process. Here's how you get to transfer information from generation to generation. It makes sense. And then he says that there's no requirement for the cognition to evolve in a way that it would actually perceive and have direct contact with the physical reality. [/INST] Except that cognition evolved in such a way that it could perceive the truth of evolution. And you can't treat evolution like an isolated thing. Evolution depends on Darwinian theory, genetics. It depends on understanding plate tectonics, the way the environment changes. It depends on how chromosomes are structured. </s><s>[INST] Actually. That's an interesting question to him, where I don't know if he actually would push back on this is how do you know, evolution is real? [/INST] Yes. </s><s>[INST] Right. I think he would be open to the idea that it is part of the illusion that we constructed that there's some it's it's it's it's in some sense it is connected to reality, but we don't have a clear picture of it. I mean, you know, that's a that's an intellectually honest statement. Then if most of our cognition as thinking beings is operating at every level in an illusory world, then it makes sense that this one of the main theories of science that's evolution is also a complete part of this illusory world. [/INST] Right. But then what happens to the premise for his argument leading to the conclusion that cognition is illusory? </s><s>[INST] I I think it makes a very specific argument about evolution as an explanation of why the world is of our cognition operating an illusory world. But that's that's just one of the explanations. I think the deeper question is why do we think we have contact with reality with physical reality? It's we could be very well living in a virtual world constructed by our by our minds in a way that makes that world deeply interesting in some ways whether it's somebody playing a video game or we're trying to through the process of distributed cognition, construct more and more complex objects. Like why do we have to why why does it have to be connected to like physics and planets and all that kind of stuff. [/INST] Okay, so if we're gonna say like we're now considering it as a possibility rather than it's a conclusion based on arguments because the arguments again, will always rely on stipulating that there is something that is known. These are the features of cognition. Cognition is capable of illusion. That's a true statement. You're somehow in contact with the mind. Why is the mind have this privileged contact and other aspects of my body do not? So that's But let's put that aside and now let's just consider it. Now, when when we put it that way, it's not an epistemological question anymore. It's an existential question. And here's my reply to you. There's two possibilities either. The illusion is one that I cannot discover sort of, you know, the matrix on steroids or something. There's no way, no matter what I do, I can't find out that it's an illusion or it's an illusion, but I can find out that it's an illusion. Those are the two possibilities. Nothing changes for me. If those are the two possibilities. Because if I cannot find possibly find out, it is irrational for me to pay any attention to that possibility. So I could sheep should keep doing the science as I'm doing it. If there's a way of finding out Science is my best bet I believe for finding out. If it's what's true and what's an illusion. So I keep doing what I'm doing. So it's an argument. If you move it to that that makes no existential difference to </s><s>[INST] me. Oh, man, that is such a deeply philosophical argument. No, no, no, no, no, no. Uh nobody's saying science doesn't work. It's an interesting question just like before humans were able to fly, they would ask a question, can we build a machine that makes us fly in that same way we're asking a question to which we don't know an answer, but we may know in the future how much of this whole thing is an illusion. And I think in the second category, the first guy, I forgot which one? Yes, science will be able to help us discover this otherwise. Yes, for sure. It doesn't matter if we're living in a simulation, we can't find out at all, then it doesn't matter. But yes, the whole point is, as we get deeper and deeper understanding of our mind of cognition. We might be able to discover like how much of this is a big charade constructed by our mind to keep us fed or something like that. Some some weird uh some weird, very simplistic explanation that will ultimately, in its simplicity be beautiful. Or as we try to build robots and instill them instill them with consciousness with ability to feel those kinds of things. Will, will discover. Well, let's just trick them into thinking they feel and have consciousness and they'll believe it and then they'll have a deeply fulfilling and meaningful lives and on top of that they will interact with us in a way they will make our lives more meaningful and then all of a sudden it's like at the end of animal farm you look at pigs and humans, you look at robots and humans, you can't tell the difference between either and we in that way start to understand that um that so much of this existence could be an illusion. [/INST] Okay, well I have two responses to that first is uh the progress that's being made on like A. G. I. Is about making whatever the system is, that's going to be the source of intelligent, more and more dynamically and recursive li self correcting. That's part of what's happening. Extrapolating from that. You get a system that gets better and better at self correcting. But that's exactly what I was describing before as the transformative theory of truth. The other response to that is science. Like people think of science just as right sort of end proposition. But let me just use the evolutionary example again right? Like I need I need, if I'm gathering the evidence, I need to know a lot of geology, I need to know plate tectonics. I need to know about radioactive decay. I need to know about genetics and then and and then in order to measure all those things, I need to know how to how microscopes work. I need to know how pencils and paper work. I need to know how rulers work. I need to know how english like like you can't isolate knowledge that way. And if you say, well most of that's an illusion, then you're in a weird position of saying somehow all of these illusions get to this truth claim. I think it goes in reverse. If you think this is the truth claim, right? The measuring and all the things that scientists would do to gather on all the ways the theories are converging together. That also has to be fundamentally right? Because it's not like lego, it is an interwoven whole. </s><s>[INST] Yes, it definitely is interwoven. But I love how you play that. I'm playing the devil's advocate for the illusion world. But there's a consist, I mean there's an aspect to truth that has to be consistent, deeply consistent across an entire system. But inside a video game that some kind of that's some same kind of consistency evolves. There's rules about interactions and game theoretic patterns about what's good and bad and so on. You get and there's sources of joy and fear and anger and and then an understanding about the world. What happens in different dynamics of a video game, even simple video games. So there's no, you know, even in an inside an illusion, you can have consistency and develop truths inside that illusion and uh iterative lee evolve your truth with the illusion. [/INST] Okay, but that comes back, does that is that process genuinely self correcting or are you in the simulation in which there is no possible doorway out because if my argument is if you find one or two doorways that feeds back, in fact, you can't just say this is the little tiny island where we have the truth. That's the point I'm making, </s><s>[INST] right. But what if you find that? I think there is doorways. If that's the case? And what if you find a doorway you step out? But you're yet in another simulation? I mean, that's the point. That's so self correcting. When you fix the self deception, you don't know if there's other big yourself deceptions you're operating on. [/INST] Of course, in one sense, that's right. But again, we're back to when I step into the second simulation, is it can I get the doorway out of that, or? Right. Because if you just make the infinite regress of simulation, you basically said I have a simulation that I can never get out of? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I think there's always a bigger pile of bullshit is the claim I'm trying to make here. Okay, Yeah, let me dance around, meaning once more. I often ask people on this podcast or at a bar or to imaginary people I talked to in a room when I'm all by myself. The question of the meaning of life. Do you think this is a useful question you draw a line between meaning in life and meaning of life. Do you think this is a useful question? [/INST] No, I think it's like the question, what's North of the North Pole or what time is it on the sun, It sounds like a question, but it's actually not really a question because it has a presupposition in it that I think is fundamentally flawed. Um if I understand what people mean by it, and it's actually often not that clear, but when they talk about the meaning of life, they are talking about, there are some feature of the universe in and of itself that I have to discover and enter into a relationship with. And there's, in that sense, a plan for me or something. And so that's a property of the universe. That's a very deep um serious metaphysical ontological claim. You're you're claiming to know something fundamental about the structure of reality. There were times when people thought they had a worldview that legitimated like God is running the universe and therefore and God cares about you and there's a plan, et cetera. But I think a better way of understanding meaning is not right. It's meaning is like the grasp ability. Remember I talked about optimal grip, it's like the grasp ability of that cup. Is that in me? No. Is it in the cup? No, because the fly can't grasp it, right? We'll grasp ability is in my hand. Well, I can't grasp africa. No, no, there is a real relation fitted nous between me and this cup. Same thing with the ad activity of an organism is the activity of a great white shark in the great white shark drop it in the Sahara dies. Okay, meaning isn't in me? I think that's romantic bullshit and it isn't in the universe. It is a proper relationship. I've coined the phrase transgenic tive, it is the binding relationship between the subjective and the objective and therefore when you're asking the question about the meaning of life, you are, I think misrepresenting the nature of meaning, just like when you ask, what time is it on the sun? You're misrepresenting how we, how we derive clock time </s><s>[INST] At the risk of disagreeing with a man who did 50 lectures on the meaning crisis. Let me hard disagree, but I think would probably agree, but it's just like a dance. Like any dialogue. I think meaning of life gets at the same kind of relationship between you and the glass of water between whatever the forces of the universe that created the planets, the proteins, the multi cell organisms, the intelligent early humans, the beautiful human civilizations and the technologies that will overtake them. It's trying to understand the the relevance realization of the big bang to the feeling of love you have for another human being. It's reaching for that, even though it's hopeless to understand. It's the question, the asking of the question is the reaching Now it is in fact romantic bullshit technically speaking, but it could be that romantic bullshit is actually the essence of life and the source of his deepest meaning? Well, [/INST] I hope not. But </s><s>[INST] technically speaking romantic bullshit meaning romantic [/INST] in the philosophical sense. Yes. </s><s>[INST] So I I mean, what is poetry? What is music? What is the magic you feel when you hear a beautiful piece of music? What is that? Oh, [/INST] but that's exactly to my point, is music inside you, or is it outside you? It's both and neither. And that's precisely why you find it so meaningful. In fact, it can be so meaningful. You can regard it as sacred what you said, I don't think. And you preface that we might not be in disagreement right? What you said is, no, no, no, there is, there's a way in which reality is realizing itself. And I want my relevance realization to be in the best possible relationship that the sort of meta, optimal grip to what is most real? I totally agree. I totally think that's one of the things I said this earlier, one of our meta desires is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real. I do this with my students. I'll say, um, you know, because romantic relationships are sort of take the role of God and religion and history and culture for us right now, we we put everything on them and that's why they break, but right, strong </s><s>[INST] words, but [/INST] I'll say to them, okay, how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships? Put up your hands and say, okay, I'm not only talking to these people Of those people, how many of you would want to know your partner is cheating on you, even if it means the destruction of the relationship, 95% of them put up their hands and I say but why? And they and and here's my students who are usually all sort of bitten with cynicism and postmodernism and they'll just say spontaneously well because it's not real because it's not real, right? So I think what you're pointing to is actually you're pointing not to an objective or a subjective thing. So Romanticism says it's subjective, there's some sort of I guess like positivism or lucky and empiricism says its objective, but you're saying no, no, no, there's reality realization. And can I get relevance realization to be optimally gripping in the best right relationship with it? And and there's good reason you can because think about it, your relevance realization isn't just representing properties of the world, it's in stance, there's something very similar to biological evolution, which is that the guts of life, if I'm right, running your cognition is not just that you all have ideas. You actually inst ansi eight, that's what I mean by conformity, the same principles there within and without they don't belong to you subjectively, they're not just out there, they're both at the same time and they help to explain how you are actually bound to the evolutionary world. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So it comes from both inside and from the outside, but there's still the question of the meaning of life first of all. The big benefit of that question is that it shakes you out of your hamster in a wheel, that is daily life, the mundane process of daily life where you have a schedule, you wake up, you have kids, you have to take them to school, then you go to work and that repeats over and over and over and over and then you get increased salary and then you upgrade the home. And that whole process uh meaning asking about the meaning of life is so full of romantic bullshit that if you take it, if you just allow yourself to take it seriously for a second it forces you to pause and think like what, what's going on here and then it ultimately I think does return to the question of meaning in those mundane things, what gives, what gives my life joy? What gives it last thing? Um deliciousness. Where do I notice the magic and how can I have that magic return again and again, Beauty and that that ultimately what it returns to. But it's a the same thing you do when you look up to the sky, you spend most of your day hurrying around looking at things on the surface. But when you look up this guy and you see the stars, it fills you with the feeling of awe that forces you to pause and think in full context of like what the hell is going on here? That, but also I think um there is um when you think too much about the meaning of a glass and relevance realization of a glass, you don't necessarily get at the core of what makes music beautiful. So sometimes you have to start at the biggest picture first, and I think meaning of life forces you to really go to the Big Bang and go go go to the go to the universe and the whole thing, the origin of life, and I think um sometimes you have to start there to discover the meaning in the day to day, I think. But perhaps you would disagree [/INST] insofar as the question makes you ask about um the the whole of your life and how much meaning is in the whole of your life? And insofar as it asks how much that is connected to reality? It's a good question, but it's a bad question in that it also makes you look for the answers in the wrong way now you said, and I agree with what you said, what? How we really answer this question is we come back to the meaning in life and we see how much that meaning in life is connected to reality. We pursue wisdom. And so for me, I don't need that that question in order to provoke me into that stance. </s><s>[INST] So let's return to the meaning crisis? What is the nature of the meaning? Crisis in modern times? What's its origin? What's his explanation? Well, [/INST] remember what I said, what I argued that the very processes that make us adaptive lee intelligent subject us to perennial problems of self deception, self destruction, creating bullshit for ourselves, for other people, all of that. And that can cause, you know, anxiety, existential anxiety, It can cause despair. It can cause a sense of absurdity. These are perennial problems. And across cultures and across historical periods, human beings have come up with ecologies of practices. There's no one practice, there's no panacea practice. They've come up with ecologies of practices for Ameliorating that self deception and enhancing that fitted nous, that connectedness. That's at the core of meaning in life. That's prototypical, what we call wisdom. And here's how I can show you one clear instance of the meeting crisis. Is it a wisdom famine? I can I do this regularly with my students in the classroom will say, where do you go for information? They hold up their phone, where do you go for knowledge? They're a little bit slower. Probably because they're in my class. They'll say, well, Science, the university say, where do you go for wisdom? There's a silence. Wisdom isn't optional. That's why it is perennial cross cultural cross historical because of the perennial problems. But we do not have homes for colleges of practices that fit into our scientific technological world view so that they are considered legitimate? The fastest growing demographic group? Are the nones. N. O N E S s. They have no religious allegiance, but they are not primarily atheistic. They most frequently described themselves with this very this has become almost everybody now described. I'm spiritual but not religious, which means they are trying to find a way of reducing the bullshit and enhancing the connectedness, but they don't want to turn to any of the legacy, established religions by and large. </s><s>[INST] Well, isn't both religion and the nuns isn't wisdom a process, not a destination. So trying to find if you're deeply faithful religious person, you're also trying to find. Right? So just because you have a place where you you're looking or a set of traditions around which you're constructing the search. It's nevertheless a search And isn't so, I guess is there a case to be made that this is just the usual human condition? Uh, how do you answer if you asked five centuries ago, where do you look for wisdom? I mean, I suppose people would be more inclined to answer while the bible or religious text. [/INST] Right? And they had a worldview that was considered not just religious, but also rational. So we now have these two things orthogonal or often oppositional spirituality and rationality, but if you go before a particular historical period, you look back in the neo platonic tradition, like before the scientific revolution. Those two are not in opposition. They are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense of legitimacy and deep realness and grounding in your practices. We don't have that anymore. And I'm not advocating for religion, neither am I an enemy of religion. I'll strengthen your case by the way. So one of my iras did research and you get people who are have committed themselves to cultivating wisdom and you can look at people within religious traditions and people who are doing it in a purely secular framework, by many of the measures we use to start to study wisdom. Scientifically, the people in the religious paths do better than the secular. But here's the important point. There's no significant difference between the religious paths. So it's not like if you're, you know, following the path of Judaism, you're more likely to end up wiser than if you follow buddhism, by </s><s>[INST] the way. I don't know if that's my case, I was making the case that you don't need to have a religious affiliation to search for wisdom. It's that I thought along to the point, you just made that it doesn't matter which religious affiliation or none, but [/INST] that's what I'm saying. Okay, so this is the tricky thing we're in. Yeah, it does matter if you're in one, but it doesn't matter, sort of the proposition, all creeds of that, there's something else at work. There's a if you will allow me this, there's a functionality to religion that we lost when we rejected all the proposition all dogma, but there's a functionality there that we don't know how to recreate </s><s>[INST] what is that. Can you try to speak to that? What is that functionality? What is that? Why is that so useful? A bunch of stories, a bunch of myths, a bunch of narratives. [/INST] I don't think </s><s>[INST] that are drenched in like deep lessons about morality and all those kinds of things. What is the what's the what's the functional thing there that can't be replaced without a religious text by non religious text. [/INST] This is for me the golden question. So thank you. Um Do </s><s>[INST] you have an answer? Yeah, [/INST] I I have I think I have a significant answer. I don't think it's complete but I think it's important and this is to step before the Cartesian revolution and think about many different kinds of knowing. And this is now something that is prominent within which is called for e cognitive science, the kind of cognitive science I practice. And there's a lot of converging evidence for okay, these different ways of knowing. There's proposition all knowing this is what we are most familiar with. In fact it's almost it's almost has a tyrannical status. Right? So this is knowing that something is the case like the cats are mammals and it's stored in semantic memory and we have tests of coherence and correspondence and conviction right? There's procedural knowing this is knowing how to do something. This is skills are not theories. They're not beliefs, they're not true or false. They engage the world or they don't and they are stored in a different kind of memory. Procedural memory. You it's semantic memory can be damaged without any damage to procedural memory. That's why, you know, you have the prototypical story of somebody suffering Alzheimer's and they're losing all kinds of facts, but they can still sit down and play the piano flawlessly same kind of argument. There's perspective, all knowing this is knowing what it's like to be you here now in this situation, in this state of mind, the whole field of your salience, landscaping what it's like to be you here now and you have a specific kind of memory around that episodic memory and you have a different sense, you have a different criterion of realness. So you you can you can get this by what we, my friend dan and I we studied the scientists using moving the rovers around or you can take a look at people who are doing VR people talk about, you know, they want they want to really be in the game that makes it real. They don't mean verisimilitude, you can get that right sense of being in the game with something like Tetris which has isn't like it doesn't look like the real world and you can fail to have it in a video game that has a lot of verisimilitude is something else it's about again, this this kind of connectedness that we're talking about </s><s>[INST] if I may interrupt. Is that connected to the hard problem of consciousness, the subject, the quality Or is that a different that kind of knowing? Is that different from the quality of consciousness? [/INST] I think it has to do with Well, I make a distinction between the adjectival and the ad verbal quality. So I think it has to do with the adverb. Real quality a much more with the with the adjectival. So the adjectival quality are like the greenness of green, blueness of blue. The adverb real quality are the here nous the narrowness. That togetherness. And I think the perspective of knowing has a lot to do with the ad verbal quality. </s><s>[INST] Adjectival quality. A and add verbal quality. I'm learning so many new things today. Okay, so, uh that's another way of knowing, [/INST] Right? The perspective and then there's a deeper one. And this is a philosophical point. I don't want to we can go through the argument, but you don't have to know that, you know, in order to know. Because if you start doing that, you get an infinite regress. There has there has to be kind of knowing that doesn't mean you know that you know that. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. [/INST] Okay. Of course. Okay, great. Okay, good. Well, there was a lot of ink spilled over that over a 40-year period. So by </s><s>[INST] philosophers. They spilled this is what they do. They link. [/INST] Yeah. But I want to talk </s><s>[INST] to. So [/INST] I want to talk about what are called participatory knowing. This is the idea that you and the world are co participating in things and such that real afford ince's exists between you. So both me and this environment are shaped by gravity. So the affording of walking becomes available to me, both me and a lot of this environment are shaped by my biology and so afford ince's for that are here look at this cup shared physics shared sort of biological factors. My hand I'm bipedal also culture is shaping me and shaping this. I had to learn how to use that and treat it as a cup. So this is an agent arena relationship, right? There's identities being created in your agency identities being created in the world as an arena. So you and the world fit together, you know, when that's missing when you're really lonely or you're homesick or you're such suffering culture shock. So this this is participatory knowing and it's the sense of it comes with a sense of belonging </s><s>[INST] at every level. So the ability to walk is a kind of No. [/INST] Yes. Yes. </s><s>[INST] That that there's a dance between the physics that enables this process and just participating in the process is the act of knowing, [/INST] right? And there's a really weird form of memory, you have for this kind of knowing. It's called yourself </s><s>[INST] what can you elaborate? [/INST] Well, you you so </s><s>[INST] so [/INST] we talked about how all the how all the different other kinds of knowing had specific kinds of memory, semantic memory for proposition procedural right episodic for perspective, all what do you what's the kind of memory that is the coordinated storehouse of all of your agent arena relationships, All the roles, you can take all the identities, you can assume all the identities. You can </s><s>[INST] what's what's the self do you mean like consciousness or like [/INST] senior sense of self </s><s>[INST] sense of self in this world? That's not consciousness, That's uh like an agency or something, [/INST] right? It's an agent arena relationship. </s><s>[INST] And so in an agent arena relationship is the sense of the agent. [/INST] And and and that the agent belongs in that arena </s><s>[INST] whatever the agent is, whatever the arena is, Because it's probably a bunch of different framing of how you experience that. [/INST] Yeah. And you and you do you have all within your identity as a self, you have all kinds of roles that are somehow contributing to that identity but are not equivalent to that identity? </s><s>[INST] Yeah. I wonder if like my two hands have different because there's a different experience to me picking up something with my right hand and then my left hand. So are those like uh [/INST] that's a really cool question lex </s><s>[INST] And they certainly feel like their own things and that could be just uh anthropomorphize ation based on cultural narratives and so [/INST] on. It could but I think it's a legitimate empirical question because it also could be sort of ian gilchrist stuff. It could be you're using different hemispheres and they sort of have different agent arena relationships to the environment. This is a really important question in the cognitive science of the self. Does that does that hemispheric difference mean your multiple or you actually have a singular self? </s><s>[INST] So it's important to understand how many cells are there? [/INST] Yes, I think so, but </s><s>[INST] that's that's just like a quirk of evolution as it's not Surely you can't be fundamental to cognition, having multiple cells or a singular self. [/INST] It depends again, because uh we're getting far from the answer to the question you you originally asked me, do you want me to go back to that first or answer that </s><s>[INST] question? I already forgot everything. What's [/INST] the functionality of religion. </s><s>[INST] Yes. [/INST] Okay. Okay. And then we can return to the self. Okay. So you said, you know, you have all these propositions and etcetera etcetera and they different from the religions and they're not they don't seem to be considered legitimate by many people. </s><s>[INST] But [/INST] yet there's something functioning in the religions that is transforming people and making them wiser. And I put it to you that the transformations are largely occurring at those non proposition all levels, the procedural, the perspective all and the participatory and those are the ones by the way that are more fundamentally connected to meaning making because remember the propositions are representational and they're dependent on the non proposition, all non representational processes of connectedness and relevance realization. So religion goes down deep to the non proposition and works there. That's the functionality we need to grasp. Well, </s><s>[INST] you talk about tools essentially that humans are able to incorporate into their cognition. Psycho technologies like language is one, I suppose, uh, isn't religion than a psycho technology? [/INST] It would be a Yeah, an ecology of psycho technologies. Yes. </s><s>[INST] And the question is that Nietzsche ruined everything by saying God is dead. Uh, do we have to invent the new thing go to from the old phone, create the iphone, invent the new psycho technology that takes place of religion. [/INST] And so when the madman in Nietzsche's text goes into the marketplace, who's he talking to? He's not talking to the believers, he's talking to the atheists and he says, do you not realize what we have done, right? We have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky. We are now forever falling. We are unchained from the sun. We have to become worthy of this. </s><s>[INST] No, [/INST] no, no, no. But there's a point there. The point is right, there's one thing to rejecting the proposition, there's another project of replacing the functionality that we lost when we reject the religion. </s><s>[INST] So his worry that is Nihilism takes hold. You don't ever replace the thing that religion the role the religion played in our [/INST] maybe it's it's hard to tell what he actually, because he's so multi vocal. Um, I I'll speak for me rather than I think it is possible to using the best cognitive science and respectfully eggs opting what we can from the best religion and philosophy, philosophical traditions. Because there's things like stoicism that are in the gray line between philosophy and religion, buddhism is the same, doing that best proxy that best expectation we can come up with that functionality without having to buy into the particular proposition all sets of the legacy religions. That's my proposal. I call that the religion, that's not a religion. </s><s>[INST] So things like stoicism or modern stoicism, those things don't, don't you think in some sense they naturally emerge. Don't you think there's a longing for meaning? [/INST] So, stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period, when there was a significant meaning crisis in the ancient world because of what had happened after the breakup of alexander, the Great's Empire. So, if you if you compare Aristotle to people who are living after uh alexander. So Aristotle grows up in a place where everybody speaks the same language has the same religion. His ancestors have been there for years. He knows everybody after alexander, the Great's empire broken has broken up. People are now thousands of miles away from the government, They're surrounded by people because of the diasporas, right? The diasporas, I should say they're surrounded by people that don't speak their language don't share their religion. That's why you get all these mother religions emerging, right? Universal model religions like ISIS, etcetera. So there is a there is what's called domiciled, there's the killing of home, there's a loss of a sense of home and belonging and fitted nous during the hellenistic period. And stoicism arose specifically to address that. And because it was designed to address a meaning crisis, it is no coincidence that it is coming back into prominence right now. Well, </s><s>[INST] there there could be a lot of other variations. It feels like, I think when you speak of the meaning crisis, you're in part describing, not prescribing, you're describing something that is happening. But I would venture to say that if we just leave things be the meaning crisis dissipates because we long to create institutions to create collective ideas. So this distributed cognition process that give us meaning. So if religion loses power, we'll find other institutions. There are sources of meaning. [/INST] Is </s><s>[INST] that is that is that your intuition as well? [/INST] I think we are already doing that. I do. I'm involved with and do participant observation of many of these emerging communities that are creating a college is a practice that are specifically about trying to address the meeting crisis. I just in late july went to Washington state and did rafe kelley's evolve, move play, return to the source and one of the most challenging things I've ever done. That </s><s>[INST] guy is awesome by the way. I've got to interact with him a long long time ago. Uh yeah, it's from another world, it feels like a different world um because I interacted with him not directly but so he, this is somebody maybe you can speak to what he works on, but he makes movement and play. Uh he encourages people to make that a part of their life, like how how you move about the world, whether that's as part of sort of athletic endeavors or actually just like walking around and around the city. Um And I think the reason I ran into him is because there was a lot of interest in that, in the athletic world, in the in the grappling world, in the Brazilian jiu jitsu world. People who study movement to make movement part of their lives to see how how can we do great play and fun and and uh just the basic humanness that's natural to our movement. How do we integrate that into our daily practice? [/INST] So so </s><s>[INST] this is yet another way to find meaning. [/INST] I think it's actually an exemplar of what I was talking about because what's going on with race, integration of parkour in nature, right? And martial arts um and mindfulness practices and biological practices is exactly and explicitly. So by the way he he will tell you, he's been very influenced by my work, he's trying to get at the non proposition all kinds of knowing that make meaning by evolving our sensory motor loop and enhancing our relevance realization because that gives people profound improved sense of connectedness to themselves to each other in the world. And I'll tell you lex I won't, I don't want to say the, I don't want to say to specifically the final thing that people did because it's part of his secret sauce. Right. Right. Right. But what I can say is when it was done, I said to them all, I said as far as I can tell, none of you are religious, Right? And then, yeah, yeah. But what you just did was a religious act, wasn't it? And they all went, yeah, it was. </s><s>[INST] So that same magic was there? [/INST] Yes, </s><s>[INST] bathroom break. What's your take on Atheism in general is um, a closer to truth than a maybe is an Atheist closer to truth than a person who believes in God. [/INST] So I'm a non theist, which I which means, I think the shared set of presuppositions between the theist and the Atheist are actually what needs to be rejected. Can </s><s>[INST] you explain that further? [/INST] Yes, I can. And I want to point out by the way that they're uh, there are lots of non theistic religious traditions. Um, so I'm not, I'm not, I'm not coming up with a sort of airy fairy category. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And what's the difference in non theism, agnosticism and Atheism. [/INST] So non theist think that the theist and the Atheist share a bunch of presuppositions, for example, it's that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that is, in some sense the supreme being and that the right relationship to that being is to have a correct set of beliefs. I reject all of those claims. </s><s>[INST] So both the theist and the Atheist [/INST] in their in their modern version. Yes, Yes. </s><s>[INST] In which do you reject it in the sense that you don't know or do you reject it in the sense that you believe that each one of those presuppositions is likely to be not true. The [/INST] latter I both on reflection, argument and personal experimentation and ex and experience. I've come to the conclusion that those shared propositions are probably not true. </s><s>[INST] Which one is the most troublesome to you, the personal being, the kind of accumulation of everything into one being that ultimately created stuff. [/INST] So for me, there's two and they're interlocked together. I'm not trying to dodge your question. It's that the idea that the ground of being is some kind of being, I think is a fundamental mistake. </s><s>[INST] It's void of being. [/INST] No, no, no. Like </s><s>[INST] the ground of being is some kind of being. [/INST] No, no. </s><s>[INST] The [/INST] ground of being is not itself any kind of being. Being is not a being. It is the ability for things to be, which is not the same thing as a being </s><s>[INST] are human beings, [/INST] We are beings, this glasses of being, this table as a being. But when I ask you, how are they all in being, you don't say by being a glass or by being a table or by being a human. You want to say no, no, there's something ah underneath it all. And then you realize it can't be any thing. This is why many mystical traditions converge on the idea that the ground of being is nothingness, which is you know which you normally pronounced as nothingness, but if you, if you put the hyphen back in, you get the original intent nothingness and that is bound up with okay, what I need to do in order to be in relationship with, so it's a misconstruing of ultimate reality as a supreme being, which is a category mistake to my mind and then that my relationship to it, that sacredness is a function of belief. And I have been presenting you an argument through most of our discussion. That meaning is at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions. And so that is a misunderstanding of sacredness because I take sacredness to be that which is most meaningful and it connected to what is most real </s><s>[INST] and theist think of what of sacredness is what [/INST] they think of sacredness as a property of a particular being God. And that the way that is meaningful to them is by asserting a set of propositions or beliefs. Now, I want to point out that this is what I would now call modern or common Theism. You go back into the classical periods of Christianity, you get a view that's really radically different from how most people understand theism today. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so let me uh this is an interesting question that I usually think about in the form of mathematics, but so in that case, if meaning is sacred, in your non theist view is meaning created or is it discovered? There's [/INST] a latin word that uh doesn't separate them called. And I would say that. And before you say, oh well give me a chance because you participate in it. You've experienced an insight? Yes. Did you make it happen? </s><s>[INST] The the insight did [/INST] you make it happen or did what did you do? Like can you do that? I'm gonna have I need an insight is what I do to make an insight. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. In some sense it came from elsewhere, right? [/INST] But you didn't just passively receive it either. You're engaged and involved in it. That's why you get right. So that's what I mean by you participate in it. You participate in meaning. So </s><s>[INST] you do think that is both. Yes, you do think it's both. I mean that's not a trivial thing to understand. Um because a lot of time we think when you think about a search for meaning, you think it's like you're going through a big house and you open each door and look if it's there and so on as if there is going to be a glowing orb that you discover. Um but at the same time, I'm somebody that based on the chemistry of my brain have been extremely fortunate to be able to discover beauty and everything uh in the most mundane and boring of things. I am as David Foster Wallace said, unbearable. I could just sit in a room uh just like playing with the tennis ball or something and be excited. Um, basically like a dog, I think endlessly. Um, so to me, meaning is um created like because I could create meaning out of everything. But of course, it doesn't require a partner. It does require dance partners, whatever it does require the tennis ball. But honestly, that's what, you know, a lot of people that I don't necessarily, we'll talk about it. I don't practice meditation, but people who meditate very seriously, like, you know, the entire days for months kind of thing. They talk about being able to discover meaning and just the wind or something like they just the breath and everything. Just subtle sensory experiences give you deep fulfillment. Um so that's again, it's interaction actually, I do want to say because the interesting uh difference that you've drawn between non Theism theism and Atheism, where's where's the agreement and disagreement between you and Jordan Peterson on this. I just talked to George about this. Um [/INST] because you're very </s><s>[INST] clear, it's kind of beautiful and the clarity in which you laid this out? Um I wonder if Jordan has arrived at a similar kind of clarity. What have you, have you been able to draw any kind of lines between the way the two of you see religion? [/INST] Yeah, so there was a video released I think like two or 3 weeks ago with Jordan's and myself and Jonathan Pageau, </s><s>[INST] I haven't watched that one yet [/INST] and it's around this question, lex, he's basically sort of making um he's putting together an argument for god. I mean I think that's a fair way, I don't think he would object to me saying that. And um and Jonathan, Pageau is also a well, Jonathan is a christian, it's unclear what Jordan is. Um </s><s>[INST] and Jonathan's work is on symbolism and different mythologies and Christianity. [/INST] Yes, especially neo platonic Christianity, which is very important. Um have a lot of respect, I have a lot of respect for both of them, I have a lot of respect for Jonathan, but in in in my participation in that dialog, you can see me well repeatedly, but but I think everybody including Jordan thought constructively challenging sort of the attempt to build a theistic model and I was challenging it from a non theistic perspective. So I think we don't um agree in on certain sets of propositions, but there was a lot of, there was also a lot of acknowledgement um and I think genuine appreciation on his part and Jonathan is part of the arguments I was making, </s><s>[INST] so they believe in uh maybe the presupposition of like a supreme being that not believe but the the not not believe, but they see the power of that particular presupposition in uh being a source of meaning. [/INST] I think that's relatively clear for me with Jordan, Jordan's a really complex guy. So it's very hard to just like pin to my best sort of understanding. Yes, I think that's clearly the case for Jordan's, it's not the case for Jonathan, Jonathan is, remember I said I was talking about modern atheism and theism, Jonathan is a guy who somehow went into icon carving and maximus, the confessor and Eastern orthodoxy and has come out of it at the other end as 1/5 century church father that is nevertheless being rightfully so to be increasingly relevant to many people. I think </s><s>[INST] he's deeply old school. [/INST] Yeah, I think he has, he and I especially because neo paganism is a non theistic philosophical spirituality and it's a big part of Eastern Orthodoxy. He, and I, I think um he would say things like God doesn't exist. What's your christian, Right? And then, and he's being quite, but he'll say, well God doesn't exist the way the cup exists or the table exists, the same kind of move I was making a few minutes ago, he'll say things like that. He he will emphasize the nothingness of ultimate reality, the nothingness of God because he's he is, he's from that version of Christianity. Um what you might call classical Theism, but classical Theism looks a lot more like non Theism than it looks like modern Theism? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's really interesting. What what about is there a line to be drawn between myth and religion in terms of its usefulness in man's search for meaning? [/INST] So here's where Jordan and I are much more actually, all three of us are in significant agreement. Um, I said this in my series, but I want to say it again here. Uh, myths aren't stories about things that happened in the deep past that are largely irrelevant myths or stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness and they need to be brought into an awareness not just or primarily at the proposition all level, but at those non proposition all levels. And I think that is what good mythos does. I prefer to use the greek word because we've now turned the english word into a synonym for a widely uh, a widely believed falsehood. And I don't think again, if you go back even to the, you know, the church fathers, I'm not a christian, I'm not advocating for Christianity. Right? But right, neither am I here to attack it. Right? But if you when, when they talk about reading these stories, they write, they think the literal interpretation is the weakest and the least important. You moved to the allegorical for the symbolic, to the moral, to the spiritual, the mystical and that's where, Right? So they would say to you, uh you know, but how is how is the story of Adam and Eve true for you now? And I don't mean true for you in that relativistic sense. I mean, how is it pointing to a pattern in your life right now? </s><s>[INST] So there's some sense in which the telling of this mythos becomes real in connecting to the patterns that kind of captivate the public today. [/INST] So, first, so </s><s>[INST] you just keep telling the story. I mean, there's something about some of these stories, they're just really good at being sticky to the patterns of each generation and they they'll stick to different patterns throughout time. They're just sticky in powerful ways. [/INST] Yes. And so we keep returning back to them again and again and again. And it's important to see that some of these stories r recursive. Their myths are about one particular set of patterns. Their their myths about, right, not not not just important pattern. Like you get, you know, Jordan's stuff about, there's heroes and myths are trying to uh make us understand the need for being heroic in our own lives. One of the things I like to put in counterbalance, that is the greek also have myths of hubris, right? The counterbalance the heroic, Right? But then there are myths that are not about those deeply important patterns but their myths about religio itself that the way we're religion means to bind to connect the way relevance realization connects us. And so the point of the myth is not notice that pattern or notice that pattern and notice that pattern. It's notice how all of these patterns are emerging and what does that say about us and reality and those miss those myths? Um I think are genuinely profound. </s><s>[INST] And how much of the myths, how much of the power of those myth is about the dialogues. You talked about this quite a bit I think in the first conversation with Jordan, you guys, I'm not sure you've gotten really into it. You you scratch the surface a little bit but the role of as you say, dialogue in distributed cognition. What is that the thing we're doing right now? Talking with our mouth holes. What is that? And actually can I ask you this [/INST] question </s><s>[INST] if aliens came to earth and were observing humans would they notice our distributed cognition first or our individual cognition first? What is the most notable thing about us humans? Is it our ability to individually do well in I. Q. Tests or whatever or puzzle solve or is it this thing we're doing together? [/INST] I think most of our problem solving is done in distributed cognition. Uh Like look around, you didn't make this equipment, you didn't build this place, you didn't invent this language that we're both sharing etcetera etcetera. Uh now there's there's more specific and precise experimental evidence coming out. Um Let's take a standard task that people reasoning task. I wanted to do the details. It's called the wason selection task. And you give it to people highly educated psychology students, premier universities across the world. You've been, we've been doing it since the sixties. It's replicates and replicates, and only 10% of the people get it right. You put them in a group of four, he allowed them to talk to each other. The success rate goes to 80%. That's just one example of a phenomenon that's coming to the fore, </s><s>[INST] by the way. Do you know if a similar experiments been done on a group of engineering students for psychology students? Is there a major group differences in I. Q. Between those two? Just kidding. Um That's uh let's move on. All right. So there is a lot of evidence that there's power to this distributed cognition. Now. What about this mechanism? That's fascinating mechanism of the ants interacting with each other? The dialogue. [/INST] I use the word discourse or dialogue for just people having a conversation, but and this is deeply inspired by um Socrates and plato especially the platonic dialogues, and I'm sure we've all had this. And so give me a moment cause I want to build on to something here. We've participated in conversations that took on a life of their own and took us both in directions. We did not anticipate afforded us insights that we could not have had on our own and we don't have to have come to an agreement, but we were both moved and we're both drawn into insight and we feel like, wow, that was one of the best moments of my life because we feel how that introduced us to a capacity for tapping into a flow state within distributed cognition. That puts us into a deeper relationship with ourselves with another person and potentially with the world. That's what I mean by the logos. And so for me, I think the logos is more important. Boy, I could just hear, I'm sorry, I can hear Jordan and Jonathan in my head right now. But I think it's more, </s><s>[INST] I hear them all the time. I just wish they would shut up in my head sometimes. Uh so what, what are they saying to you in your head? What [/INST] they're saying is? Well, see that's what the most recent conversation was about. I was trying to say that I don't think mythos is, I think mythos is really important. I think these kinds of narratives are really important. But I think this ability to connect together in distributed cognition, collective intelligence and cultivate a shared flow state within that collective intelligence. So it starts to ramp up perhaps towards collective wisdom. I think that's more important because I think that's the basin within which the myths and the rituals are ultimately created and when they function like a myth is like a public dream, it depends on distributed cognition and it depends on people enacting it and getting into mutual flow states. </s><s>[INST] So the highest form of dialogue goes of conversation is this flow state and that it forms the foundation from myth building. I [/INST] think so I think so. So that communities, that's victor turner's phrase and he specifically linked it to flow and I study flow scientifically, that, you know that with within distributed cognition as as as as the home as the generator of mythos and ritual and those are bound together as well. I think that's fundamentally correct. </s><s>[INST] You know, what's the cool thing here? Because I'm a huge fan of podcasts and audiobooks, but podcasts in particular is relevant here is there's a third person in this room listening now and and they're also in the flow state. [/INST] Yes, yes. </s><s>[INST] Like I'm close friends with a lot of podcasts there. They don't know I exist, I just listened to them and because I've been in so many flow states with them and I was like, yes, yes, this is good, but they don't, they don't know I exist, but they are in conversation with me ultimately and [/INST] think think like of what what that's doing. You've got like you got dialogues and then you've got this meta dialogue like you're describing and think about how things like podcasts and youtube. They break down old boundaries between the private and the public between writing and oral speech. So we have the dynamics of living oral speech, but it has the permanency of writing, like we're we're in the midst of creating a vehicle, right? And a medium for distributed cognition that breaks down a lot of the categories by which we organized our cognition. </s><s>[INST] I mean because of the tools of Youtube and so on. Just the, the network, the graph of how quickly the distributed cognition can spread is really powerful and just a huge amount of people have listened to your lectures, I've listened to your lectures but I've experienced them at least in your style, there's something about your style, it felt like a conversation like it felt like at any moment I could interrupt you and say something and I was just listening, [/INST] thank you, thank you for saying that because I aspire to being genuinely as socratic as I can when I'm doing this. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, there was that sounds actually as I'm saying it now, why was that? It didn't feel like sometimes lectures are kinda uh you know, you came, you come down with the commandments and you just [/INST] want to list them but </s><s>[INST] there was a sense like, I mean, I think it was the excitement that you have like you have to understand and also the fact that you were kind of, I think thinking off the top of your head, sometimes there was a you're interrupting yourself with [/INST] thoughts, you're </s><s>[INST] playing with thoughts like your, your reasoning through things often, like you had your reference a lot of books, so surely you were extremely well prepared and you're referencing a lot of ideas, but then you're also struggling in the way to present those ideas. [/INST] Yes, there was. And so the jazz, </s><s>[INST] jazz, jazz [/INST] and getting into the flow state and and trying to share in a participatory in perspective of fashion the learning with the people rather than just pronouncing at them. Yes. </s><s>[INST] What's mindfulness? [/INST] So published on that as well? Um and I practice, I've been practicing many forms of mindfulness and ecology of practices since 1991, so I both have practitioners knowledge and I also study it scientifically. I think I'm pretty sure I was the first person to academically talk about mindfulness at the University of Toronto within a classroom setting, like lecturing on it. Um so </s><s>[INST] this is a topic that a lot of people have recently become very interested in. Think about. So from that from the early days, how do you think about what it is? [/INST] I've critiqued the sort of standard definitions, being, you know, aware of the present moment without judgment and because I think they're they're they're flawed. Um and if you want to get into the detail of why we can, but this is how I want to explain it to you. And it also points to the fact of why you need an ecology of mindfulness practices. You shouldn't equate mindfulness with meditation? I think that's a primary mistake </s><s>[INST] when you say ecology, what do you mean by the way? Like so lots of many different variants? [/INST] No. So what I mean by an ecology is exactly what you have in an ecology. You have a dynamical system in which there are checks and balances on each other and right. And I'll get to that with this about mindfulness. I'll make that connection if you allow me. So we're always framing. We've been talking about that, right? And for those of you who are not on Youtube. But this podcast, I wear glasses and I'm now sort of putting my my my my fingers and thumb around the frames of my glasses. So this is my frame and my lenses, right? And that frame the frame holds the lens and I'm seeing through it in both senses beyond and by means of it. So right now my glasses are transparent to me. I want to use that as a strong analogy for my mental framing. Okay now, sometimes this is what you do in meditation. I would argue you step back from looking through your frame and you look at it. I'm taking my glasses off right now and I'm looking at them. Why might I do that to see if there's something in the lenses that is distorting </s><s>[INST] causing [/INST] me to right now, if I just did that, that could be helpful. But how do I know if I've actually corrected the change I made to my lenses? What do I need to do? I need to put my glasses on and see if I can now see more clearly and deeply than I could before meditation. Is this stepping back and looking at contemplation is that looking through and there are different kinds of practices. The fact that we treat them as synonyms is a deep mistake. The word contemplation has temple in it, in latin, contemplate EO means to look up to the sky. It's it's a translation of the greek word, Theo, Aurea, which we get our word theory from its to look deeply into things. Meditation is more about having to do with reflecting upon standing back and looking at mindfulness includes both. It includes your ability to break away from an inappropriate frame and the ability to make a new frame. That's what actually happens in insight. You have to both break an inappropriate frame and make c realize a new frame. This is why mindfulness enhances insight both ways by the way, meditative practices and also contemplated practices. </s><s>[INST] So [/INST] mindfulness is frame awareness that can be appropriated in order to improve your capacities for insight and self regulation. </s><s>[INST] Now I am inexperienced with meditation, sort of the practice, the rigorous practice and the science meditation. But you know, I've talked to people who uh seriously as a science study psychedelics and they often talk about the really important thing is the sort of the integration back. So the contemplation step. So if you it's not just the actual things you see on psychedelics or the actual journey of where your mind goes on psychedelics. It's also the integrating that into the new perspective that you take on life. Right? [/INST] Exactly. </s><s>[INST] You you're really nice to describe some meditation is the in that metaphor is the psychedelic journey to a different mind state. And contemplation is the return back to reality. How you integrate that into a new world view and mindfulness as the whole process those [/INST] right? So if you if you if you just did contemplation, you could suffer from inflation and projective fantasy. If you just do meditation, you can suffer from withdrawal spiritual bypassing avoiding reality. They act, they need they need each other. You have to cycle between them. It's like what I talked about earlier when I talked about the opponent processing within the autonomic nervous system or the opponent processing at work and attention. And that's what I mean by an ecology of practices. You need both. Neither one is a panacea. You need them in this opponent processing acting as checks and balance on each other. </s><s>[INST] Is there sort of practical advice you can give to people on how to meditate or how to be mindful in this full way. [/INST] Yes, I would tell them to do at least three things and I was I I lucked into this when I started meditation, I went down the street and there was a place that taught the past the meditation. Metta contemplation and tai chi Chuan for flow induction. And you should get you should have a meditative practice. You should find a contemplated practice and you should find a moving mindfulness practice. Especially one that is conducive to the flow state and practice them in an integrated fashion. </s><s>[INST] Can you elaborate what those practices might look like? So? Right Generally speaking [/INST] meditative practice like pasta. Um So what what what's the primary thing I look through rather than look at its my sensations. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to focus on my sensations rather than focusing on the world through my sensations. So I'm gonna follow for example the sensations in this area of my my abdomen more where my breathing is. So I can feel as my abdomen is expanding. I can feel those sensations and then I can feel the sensation since it's contracting. Now what will happen is my mind will leap back to trying to look through and look at the world again. Right I'll start thinking about I need to do my laundry or what was that noise. And so what do I do? I don't get involved with the content. I step back and label the process with an I. N. G. Word listening, imagining planning and then I return my attention to the breath and I have to return my attention in the correct way the part of your mind that jumps around in the buddhist tradition. This is called your monkey mind. It's like a monkey leaping from branches and chattering right? If I was trying to train that, that that monkey mind to stay, or, as Jack cornfield said, train a puppy dog and you know, stay puppy dog, and if it goes and I get really angry, I bring it back and I'm yelling at it, I'm going to train it to fight and fear me. But if I just indulge it, if I just feed its whims, oh look, the puppy dog went there, Oh, now </s><s>[INST] it's their puppy [/INST] dog never learns to stay. What do I need to do? I have to either fight it or feed it. I have to have this centered attitude, I have to befriend it. So you you step back and look at your sensations, you step back and look at your distracting processes, you return your attention to the breath, and you do it with the right attitude. That's the core of a good meditative practice. Okay, </s><s>[INST] then what's a good contemplated practice? Good [/INST] contemplated practice is to try and meta, it's actually a proposed, because we talked about that participatory, knowing the way you're situated in the world. So, what This is a long thing, because there's different interpretations of meta uh and I go for what's called an existential interpretation over a an emotional one. But so what I'm doing in meta right is I'm trying to become I'm trying to awaken in two ways, I'm trying to awaken to the fact that I am constantly assuming an identity and assigning an identity. So I'm looking at that, I'm trying to awaken to that and then I'm trying to awake from the modal confusion that I can get into around that and so I'm looking out onto the world and I'm trying to see you in a fundamentally different way than I have before, </s><s>[INST] you know, like you go to the gym and you do bicep curls. [/INST] Yes, </s><s>[INST] yes. Is it possible to reduce it to those things? That I mean you don't need to speak to the specifics but is there actual practice you can do or is it really personal? [/INST] No, I teach people how to do the meta practice. I also teach them how to do a neo platonic contemplated practice how to do a stoic one. Another one you can do is the view from above, this is classic stoicism. I get you to imagine that you're in this room and then imagine that you're floating above the room, then above austin, then above texas, then above the United States than the Earth and you like and you have to really imagine it don't just think it but really and then what you notice is as you're pulling out to a wider and wider, like contemplation of reality, your sense of self and what you find relevant and important also changes note for all of these, there's a specific step by step methodology. </s><s>[INST] So you can so like in that one, you could just literally imagine yourself floating farther and farther out, [/INST] but you have to go through the steps because the stepping matters because if you just jump, it doesn't work. </s><s>[INST] Do you have any of the stuff online by the way [/INST] I do, because during Covid, I decided um um, at the advice of a good friend to do a daily, of course I taught meditating with john Dravecky, I did all the way through meditation, contemplation, even some of the movement practices that's all there. It's all available. That was largely inspired by buddhism and daoism. And then I went into the Western tradition and went through things like stoicism and optimism, cultivating wisdom with john that's all they're all free </s><s>[INST] on your website. [/INST] Yeah, it's on my Youtube channel </s><s>[INST] Youtube channel. Okay, that's exciting. Um, I mean, you're meaning meaning crisis lectures is just incredible everything around it. Including the notes and the notes that people talk. It's just, there's a, it created this tree of, of conversations. It's really, really, really well done. Um, what about flow induction? You [/INST] want to flow wisely And first of all, you need to understand what flow is and then you need to confront a particular issue around a practical problem around flow. </s><s>[INST] Let's go there because a lot of those words seem like synonyms to people sometimes. So the state of [/INST] flow, </s><s>[INST] what is it? [/INST] All right. So, um, and he just died last year. I </s><s>[INST] admire him very much. We've exchanged a bunch of messages um, over the past few years and he wanted to do the podcast several [/INST] times. Uh </s><s>[INST] but he said his um he struggled with his health and I I never knew in those situations I deeply regret um several cases like this that um that I had like with with Conway that I should have pushed him on [/INST] it </s><s>[INST] because yeah, as you get later in life things, the simple things become more difficult, but a voice, especially one that hasn't been really heard is important to hear. So anyway, I apologize, but [/INST] you know, I I share that. I mean, I can tell you that within my area he is important and he's famous in academics. So the flow state two important sets of conditions, and very often people only talk about one and and that's a little bit of a misrepresentation. So the flow state is in situations in which the demand of the situation is slightly beyond your skills. So you both have to apply all the skills you can with as much sort of attention and concentration as you possibly can. And you have to actually be stretching your skills. Now, in this circumstance, people report optimal experience, optimal in two ways, optimal in that this is one of the best experiences I've had in my life. It's distinct from pleasure. And yet it explains why people do very bizarre things like rock climbing because it's a good flow induction, right? But they also mean optimal, in a second sense, my best performance. So it's both the best experience and the best performance. So I also talked about the information flow conditions you need right in order for there to be this state of flow. And then I'll talk about what it's like to be in flow in a sec, what you need is three things you need, the information that you're getting to be clear. It can't be ambiguous or vague, think about a rock climber, it's ambiguous and vague. You're in trouble, right? There has to be tightly coupled feedback between what you do and how the environment response. So when you act, there's an immediate response. There isn't a big time lag between your action and your ability to detect the response from the environment. 3rd, failure has to matter, error really matters. So </s><s>[INST] there should be some anxiety about failure [/INST] and failure matters. So that like the Yeah, because </s><s>[INST] to you, the person that [/INST] Yes, yes, yes. Now, when you're in the flow state and notice how this sits on the boundary between the secular and the sacred. When you're in the flow </s><s>[INST] state, [/INST] People report a tremendous sense of at one ment with the environment, They report a loss of a particular kind of self consciousness, that narrative natural nanny in your head. That how do I look to people like me? How do I look? How's my hair? Do people like me should I have said that all goes </s><s>[INST] away? You're [/INST] free from that. You're free from the most sadistic super ego self critic. You could possibly have at least for a while. The world is vivid. It's super salient to you. There's an ongoing sense of discovery, although often, you know, you're exerting a lot of metabolic metabolic effort, it feels effortless. So in the flow state, when you're sparring your hand just goes up for the block and you your strike just goes through the empty space. Or if you're a goalie in hockey, I've got to mention hockey once. I'm a Canadian, right? You put out your, you know, you put out your glove hand and the puck's there, right? So there's this tremendous sense of grace at one mint super salience discovery and realness. People don't, people don't when they're in the flow state, they don't go, I bet this is an illusion. The interesting question for me and my co authors in the book in the uh the article we published in the hands of the Oxford handbook spontaneous thought with Harry in Harry Bennett and Leo Ferraro is that's a descriptive account of flow. We wanted an explanatory account. What are the causal mechanisms at work in flow. And so we actually proposed two interlocking cognitive processes. The first thing we said is, well, what's going on in flow? Well, think about it? Think about the rock climber? The rock climber and we talked about this earlier, they, they're constantly restructuring how they're seeing the rock face, They're constantly doing something like insight and if they and if they fail to do it, they impasse and that starts to get dangerous. So they got to do an insight that primes an insight that primes an insight. So imagine the aha experience that that flash in that moment and imagine it cascading. So you're getting the extended, aha, That's why things are super salient. There's a sense of discovery, there's a sense of that one moment of deep participation of grace, but there's something else going on too. So there's a phenomena called implicit learning. Also very well replicated starts way back in the 60s with river, you can give people complex patterns like number and letter strings, right? And they can learn about those patterns outside of deliberate focal awareness. That's what's called implicit learning and what's interesting is if you try and change that task into um you know, tell me the pattern, but explicitly explicitly try to figure out the performance degrades. So here's the idea you have this adaptive capacity for implicit learning and what it does is it results in you being able to track complex variables in a way, but you don't know how you came up with that knowledge, right? So you get, and this is Hogarth's proposal and educating intuition intuition is actually the result of implicit learning. So an example I use is how far do you stand away from somebody at a funeral? There's a lot of complex variables, their status closeness to the person, your relationship to them, past history, all kinds of stuff. And yet you know how to do it and you didn't have to go to funeral school. You I'm just using that as an example. So you have these powerful intuitions. Now here's Hogarth's great point, implicit learning. Remember I said before the things that make adaptive make us subject to self deception. Here's another example, implicit learning is powerful at picking up on complex patterns, but it doesn't care what kind of pattern it is. It doesn't distinguish causal patterns from merely correlation patterns. So implicit learning when we like it? It's intuition when it's picking up on stuff that's bogus. We call it prejudice or all kinds of other names for intuition that's going wrong now, he said, okay, what do we do? What do we do about this? And this will get back to flow? What do we do about this? Well, we can't try to replace implicit learning with explicit learning because we'll lose all the adaptive nous to it. So what can we do explicitly? What we can do is take care of the environment in which we're doing the implicit learning. How do we do that? We try to make sure the environment has features that help us distinguish causation from correlation. What kind of environments have we created that are good at distinguishing causation correlation. Experimental environments? What do you do in an experiment? You make sure that the variables are clear. No confound no ambiguity, no vagueness, you make sure there's a tight coupling between the independent and the dependent variable and your hypothesis can be falsified error matters. Now look at those three lex, those are exactly the three conditions that you need for flow, clear information, tightly coupled feedback and error matters. So flow is not only an insight cascade, improving your insight capacity, it's also and marker that you're you're you're cultivating the best kind of intuitions, the ones that fit you best to the causal patterns in your environment. </s><s>[INST] But it's hard to achieve that kind of environment where there's a clear distinction between causality and correlation and and it has the rigor of a scientific experiment. [/INST] Fair enough. And I don't think Hogarth was saying it's going to be epistemological e as rigorous as a scientific experiment. But he's saying right, if you structure that it will tend to do what that scientific method does, which is fine cause I think of the rock climber, all of those things are the case, they need clear information right? It's tightly coupled and error matters and they think what they're doing is very real because if they're not, if they're not, you know, conforming to the real causal patterns of the rock face and the physiology of their body? They will fall. </s><s>[INST] Is there something to be said about the power of discovering meaning and having this deep relationship with the the moment? There's something about flow that's really forgets the past and the future and it's really focused on the moment. [/INST] I think that's part of the phenomenology, but I think the functionality has to do with the fact that what's happening in flow is that dynamic non proposition all connectedness that is so central to meaning is being optimized. This is why flow is a good predictor of how well you rate your life, how much well being you you think you have, which of course is itself also predictive and interrelated with how meaningful you find your life. One of the things that you can do, but there's an important caveat to increase your sense of meaning in life is to get into the flow state more frequently. That's why I said you wanna moving practice. That's conducive the flow state. But there's one important caveat which is, we of course have figured out and I'm playing with words here, how to game this and how to hijack it by creating things like video games. I'm not saying this is the case for all video games or this is the case for all people. But the W. H. O. Now acknowledges this as a real thing that you can get into the flow state within the video game world, to the detriment of your ability to get into the flow state in the real world. What's the opposite of flow depression? In fact, depression has been called, Auntie flo. So you get these people that are flowing in this non real world and it's, they can't transfer it to the real world and it's actually costing them flow in the real world. So they tend to get, they tend to suffer depression and all kinds of things, </s><s>[INST] your ability, your habit and just skill attaining flow in the video game world basically makes you less effective or maybe shocks you at how difficult it is to achieve flow in the physical world. [/INST] I </s><s>[INST] just I don't want to push back against the implied challenge of transferability because um you know, there's a lot of, you know, I have a lot of friends that play video games, a lot very large percent of young folks play video games and I'm hesitant to build up models of how that affects behavior. My intuition is weak. They're oftentimes people that have ph d. S are of a certain age that they came up when video games weren't a deep part of their life development. I would venture to say, people who have developed their brain with video games being a part of a large part of that world, um are, in some sense, different humans and it's possible that they can transfer more effectively. Some of the lessons, um some of the ability to attain flow from the virtual world to the physical world. They're also more, I would venture to say resilient to the negative effects of, for example, social media or video games. They have that, you know, maybe the objectification or like the over sexualized violent aspect of video games, they're able to turn that off when they go to the physical world and turn it back on when they're playing the video games probably more effectively than um, the old timers. So I just want to say that sort of, I'm not sure. It's a really interesting question how transferable the flow state is. Okay. [/INST] Do I do? Um First of all, I did qualify and I'm saying it's not the case for all, video games are for all people. I'm holding out the possibility and I know this possibility because I've had students who actually suffer from this and have done work around it with me. Um </s><s>[INST] The they [/INST] couldn't they couldn't transfer. Yeah. Um and then they were able to step back from that and then take up the cognitive science and write about it and work on it. Um Also, I'm not so sure about the resiliency claim because um, there seems to be mounting evidence. It's not consensus, </s><s>[INST] but [/INST] it's certainly not regarded as fringe that the increase in social media is being is pretty strongly correlated with increase in depression, self destructive behavior. Things like this. </s><s>[INST] I would like to see that evidence because. No, no, no, no. I let me, um I'm always hesitant to to eagerly kind of agree with things that I want to agree with that, that there's a public perception everyone seems to hate on social media. I, I wonder as always with these things, does it reveal depression or does it create depression? This is always the question. It's like whenever you talk about any political or ideological movement, does it create hate or does it reveal [/INST] hate? And that's a good thing to ask. And you should always challenge the things that you intuitively want to believe. I agree with that. </s><s>[INST] Um, like aliens. [/INST] So one of the ways you address this and it's not, it's not sufficient. And I did say the work is preliminary, but you you if if I can give you a plausible mechanism that's new and then that lends credence and part of what happens right is illusory social comparison. Uh, think of instagram people are posting things that are not accurate representation of their life or life events. In fact they will stage things. But we what the people that are looking at these right, They take it often as real and so they get downward social comparison and this is, and this is like compared to how you and I probably live where we may get one or two of those events a week. They're getting the moment by moment. And so it's a plausible mechanism that why it might be driving people into a more depressed state. So, okay, </s><s>[INST] the flip side of that is because there's a greater, greater gap going from real world to instagram world. You start to be able to laugh at it and realize that it's artificial. So for example, even just artificial filters, people start to realize like there's like it's the same kind of gap as there is between the video game world, in the real world, In the video game world, you can do all kinds of wild things. Uh, Grand theft Auto, you can shoot people up, you can do whatever the heck you want, the real world, you can't and you start to develop an understanding of how to have fun in, in the virtual world and in the physical world. And I think it's just push back. I'm not saying either it's true though. It was a very interesting claims. The more ridiculously out of touch instagram becomes, the easier you can laugh it off potentially in terms of the effect it has on your [/INST] cycle will respond to that. But at some point we should get back to flow. Um, </s><s>[INST] as we engage in flow, [/INST] you laugh at the the hair, the shampoo commercial. You buy the shampoo. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] there's a capacity for tremendous bullshitting because of the way these machines are designed to trigger salience without triggering reflective truth seeking. </s><s>[INST] I'm thinking of Connor examples because you're sometimes you're, you can laugh all the way to the bank. So you can, you can laugh and not by the shampoo, right? There's, there's many cases. So I think you have to laugh hard enough. [/INST] You do have to laugh hard enough, but the advertising, the advertisers get millions of dollars precisely because for many, many people, it does make you buy the shampoo and that's the concern </s><s>[INST] and maybe the machine of social media is such the optimizes the shampoo buying. [/INST] Yes, the point I was trying to make is whether or not that particular example is, you know, ultimately right, the possibility of transfer failure is a real thing. Um, and I want to contrast that to an experience I had when I was in grad school and I've been doing tai chi Chuan about three or four years, very religiously in both senses of the word like three or four hours a day and like reading all the literature and right, I was having all the weird experiences, you know, cold as ice, hot as lava, all that stuff and right, but my friends in grad school, they said to me, what's, what's, what's going on? You're different. And I said, what do you mean? And they said, well, you're a lot more balanced in your interactions and you're a lot more flowing and you're a lot more sort of flexible and you adjust more. And I realized, oh, you know, and this was, this was the sort of Taoist claim around tai chi one that it actually transfers in ways that you might not expect you start to be able and I've now noticed that I now notice how, how I'm doing tai chi even in this interaction and how it can facilitate and afford. And so there's a powerful transfer and that's what I meant by, you know, flo wisely not only flow in a way, that's right. Making sure that you're distinguishing causation from correlation which flow can do but find how to situate at home it so that it will percolate through your psyche and permeate through many domains of your life. </s><s>[INST] Is there something you could say similar to our discussion about mindfulness and meditation and contemplation about the world that psychedelics take our mind? Where where does it, where does the mind go when it's on psychedelics? [/INST] I want to remind you of something you said, which is is a gem, it's not so much the experience, but the degree to which it can be integrated back. So, here's the proposal comes from Woodward and others. A lot of convergence around this. Carhartt Harris is talking about it similarly in the entropic brain, but I'm not gonna talk first about psychedelics. I'm gonna talk about neural networks and I'm going to talk about a classic problem in neural networks, or neural networks like us with intuition and implicit learning are fantastic at picking up on complex patterns. Uh </s><s>[INST] talking [/INST] about, I'm talking about a general just general </s><s>[INST] artificial and biological. [/INST] Yes. Yes, Yes. Um, I think at this point there is no relevant difference. So one of the classic problems because of their power is they suffer from overfitting to the data or for those of you are you know, statistical orientation. They pick up patterns in the sample that aren't actually present in the population. Right? And so what you do is there's various strategies you can do drop out where you to periodically turn off half of the nodes in the network, you can drop noise into the network. And what that does is it prevents overfitting to the data and allows the network to generalize more powerfully to the environment. </s><s>[INST] I [/INST] propose to you that that's basically what psychedelics do they, They do that they basically do significant constraint reduction. And so you get areas of the brain talking to each other that don't normally talk to each other, areas that do talk to each other, not talking to each other down regulation of areas that are very dominant, like the default mode network etcetera. And what that does is exactly something strongly analogous sorry to what's happening in drop out or putting noise into the data it opens up by the way, if you give people if you give human beings an insight problem that they're trying to solve and you throw in some noise like literally static on the screen, you can trigger an insight in them. </s><s>[INST] So like literally a very simplistic kind of noise to the perception system [/INST] right? Can break it out of overfitting to the data and open you up now? That means though that just doing that right? In and of itself is not the answer because you also have to make sure that the system can go back to exploring that new space properly. This isn't a problem with neural networks. You turn off drop out and they just go back to being powerful neural networks and now they explore the state space that they couldn't explore before. Human beings are a little bit more messy around this. And this is where the analogy does get a little bit strained. So they need practices to help them integrate that opening up to the new state space so they can properly integrate it. So beyond leary's ST uh set and setting, I think you need another s I think you need sacred, you need psychedelics need to be practiced within a substantial framework, a framework in which people are independently and beforehand improving their abilities to deal with self deception and afford insight and self regulate. This is of course the overwhelming way in which psychedelics are used by indigenous cultures. And I think if we put them into that context, then they can help the project of people self transcending, cultivating meaning and increasing wisdom. But if I think we remove them out of that context and put them in the context of commodities taken just to have certain phenomena logical changes. We run certain important risks. </s><s>[INST] So using the term of higher states of consciousness, [/INST] yes. </s><s>[INST] Is consciousness an important part of that word? What what, why higher? Uh is it is it is it a higher state or is it a detour a side road on the main road of consciousness? What [/INST] I think the psychedelic state is on a continuum, there's insight and then flow is an insight cascade, there's flow and then you can have sort of psychedelic experiences, mind revealing experiences and then, but they overlap with mystical experiences and they aren't the same. Um so for example, in the griffiths lab, they gave people psilocybin and they taught them ahead of time how like sort of the features of a mystical experience and only a certain proportion of the people that took the psilocybin went from a psychedelic into a mystical experience. What was interesting is the people that had the mystical experience had measurable and longstanding change to one of the big five factors of personality. They had increased openness. Openness is supposed to actually go down over time and these traits aren't supposed to be that malleable and it was significantly like altered, right? But imagine if you just created more openness and a person, right? And they're now open to a lot more and they want to explore a lot more, but you don't give them the tools of discernment that could be problematic for them in important ways that could be very problematic. </s><s>[INST] I got it. But, you know, so you have to land the plane uh in a productive way, somehow integrated back into your life and how you see the world and how you frame your perception of that world. [/INST] And when people do that, that's when I call it a transformative experience. Now, the higher states of consciousness are really interesting because they tend to move people from a mystical experience into a transformative experience. Because what happens in these experiences is something really, really interesting. They get to a state that's ineffable, they can't put it into words, they can't describe it, but they do this this this there in this state state temporarily, and then they come back and they do this, they say that was really real and this in comparison is less real. So I remember that platonic meta desire, I want to change my life myself so that I'm more in conformity with that really real. And that is really odd lex because normally when we go outside of our consensus intelligibility, like a dream state, we come back from it. We say that doesn't fit into everything, therefore it's unreal. They do the exact opposite. They come out of these states and they say that doesn't fit into this right consensus right intelligibility and that means this is less real. They do the exact opposite and that fascinates me. Why do they why do they flip our normal procedure about evaluating alternative states and what the thing is those higher states of consciousness precisely because they have that onto normative itty, the the realness that demands that you make a change in your life. They serve to bridge between mystical experiences and genuine transformative. </s><s>[INST] So you do think seeing those as more real as productive because then you reach for them. [/INST] So yeah, has done work on it. Um you know, and again, all of this is all of this stuff is recent, so we have to take it with a grain of salt, but you know, by a lot of objective measure people who do this, who have these higher states of consciousness and undergo that and undertake the transformative process. Their lives get better, the relationships improve right, their sense of self improves, their anxieties go down depression. Like all of these other measures are the needles are moved on these measures by people undergoing this transformative experience, their lives by many of the criteria that we judge our lives to be good, get better. </s><s>[INST] I have to ask you about this fascinating distributed cognition process that leads to mass formation of ideologies that have had an impact on our world. So, you spoke about the clash of the two great pseudo religious ideologies of Marxism and nazism, especially their clash on the Eastern front. Can you explain the origin of each of these Marxism and nazism in a kind of way that we have been talking about the formation of ideas. [/INST] Hagel is to protestantism, what thomas Aquinas is to Catholicism. He he was like the philosopher who took german protestantism and and also Kant and victor and shelling and he built a philosophical system. He explicitly said this by the way he wanted to bridge between philosophy and religion. He explicitly said that, I'm not I'm not foisting that on him. He said it repeatedly in many different places, so he's trying to create a philosophical system that gathered to it. I think the core mythos of Christianity, core mythos of Christianity is this idea of a narrative structure to reality, in which progress is real in which our actions now can change the future. We can co participate with God in the creation of the future and that future can be better. It can reach something like a utopia or the promised land or whatever. He created a philosophical system of brilliance by the way, he's a genius. But basically what it did was it took that religious vision and gave it the air of philosophical intelligibility and respect. And then Marx takes that and says, you know, that process of the by which the narrative is working itself out, that Hagel called dialectic, I don't think it's primarily happening in ideas. I think it's happening primarily in between classes within socio economic factors. But it's the same story, here's this mechanism of history. It's t ideological, it's gonna move this way. It can move towards a utopia. We can either participate in furthering it like participating in the work of God, or we can thwart it and be against it. And so, you have a you have a pseudo religious vision, it's all encompassing think about how Marxism is not just a philosophical position, it's not just an economic position, it's an entire worldview and entire account of of history and and a a demanding account of what human excellence is. And it has all these things about participating, belonging fitting to. But </s><s>[INST] it's very in Marxist cases, very uh pragmatic or or directly applicable to society to where it leads to more naturally leads to political ideologies. It [/INST] does, but I think marks a very significant degree inherits one of Hagel's main flaws. Hagel is talking about all this and he's trying to fit it into right, post content philosophy. So for him, it's ultimately, you know, proposition conceptual, he, like everybody after Deckard is very focused on the proposition all level, and he's not paying deep attention to the non proposition all this is why the two great critics of Hagel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, they're trying to put their finger on the non proposition, all the non conceptual the will to power or faith. And and they're trying to bring out all these other kinds of knowing as being inadequate. That's why Kirkegaard met when he said Hagel made a system and then he sat down beside it, right? Um and and so Marxism is very much it is activists, it's about reorganizing society, but the transformation in individuals is largely ideological meaning. It's largely about these significant proposition, all changes in adopting a set of beliefs </s><s>[INST] when it came in contact with the soviet union or with what became the soviet union, Why do you think it had such a powerful hold on such a large number of people, not Marxism, but implementation of Marxism in the name of communism? [/INST] Because it offered people, I mean, it offered people something that typically only religions had offered and it offered people the hope of making a new man a new kind of human being in a new world. And when you've been living in Russia, in which things seem to be locked in a system that is crushing most people getting the promise in the air of scientific legitimacy that we can make new human beings and a new world and in which happiness will ensue. That's an intoxicating proposal. You get sort of like I said, you get you get all of the intoxication of religious utopia, but you get all the seeming legitimacy of claiming that it's a scientific understanding of history and economics. </s><s>[INST] It's very popular to criticize communism, Marxism these days and um I often put myself in the place before any of the implementations came to be, I tried to think if I would be able to predict [/INST] what </s><s>[INST] The implementations of Marxism and communism would result in in the 20th century and I'm not sure I'm smart enough to make that prediction because at the core of the ideas are respecting its with marks, it's very economics type of theory. So it's basically respecting the value of the worker and the regular man in society for making a contribution to that society. And to me that seems like a powerful idea and it's not clear to me how it goes wrong. In fact, it's still not clear to me why the hell did this like Stalin happen or model happen? It's there's something very interesting and complex about human nature in hierarchies about distributed cognition, the results in that and it's not trivial to understand. [/INST] No, no. </s><s>[INST] So I mean, I wonder if you could put a finger on it, why like why did it go so wrong? [/INST] So I think you know what oh Hannah talks about and uh the intellectual history of modernity um talks about the Promethean Spirit, the idea the really radical proposal and and think about how it's not so radical to us and in that sense Marxism has succeeded the radical proposal that you see even in the french revolution, and don't forget the terror comes in the french revolution too, that we can make ourselves into Godlike beings think of the hubris in that, right? And think of the overconfidence to think that we so understand human nature and all its complexities and human history, right and how religion functioned and everything that we can just come in with a plan and make it run, it's it's to my mind that Promethean spirit is part of why it's doomed to fail and it's doomed to fail in a kind of terrorizing way because the Promethean spirit really licenses you to do anything because the the ends justify the means. </s><s>[INST] This the end justify the means, really free you to do some of um basically um will commit atrocities at any scale [/INST] ground zero with pol pot and the camera rouge right, Exactly. And you only you can only believe in an ends that can justify any means if you believe in the Utopia and you can only believe in the Utopia if you really buy into the Promethean spirit. </s><s>[INST] So is that what explains Nazism? [/INST] So, Nazism is part of that, to the Promethean spirit that we can make ourselves into Superman Uber Mich right? And Nazism is fueled very much, Bye, appropriating and twisting sort of gnostic themes that are very prevalent. Gnosticism tends to come to the fore when people are experiencing, you know, increased meaning crisis. And don't forget the Weimar Republic is like a meaning crisis gone crazy on all levels. Everybody's suffering homicide, everybody's home and way of life and identity and culture and relationship to religion and science. All of that, right? And so Nazism comes along and offers a kind of gnosticism again, twisted, perverted, I'm not saying I'm not I'm not not saying that all gnostics are Nazis, but there is this Knost IQ mythology mythos and it comes to the fore I remember and this stuck with me, I undergrad, I was taking political science. Um and the professor extended lecture on this and it still rings true for me says if you understand nazism is just a political movement, you have misunderstood. It, it is much more a religious phenomena in many ways. </s><s>[INST] Is it religious in that the loss of religion? So is it a meaning crisis? Or is it out of a meeting? Crisis? Every discovery of, of religion in a, in a promethean type of, [/INST] I think it's the latter, I think there's a, there's this vacuum created </s><s>[INST] in that context. Is Hitler the central religious figure. And also did nazi Germany create Hitler or did Hitler create nazi Germany? So in this distributed cognition where everyone's having a dialogue, what's the role of the charismatic leader? Is it an emergent phenomena or do you need one of those two? Uh to kind of guide the populace, [/INST] I hope it's not a necessary requirement. I hope that the next buddha can be the rather than a specific individual? Um but I think in that situation, Hitler's charisma allowed him to take on a mythological, in the proper sense archetypal, he became deeply symbolic and he and he instituted all kinds of rituals, all kinds of rituals and all kinds of mythos, there's all this mythos about the master race and there's all these rituals, the swastika is of course self a religious symbol, there's all of this going on because he was tapping into the fact that when you put people into deeper and deeper meaning scarcity, they will fall back on more and more mythological ways of thinking in order to try and come up with a generative source to give them new meaning, making I should say, meaning participating behavior. </s><s>[INST] What is [/INST] evil? </s><s>[INST] Is this a word you [/INST] avoid? No, I don't because I think part of what we're wrestling with here is resisting the enlightenment. I mean the historical period in europe, the the idea that evil and sin can just be reduced to immorality, um individual human immorality. I think there's something deeper in the, the idea of sin than just immoral. I think sin is a much more comprehensive category. I think sin is a failure to love wisely, so that you ultimately engage in a kind of idolatry. You take something as ultimate, which is not. And that can tend to consulate these collective agents, I call them hyper agents within distributed cognition that have a capacity to wreck havoc on the world. That is not just due to a sort of a sum total of immoral decisions. You know, this goes to Hannah Arendt's thing, right? And the banality of Eichmann and she was really wrestling with it and I think she, she's close to something, but I think she's slightly off, you know Aikman is just making a whole bunch of immoral decisions, but it doesn't seem to capture the gravity of what the nazis did, the genocide and the warfare and and and she's right because you're not going to get just the summation of a lot of individual, rather banal, immoral choices adding up to what was going on. You're getting a comprehensive parasitic process within massive distributed cognition that is has the power to confront the world and confront aspects of the world that individuals can't. And I think when we're talking about evil, that's what we're trying to point to. This is a point of convergence between me and Jonathan Pageau, we've been talking about this. So </s><s>[INST] the word sin is interesting. Are you comfortable using the word sin [/INST] so </s><s>[INST] deeply rooted in [/INST] religion? It is and in part and I struggle around this um um because I was brought up as a fundamentalist christian and so that is still there within me, there's trauma associated with that </s><s>[INST] probably uh layers of self deception mechanisms, [/INST] no doubt, no doubt </s><s>[INST] to hear slowly escaping, [/INST] trying to and trying to come into </s><s>[INST] a proper [/INST] respectful relationship with Christianity via a detour through buddhism daoism and pagan neo paganism, </s><s>[INST] trying to find a way how to love wisely. [/INST] Yes, exactly, and so I want to, I think the term sin is good because somebody may not be doing something that we would prototypical call immoral, but if they're feeling to love wisely, they are disconnecting themselves in some important way from the structures of reality. And I think I think it was hume, I may be wrong. You said, you know, people don't do things because they think it's wrong. They do a lesser good in place of a greater good. And that's a different thing than being immoral, immoral. We're saying you're doing something that's wrong. It's like, well, no, no, you know, I'm loving my wife, That's a great thing, isn't it? Yeah. But if you love your wife at the expense of your kids, like maybe something's going awry here, Right, Well, I love my country, great. But should you love your country at the expense of your commitment to the religion you belong to, like, people should wrestle with these questions. And I think sin is a failure to wrestle with these questions properly. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. To be content with the choices you made without considering. Um is there a greater good that could be done? [/INST] Yeah. </s><s>[INST] Your lecture series on the meaning crisis uh puts us in dialogue in the same way as with the podcast with a bunch of fascinating thinkers throughout history. Heidegger Corbin, uh the man carl Young tillage Barfield is there. Can you describe this might be challenging, but one powerful idea from each that jumps to mind. Maybe Heidegger. [/INST] So for Heidegger, one real powerful idea that has had a huge influence on me. He's he's had a huge influence on me in many ways, he's a big influence on what's called for in cognitive science, and this whole idea about the non proposition all that was deeply uh you know, afforded by Heidegger and Marleau Ponty, but I guess maybe the one idea if I had to pick one is his critique of an to theology, his critique of the attempt to understand being in terms of a supreme being, something like that, and how that gets us fundamentally messed up and we get disconnected from being because we are over focused on particular beings. Were failing to love wisely, we're loving the individual things and we're not loving the ground from which they spring. Can </s><s>[INST] you explain that a little more? What's the difference in the being, the supreme being? And that gets us into trouble? [/INST] Okay, so, like, well, we talked about this before, the supreme being is a particular being, whereas being is no thing, it's not any particular kind of thing. And so if you're thinking of being as a being, you're thinking of it in a thingy way about something that is fundamentally nothingness. And so then you're disconnecting yourself from presumably ultimate reality. This takes me to </s><s>[INST] Tillich [/INST] Telex. Great idea is understanding faith as ultimate concern rather than a set of propositions that you're asserting? Right? So what you write what you what do you ultimately concerned about? What do you want to have? What do you want to be in right relationship to what what and is that ultimate? Is that the ultimate reality that you conceive of are those two things things in sync. This has had a profound influence on me. And I think it's a brilliant idea. </s><s>[INST] So some of the others, how do they integrate? Um maybe the psycho. So the carl young [/INST] and </s><s>[INST] Freud, which which team are you on? [/INST] I'm on young, Freud is the better writer, but Young has I think a model of the psyche that is closer to where cognitive science is heading. Um, he's more prescient. So </s><s>[INST] which aspect of his models [/INST] directly? So Freud has a hydraulic model? The psyche is like a steam engine, things are under pressure and there's a fluid that's moving around. It's like, like this is a record, noted this Young has an organic model. The psyche is like a living being, it's doing all this opponent processing, it's doing all of this self transcending and growing right. And I think that's a much better model of the psyche than the sort of uh steam engine model. </s><s>[INST] What do you think about their view of the subconscious mind? What do you think their view in your own view of what's going on there in the shadow? [/INST] So all </s><s>[INST] that stuff. Some good stuff. [/INST] Um well, I mean both Freud and young are only talking about the psychodynamic unconscious, which is only a small part of the unconscious, they're </s><s>[INST] talking about. They're [/INST] talking about the the the aspects of the unconscious that have to do with your your sort of ego development and and how you are understanding and interpreting yourself. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] there's the unconscious that allows you to turn the noise coming out of my face hole into ideas. There's the unconsciousness that all that stuff which is huge and powerful </s><s>[INST] and they didn't think about that. They're they're they're they're focused on the big romantic stuff that you have to deal with through psychotherapy, that kind of stuff which [/INST] is relevant and important. I'm not dismissing, I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but it's certainly not all of the unconscious. A lot of work that's going on. My colleague and deep friend Anderson Todd is can we take the union stuff and the cognitive science stuff and can we integrate it together theoretically. And so he's working on that Exactly that project. </s><s>[INST] But nevertheless, your census, there is a subconscious or [/INST] at least an unconscious, I like the term unconscious and and young continually reminded people that the unconscious is unconscious, that we're not conscious of it and and and that's its fundamental property. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] And then is in the task of therapy then to bring to make the unconscious conscious [/INST] Yeah. To a degree, right? But also, I mean, yeah, to bring two to bring to bring consciousness where there was unconscious is part of Young's mythos, but it's also not the thought that that can be completed part of the why you're extending the reach of the conscious mind, is that so it can enter into more proper dia logical relationship with the self organizing system of the unconscious mind? </s><s>[INST] What did they have to say about the motivations of humans? So for Freud joking, I said, you know sex, there's so much of our mind is developing our young age, sexual interactions with the world or whatever. Hence the thing about the, the edible complex and all, You know, I wanted to have sex with your mother. What do you think about their description about what motivates humans and what do you think about the will to power from Nietzsche? Who which camp are you in there? What motivates humans? Sex or power? I [/INST] think Plato is right and I think there's a connection for me, Plato is my first philosopher, young is my first psychologist and young is very much the plato of the psyche. You </s><s>[INST] never forget your first, [/INST] Yeah, you never do, you never do. And I think, I think we have, I reject the monologue logical mind, I reject the mono physic mind model. I think we are multi centered, I think we have different centers of motivation that operate according to different principles to satisfy different problems. Um and that part of the task of our humanity is to get those different centers into some internal culture by which they are optimally cooperating rather than in conflict with each other, </s><s>[INST] what advice would you give to young people today? They're in high school trying to figure out what they're gonna do with their life, maybe they're in college, what advice would you give, how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life that can be proud of. [/INST] So the first thing is finding the college of practices and a community that supports them without involving you in believing things that contravene our best understood science. So that wisdom and virtue, especially how they show up in relationships are primary to you. This will sound ridiculous. But if you take care of that, the other things you want are more likely to occur because what you most want is you, what you want at when you're approaching your death is what were the relationships, you cultivate it to yourself, to other people, to the world? And what did you do to improve the chance of them being deep and profound relationships? </s><s>[INST] Well, that's an interesting, so ecology of practice. So like finding a place where a lot of people are doing different things that are interesting interplay with each other, but at the same time it's not a cult like, uh where ideas can flourish now. How the hell do you know? Um [/INST] because in </s><s>[INST] a place where people are really excited about doing stuff. [/INST] Yes, that's </s><s>[INST] very right for cult formation, [/INST] especially if they're a wash and a culture in which we have ever expanding waves of bullshit? Yes, precisely. So try </s><s>[INST] to keep away from the bullshit is the advice. [/INST] Yes, No, I mean I take this very seriously. And I was with a bunch of people in Vermont at the respond retreat, people rave kelly. Was there a bunch of people who have set up colleges of practices and created communities and I have good reason to find all of these people trustworthy. And so we gathered together to try and generate real deal logos, flow in distributed cognition, exercise the collective intelligence and try and address that problem. Both in terms of, you know, meta curriculum that we can offer emerging communities in terms of practices of vetting, how we will self govern the federation were forming so that we can resist glorification </s><s>[INST] glorification of people or ideas. [/INST] Both both </s><s>[INST] some of us just get unlucky, [/INST] some of us get unlucky and we all at respond we all had a tremendous sense of urgency around this but we were trying to balance it about not being premature. But there it was going to I mean there's we're going to produce a medical um that's coming in months. There's gonna be a scientific paper about integrating the scientific work on wisdom with this practitioner based ideas about the cultivation of wisdom. There's going to be uh projects about how we can create a self correcting vetted vetting system. So we can say to people, we think this ecology is legit, it's in good fellowship with all these other legit ecology is we don't know about that one. Were hesitant about that one. It's not in Good fellowship, we have concerns, here's why we have our concerns, etcetera. And you may say, well, who are you to do that? It's like nobody but somebody's gotta do it, right, and that's what it comes down to. And so we're gonna give it our best effort. It's </s><s>[INST] worth a try. You talked about the meaning crisis in uh human civilization, but in your own personal life, what has been a dark place you've ever gone in your mind? Has there been difficult times in your life where you really struggled? [/INST] So when I left fundamentalist Christianity for a while, I was just sort of hard bitten atheist. Um the problem with leaving the belief structure was that I didn't deal with all the non proposition all things that had gotten into me all the procedures and habits and all the perspectives and all the identities and the trauma associated with that. So, you know, I required therapy, required years of meditation and tai chi and I'm still wrestling with it. But for the first four or 5 years I would I I described it like this. It was I called it the black burning. I felt like there was a a blackness that was on fire inside of me precisely because the religion had left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth. But it had the food, it had given me food and square quotes had soured in my stomach and made me nauseous and the and the juxtaposition, The juxtaposition of those seemed like an irresolvable problem for me. That was a very, very dark time for me. </s><s>[INST] Did it feel lonely [/INST] when it was very bad? It felt extremely lonely and in the and deeply alienating the universe seemed absurd and there was also uh existential anxiety. I talk about these things for a reason. I don't just talk about them as things I'm pointing to, I'm talking about them as seeing in myself and people I care, you know, having undergone them and how how they can bring you close to, you know, self destructive. I started engaging in kinds of self destructive behavior. So </s><s>[INST] the meaning crisis to you is not just the thing you look outside and and see many people struggling you yourself a struggle. [/INST] But that's that's in fact the narrative is I struggled with it thinking it was a purely personal idiosyncratic thing. I started learning the cox, I started doing the tai chi in the meditation, I started doing all this right, Socratic philosophy. And when I started to talk about these pieces, I saw my students eyes light up and I realized, oh wait, maybe this isn't just something I'm going through talking to them and then doing the research and expanding it out. It's like, oh many people in a shared fashion and also in an individual lonely fashion are going through meaning crisis? </s><s>[INST] Well we talked a lot about wisdom and meaning and you said that the goal is to love wisely. So let me ask about Love, what's the role of love in the human condition? [/INST] I mean it's even central to, to, to, to reason and rationality, This is plato but Spinoza the most logical of the rationalist, you know, the ethics is written like euclid geometry, but he calls it the ethics for a reason </s><s>[INST] because [/INST] he wants to talk about the blessed life and what does he say? He says that ultimately reason needs love because love is what brings reason out of being entrapped in the gravity well of ego centrism and Murdoch, iris Murdoch said, I think really beautifully love is when you painfully realize that something other than yourself is real, </s><s>[INST] escaping the gravity well of ego centrism, beautifully put a beautiful way to end it, john you're a beautiful human being. Thank you for struggling in your own mind with with with the search for meaning and uh encouraging others to do the same and ultimately, to learn how to Love wisely. Thank you so much for talking today. [/INST] It's been a great pleasure. Lex. I really enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with john Verbeke to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, I've always believed and I still believe that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way, we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] was their advice along the way that you got about what you should and shouldn't work on, or do you just try to listen to yourself? [/INST] Yeah, I probably overreact another way when, when something, when I see everybody else going some way, I probably, I probably say that's too much competition. Uh, but, but but uh, but mostly I I played with things that were interesting to me and then later on I found, oh, actually the most important thing I learned was how to be interested in almost anything. I mean, not to be born her, it makes me very sad when I, when I see kids talking to each other and they say that was boring and to me, a person should feel upset if he would help if he had to admit that he wasn't able to find something interesting. </s><s>[INST] Uh, [/INST] you know, the skill they saying, I haven't learned how to, uh, how to enjoy life. I have to have somebody entertain me instead of. </s><s>[INST] That's really interesting. It is a skill. Uh, David Foster Wallace. I really like the thing he says about this, which is the key to life is to be unbearable. And I do really like you saying that it's a skill because I think that's a really good, that's really good advice, which is if you find something boring, that's not, I don't believe is because it's boring. It's because you haven't developed [/INST] how </s><s>[INST] to find the beauty and how to find the fun in it. That's a, that's a really good point. [/INST] Sometimes it's more difficult than others. I have to do this. But I mean, during the covid lots of days when I never saw another human being, uh, but I still find other ways to, </s><s>[INST] it still was a pretty fun [/INST] time. Yeah, I came earlier. I came a few minutes earlier today and I walked around foster, so I didn't want, you know, I didn't know what's going on in foster city. I saw a beautiful, some beautiful flowers at the nursery at home depot for a few blocks away. </s><s>[INST] Life is amazing. It's full of amazing things like this. Yeah. I just, sometimes I'll sit there and just stare at a tree, nature is beautiful. Uh Let me ask you the big ridiculous question. I don't think I asked you last time I have to ask this time in case you have a good answer. What is the meaning of life? Our existence here on earth? The whole thing. Yeah. Uh No, no, you can't. You can't I will not allow you to uh to try to escape answering this question. You have to answer definitively because [/INST] there </s><s>[INST] surely surely don canoe. There must be an answer. [/INST] What is the answer? Is it 42 or </s><s>[INST] I don't think it's a numerical. That's that [/INST] was that was in Shannon. Okay. But all right. So talk to anyway. It's only for me. And but I but I personally think of my belief that that God exists, although I have no idea what that means. But I believe that there is uh some something beyond human uh capabilities. Um, it might be uh might be some ai uh but but whatever it is, but what whatever I but I do believe that that there is uh something that goes beyond the realm of human understanding. But but that that I can try to learn more about how to resonate with whatever that being would like me to do. </s><s>[INST] So you think you can have occasional glimpses of that being. [/INST] I strive for that. Not that I ever think I'm going to get close to it. But it's not, it's not for me it's saying, what should I do? That that being wants me to do. That's that's, you know, I'm trying to ask what that means. Is that being want me to to be talking to lex Friedman right now, You know? And I said yes, okay, but thank you. Well, thank you. But what I'm trying to say is I'm not trying to say what of all this Strategies I could choose or something. Which 1? I try to do it. Not, not strategically, but I try to to imagine that I'm following somebody's wishes </s><s>[INST] even though you're not smart enough to know what they are. Yeah, but that funny little dance. [/INST] Well, I mean, there's A I or whatever it is probably is smart enough to help to give me clues. Uh, </s><s>[INST] And uh, you make the whole journey from clue clue a fun one. [/INST] Yeah. I mean, it's as so many people have said, it's the journey, not the destination and people live live through crises help each other. I think things come up. Uh, history repeats itself. Uh, you try to say in the world today. Is there any government that's working? I read history. I I know that things were, oh, they </s><s>[INST] were there were there were a lot worse in many ways. [/INST] There's a lot of bad things all the time. And I read about. Uh, you know, I look at things that people have good ideas and they were working on great projects. And then I know that it didn't succeed though in the end? But the new inside have gotten him actually in that way, was I was reading, what book was I reading recently? It was it was by ken Follett and it was called The Man from ST Petersburg. But but it was talking about the prequel to World War and Winston Churchill, according to this book, uh, seems that that Germany has been spending all its gold reserves, building up a huge military. And there's no question that if Germany would attack England, that England would be wiped out. Um, so he wants Russia to help, uh, to attack Germany from the other side, because Germany doesn't have enough of an army to be fighting two wars at one. Okay, now, then there's an anarchist in Russia who sees that wars are, uh, something that leaders start. But actually people get killed. And so he wants to stop any alliance between England and Russia, because that would mean that thousands and thousands of people of Russia would would would be killed. That wouldn't be otherwise killed. All right. And so his life's goal is to assassinate a Russian prince who is visiting England, because that will make you mean the Zero will not form the alliance? All right. So, we have this year question about what should the government do? Should it actually do something that will lead to, you know, is the war inevitable or is there a way to have people? And it struck me that if I were in a position of responsibility for people's lives, in most cases I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have any confidence that any of my decisions were good. That that that that these questions are too hard probably for any human being, but certainly for me. </s> |
<s>[INST] So you said your favorite scene in Interstellar is the intense stocking scene with the ai and cooper talking saying cooper, what are you doing docking? It's not possible, No, it's necessary such a good line by the way. Just so many questions there, why an Ai in that scene presumably is supposed to be able to compute a lot more than the human is saying it's not optimal. Why the human, I mean that's a movie but shouldn't they? I know much better than the human anyway. What do you think is the value of setting seemingly impossible goals? So like uh our initial intuition which seems like something that you have taken on that Ellen espouses that where the initial intuition of the community might say this is very difficult and then you take it on anyway with a crazy deadline. You just from a human engineering perspective, uh have you seen the value of that? [/INST] I wouldn't say that setting impossible goals. Exactly is is a good idea, but I think setting very ambitious goals is a good idea. I think there's a, what I call sub linear scaling of difficulty, which means that 10 X problems are not 10 X hard, usually 10 X 10 X harder problem is like two or three X harder to execute on because if you want to actually like if you want to improve the system by 10% it costs some amount of work and if you want to improve the system it doesn't cost You know 100 x. Amount of work and because you fundamentally change the approach and if you start with that constraint then some approaches are obviously dumb and not going to work and it it forces you to reevaluate. Um and I think it's a very interesting way of approaching problem solving </s><s>[INST] but it requires a weird kind of thinking it's just going back to your like PhD days, it's like how do you think which ideas in the machine learning community are solvable? [/INST] Yes it's </s><s>[INST] uh it requires what is that? I mean there's the cliche first principles thinking but like it requires to basically ignore what the community is saying because it doesn't the community doesn't. A community in science usually draw lines of what is and isn't possible and like it's very hard to break out of that without going crazy. [/INST] Yeah I mean I think a good example here is you know the deep learning revolution in some sense because you could be in computer vision at that time when during the deep learning sort of revolution of 2012 and so on. Uh you could be improving a computer vision stack by 10% or we can just be saying actually all this is useless and how do I do 10 X. Better computer vision? Well it's not probably by tuning Hog feature detector I need a different approach um I need something that is scalable. Going back to uh Richard Sutton's um and understanding sort of like the philosophy of the bitter lesson and then being like actually I need much more scalable system. Like a neural network that in principle works and then having some deep believers that can actually execute on that mission and make it work. So that's the solution. </s><s>[INST] What do you think is the timeline to solve the problem of autonomous driving? That's still in part open question. [/INST] Yeah. I think the tough thing with timelines of self driving obviously is that no one has created self driving. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. [/INST] So it's not like what do you think is the timeline to build this bridge? Well we've built million bridges before. Here's how long that takes its. You know it's uh no one has built autonomy. It's not obvious. Uh some parts turned out to be much easier than others so it's really hard to forecast you do your best based on trend lines and so on and based on intuition but That's why fundamentally it's just really hard to forecast this. No one is </s><s>[INST] even still like being inside of it is hard to to do [/INST] some things turn out to be much harder and some things turn out to be much easier. </s><s>[INST] Do you try to avoid making forecasts? Because like Ellen doesn't avoid them right? And heads of car companies in the past have not avoided it either forward in other places have made predictions that we're going to solve level four. Driving by 2020 2021 whatever. And they all kind of backtracking that prediction. Are you as a as an ai person, do you for yourself privately make predictions or do they get in the way of like your actual ability to think about a thing? [/INST] Yeah, I would say like what's easy to say is that this problem is tractable and that's an easy prediction to make. It's tractable. It's going to work. Yes, it's just really hard. Something turned out to be harder than something turned out to be easier. So but it's it definitely feels tractable and it feels like at least the team at Tesla which is what I saw internally is definitely on track to that. How </s><s>[INST] do you form a strong representation that allows you to make a prediction about attract ability? So like you're the leader of a lot, a lot of humans, you have to kind of say this is actually possible. Like how do you build up that intuition? It doesn't have to be even driving, it could be other tasks. It could be. Um and I want to, what difficult task did you work on your life? I mean classification, achieving certain just an image in that certain level of super human level performance. Yeah, [/INST] expert intuition just intuition, it's belief. </s> |
<s>[INST] nevertheless, what if you could analyze it as if it's some deep, profound you made in the book? [/INST] Well, the reason is that we are incredibly individually intelligent things like these devices were playing with now </s><s>[INST] that's the creation of individual minds, [/INST] creative individual mind and a collective labor over centuries that led to this level of technology and that has to be respected. It's incredible stuff. But at the same time, I think what humans are, if you want to distinguish humans from other species on the planet, we don't weave webs, okay, we don't make bird calls, what we do is we share beliefs. Yeah, okay, now </s><s>[INST] you don't think that's awesome. That's a you don't think that's a catalyst for intelligence. [/INST] Yeah, it is a catalyst. But what it means is we can delude ourselves as much as we can inform ourselves. So because we share beliefs, we can do things in a collective way. And if we believe that if we take the incantations of the witch doctors and we and we happen to have a couple of spears and things, we can go and attack the local hurt, a tribe of lines and drive them out and we've become the dominant species. So it worked at the stage where we were in competition with other species on the planet now that we're the dominant species, then our beliefs get in the way. </s><s>[INST] So you agree with with Einstein who said uh the only, there are only two things that are infinite the universe and human stupidity. And [/INST] he wasn't sure about the universe </s><s>[INST] and he wasn't sure about the right, That's right. And he wasn't sure about the universe. Uh yeah, so you think that the collective, I mean there's an infinity to the destructive and the stupid the inhumane. That's possible when we humans get together, but it feels like there's more trajectories, there's more possibility for creation, [/INST] there are and I think that's why we have to, if we were built around the idea that our role as a species is to maintain and extend life on the planet. And if not find it elsewhere, then seeded elsewhere, then that is a vision which makes us creative and confines the worst elements of our capacities to share beliefs. So that's what my hope is that will reach that stage. But I think we've overshot it so badly that my real fear is will end up blaming technology for the type of world we find ourselves living in in the next 20 to 50 years. So </s><s>[INST] you think technology is going to be one of the part of the solution? [/INST] Part of the solution. But if we go through and blame it, which is quite possible, we'll blame the technology rather than blaming too much of the technology and the too much comes down to what economists have told us that we can just continue consuming infinitely on a finite planet. And Kenneth Boulding said that beautifully said. If somebody believes that you can have exponential growth on a finite planet, they were either mad or they're an economist. </s><s>[INST] So you're you made a long journey for which I am deeply honored from from [/INST] Sydney. </s><s>[INST] This distant place. [/INST] Activities, </s><s>[INST] you've got to go [/INST] there one day you'd enjoy it. </s><s>[INST] I will, I'm afraid if I go there, I will stay forever. And so [/INST] I know it's a bit too, there's more vitality back in this economy. So you'd come back, </s><s>[INST] okay, maybe, you know, I'm not a fan of the economy or money or any of that nature calls me. Let me so I'm honored that you make that trip. You've also said that you, while you're here in Austin, you're going to um go to uh, this american factory that makes cars here in Austin and also visit Starbase. So let me ask you about expanding out into the universe. Is that something that that excites you mention about the economics of it, Do you think? What what do you think Marx would think about this? Like what, economically speaking, what what is this? Is it a good thing? I think it's [/INST] vital we can have capitalism and outer space far more successfully than we can have it on the planet because we don't face when we dump the waste ends up in the sun. Not a problem. Um, so it means the potential, we don't undermine our own productive capacity if we're doing it in outer space. So </s><s>[INST] the destruct development of waste has a lesser impact. [/INST] I mean, who cares if we throw a bit of our eye and back into the sun again, Take a fair bit of it to turn it into what would be the next stage would be a red giant? We have to get away because as a red giant at some stage, the sun will head out past the orbit of mars, I think certainly passed the orbit of Earth. So to have the longevity of human life, the life that evolved on this planet, We have to be able to take it off planet ultimately. So if you think in the really long term, then it's our responsibility. If we're going to maintain life is to get is to establish life off the planet, </s><s>[INST] what do you think about robots and ai as part of the expanding our [/INST] We have to I mean that ends labor. You can't you can't go for your dad, can't be from here to the asteroid belt and back again for dinner with your family. So production would be entirely mechanized. You have to be a handful of people who service the machines, but </s><s>[INST] it's about production and automation. What about elements of consciousness that make humans so special? What about that? Persisting within the machine? [/INST] That, I mean, I'm still a skeptic about us ever being able to create a machine which is truly conscious. If I can throw my two cents, that </s> |
<s>[INST] but it was sort of was more open. Yeah [/INST] right. So it's completely open. It's open access actually uh had a post George kennan artist who wanted to call these journals free for all because there were I mean it both has no page charges and has no uh access restrictions and the reason. And so lots of people, I mean for there were there were people who were mad about the existence of this journal who thought it was a fraud or something. It would be impossible. They said to run a journal like this with basically, I mean for a long time I didn't even have a bank account. I paid for the lawyer to incorporate and the I. P. Address And I just did it cost a couple $100 a year to run. It's a little bit more now but not that much more but that's because I think computer scientists are competent and autonomous in a way that many scientists and other fields aren't doing these kinds of things. We already types that around papers. We all have students and people who can hack a website together in the afternoon. So the infrastructure for us was like not a problem but for other people in other fields it's a harder thing to do. </s><s>[INST] Yeah and this kind of open access journal there's nevertheless one of the most procedures journals so it's not like uh prestige and it can be achieved without any of the [/INST] paper is not required for prestige. It turns out </s><s>[INST] uh So on the review process side I've actually a long time ago I don't remember when I reviewed a paper where you were also a reviewer. And remember reading your view of being influenced by and it was really well written. It influenced how I write feature reviews. You disagreed with me actually. Uh and you made it uh my review but much better. So but nevertheless through your process you know has its flaws. And how do you think what do you think works well how can it be improved? [/INST] So actually when I started Jan Miller I wanted to do something completely different and I didn't because it felt like we needed a traditional journal of record and so we just made jam RB almost like a normal journal except for the open access parts of it basically. Um increasingly of course publication is not even a sensible word. You can publish something about putting it in archive so I can publish everything tomorrow. So making stuff public is there's no barrier. We still need curation and evaluation. I don't have time to read all of archive and you could argue that kind of social thumbs upping of articles suffices right? You might say, oh heck with this. We don't need journals at all. We'll put everything on archive and people will upload and down both the articles and then your CV will say oh man he got a lot of boats. So that's good. Um but I think there's still value in careful reading and commentary of things and it's hard to tell when people are voting and down voting or arguing about your paper on twitter and reddit whether they know what they're talking about, right? So then I have the second order problem of trying to decide whose opinions I should value and such. So I don't know what I if I had infinite time which I don't and I'm not going to do this because I really want to make robots work. But if I felt inclined to do something more in the publication direction, I would do this other thing which I thought about doing the first time which is to get together some set of people whose opinions I value and who are pretty articulate, and I guess we would be public, although we could be private, I'm not sure. And we would review papers, we wouldn't publish them and you wouldn't submit them. We would just find papers and we would write reviews and we would make those reviews public. And maybe if you, you know, so we're Leslie's friends who review papers and maybe eventually if if we are opinion was sufficiently valued, like the opinion of JlR is valued, then you'd say in your CV that Leslie's friends gave my paper of five star reading and that would be just as good as saying I got it. So, you know, accepted into this journal. Um so I think I think we should have good public commentary uh and organize it in some way, but I don't really know how to do it. It's interesting times, </s><s>[INST] the way the way you describe it actually is really interesting. I mean we do it for movies imdb dot com. There's experts, Critics come in, they write reviews, but there's also regular non critics, humans write reviews and they're separated. I like [/INST] open review. The eye clear process, I think is interesting. </s><s>[INST] It's a step in the right direction, but it's still not as compelling as uh reviewing movies or video games. I mean sometimes almost it might be silly, it's my perspective to say, but it boils down to the user interface, how fun and easy it is to actually perform the reviews, how efficient, how much you as a reviewer get, uh, street cred for being a good reviewer, those elements, those human elements come into play. [/INST] No, it's a big investment to do a good review of a paper And the flood of papers is out of control. Right? So you know, there aren't 3000 new, I don't know how many movies are there in a year. I don't know. But that's going to be less than how many machine learning papers are in a year now and I'm worried I, uh, right, so I'm like an old person. So of course I'm going to say rar, rar, rar and things are moving too fast. I'm a stick in the mud. Uh, so I can say that, but my particular flavor of that is I think the horizon for researchers has gotten very short that students want to publish a lot of papers and there's a huge, there's value, it's exciting and there's value in that and you get patted on the head for it and so on. But, and some of that is fine. But I'm worried that we're driving out people who would spend two years thinking about something back in my day when we worked on our thesis, We did not publish papers, you did your thesis for years. You picked a hard problem and then you worked and chewed on it and did stuff and wasted time and for a long time And when it was roughly when it was done, you would write papers and so I don't know how to insect and I don't think that everybody has to work in that mode, but I think there's some problems that are hard enough that it's important to have a longer her research horizon. And I'm worried that we don't incentivize that at all at this point </s> |
<s>[INST] Yeah, So that's super exciting. I mean it's not just that it's connected to all kinds of tooling and you can go on mobile and with this full light, it can go in the cloud or serving and so on and always connected together. Some of the best software written ever is often done by one person sometimes too. So with a google you're now seeing sort of caress having to be integrated intensive form. Sure has a ton of engineers working on so and there's, I'm sure a lot of tricky design decisions to be made. How does that process usually happen from at least your perspective? What are the, what are the debates like? What is there? A lot of thinking? Considering different options and so on. [/INST] Yes. So a lot of the time I spent at google is actually discussing design discussions, right? Uh, writing design darks, participating in design review meetings and so on. Uh, this is, you know, as important as actually writing the code. </s><s>[INST] Right? What? [/INST] So there's a lot of thoughts, There's a lot of thought and a lot of care that is uh, taken in coming up with these decisions and taking into account all of our users because tensorflow is this extremely diverse user base. Right? It's not, it's not like just one user segment where everyone has the same needs. Uh we have a small scale production uses large scale production users, we have uh, startups, we have researchers, um, you know, it's sort of other place and we have to catch up to all of the onions. </s><s>[INST] If I just look at the standards debates of C plus plus or python, there's some heated debates. Do you have those at google? I mean, they're not heated in terms of emotionally, but there's probably multiple ways to do it. Right? So how do you arrive through those design meetings at the best way to do it? Especially in deep learning where the field is evolving as you're doing it? Is there some magic to it? There's some magic to the process. [/INST] I don't know, just magic to the process, but there definitely is a process. So making design decisions about satisfying a set of constraints, but also trying to do so in the simplest way possible because this is what can be maintained. This is what can be expanded in the future. So you don't want to naively satisfy the constraints by just, you know, for each capability you need available. You're going to come up with one argument in the api and so on. You want to design GPS, um, that are modular and hierarchical so that they have uh an an api surface that is as small as possible. Right? And, And you want uh these smaller hierarchical architecture to reflect the way that domain experts think about the problem because like as a domain expert when when you're reading about a new ep you're reading toil or some darks pages um you already have a way that you're thinking about the problem. You already have like uh certain concepts in mind and you're thinking about how they relate together and when you're reading docks you're trying to build as quickly as possible and mapping between the concepts feature the new API and the concept in your mind. So you're trying to map your mental model as a domain expert to the way things work in the API. So you need an API and an underlying implementation that are reflecting the way people think about these things. So in minimizing </s><s>[INST] the time it takes to do the mapping. [/INST] Yes. Minimizing the time the cognitive load there is in interest in this new knowledge about AP and NPR should not be self referential. Are referring to implementation details, it should only be referring to domain specific concepts that people already understand. </s><s>[INST] Brilliant. So what's the future of keras and tensorflow look like? What does tensorflow? Three point Oh look like. [/INST] So that's going to fall in the future for me too. Especially uh since I'm not I'm not even the one making these decisions. But so from my perspective which is you know just one perspective among many different perspectives on the transfer team. I'm really excited by developing even higher level api s higher level and Cara's I'm very excited by hyper parameter tuning by automated machine learning or two Ml I think the future is not just, you know, defining a model like uh like you were assembling lego blocks and then collect fit on it. It's more like an auto magical model that we just look at your data and optimize the objective you you're after. Right? So that's that's uh what what I'm looking into. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So you put the baby into a room with the problem and come back a few hours later with a fully solved problem. [/INST] Exactly. It's not like a box of legos, right? It's more like the combination of a kid that's very good at legos and a box of figures. It's just building the thing. Very nice. </s><s>[INST] So that's that's an exciting future. And I think there's a huge amount of applications and revolutions to be had under the constraints of the discussion we previously had. But what do you think of the current limits of deep learning if we look specifically at these function approximate ear's that tries to generalize from data? You've talked about local versus extreme generalization. You mentioned in your networks don't generalize? Well humans do. So there's this gap. So and you've also mentioned that generalization. Extreme generalization requires something like reasoning to fill those gaps. So how can you start trying to build systems like that. [/INST] Right. Yeah. So this is this is by design. Right? Deep learning models are like huge biometric models differentiable, so continuous uh that go from an input space to unite with space and they're trained with gradient descent. So they're trying to pretty much point by point. Uh they are learning continuous geometric morphing from from an input vector space tonight protective space. Right. And because this is done point by point, a deep neural network can only make sense of points in experience space that are very close to things that has already seen in stream data. At best. It can do interpolation across points. But that means, you know, it means in order to train your network you need a dense sampling of the input cross output space almost a point by point sampling, which can be very expensive if you're dealing with complex real world problems like autonomous driving, for instance, or robotics. Uh it's doable if you're looking at the subset of the of the visual space. But even then it's still fairly expensive. Is still in millions of examples and it's only going to be able to make sense of things that are very close to waste has seen before. And in contrast to that. But of course you have human intelligence. But even if you're not looking at human intelligence, um you can look at very simple rules algorithms if you have a symbolic cruel, it can actually apply to a very, very large set of inputs because it is abstract. It is not obtained um uh by doing a point by point mapping, right? For instance, if you try to learn a sorting algorithm using a deep neural network well you're very much limited to learning point by point what the sort of representation of this specific list is like but instead you could have a very very simple sorting algorithm written a few lines, maybe it's just you know, two nested loops. Um and it can process any list at all because it is abstract because it is a set of rules. So the planning is really like point by point, geometric, more fins, more things strange is going in this sense. And meanwhile abstract rules can generalize much better and I think the future is really to combine the two. So </s> |
<s>[INST] Well don't you think that Ai systems could be in addition to the Dunbar's number? So like why [/INST] do you count as one system or multiple Ai systems? </s><s>[INST] Multiple Ai systems. So I do believe that ai systems for them to integrate into human society as it is now have to have a sense of agency. So there has to be a individual because otherwise we wouldn't relate to them, [/INST] we could engage certain kinds of individuals to make sense of them for us and be almost like, did you ever watch Star trek like Voyager, like there's the Volta who are like the interfaces, the ambassadors for the Dominion. Um we may have ambassadors that speak on behalf of these systems there, like the men tats of dune maybe or something like this, I mean we already have this to some extent, if you look at the biggest sort of wants Ai system, but the biggest cybernetic system in the world is the financial markets, it runs outside of any individual's control and you have an entire stack of people on Wall Street, Wall Street analysts to CNBC reporters or whatever, they're all helping to communicate. What does this mean? You know, like Jim Cramer like running around and yelling stuff like all of these people are part of that lowering of the complexity there to meet since you know, to help do sense making for people or whatever capacity there at And I don't see this changing with AI systems, I think you would have ringside commentators talking about all the stuff that this Ai system is trying to do over here over here because it's a it's actually a super intelligence. So you wanna talk about humans interfacing making first contact with super intelligence. We already there were doing pretty poorly and if you look at the gradient of power and money, what happens is the people closest to it will absolutely exploit their distance for um personal financial gain. So we should look at that and be like, oh well that's probably what the future will look like as well. But um but nonetheless, I mean we're already doing this kind of thing. So in the future we can have a I. Systems but you're still gonna have to trust people to bridge the sense making gap to them. </s><s>[INST] See I don't I just feel like there could be of like millions of Ai systems that have um have agencies you have when you say one super intelligence, super intelligence in that context means it's able to solve particular problems extremely well. But there's some aspect of human like intelligence that's necessary to be integrated into human society. So not financial markets, not sort of weather prediction systems or I don't know, logistics optimization. I'm more referring to things that you interact with on the intellectual level and that I think requires there has to be a backstory. There has to be a personality. I believe it has to fear its own mortality in a genuine way. Like there has to be all, many of the elements that we humans experience that are fundamental to the human condition because otherwise we would not have a deep connection with it. [/INST] But I don't think having a deep connection with it is necessarily going to stop us from building a thing that has quite an alien intelligence aspect. Um So another, the other kind of alien intelligence on this planet is octopuses or octopi teas or whatever you wanna call them. Octopi. Yeah there's a there's a little controversy as to what the plural is I guess. But an octopus, an octopus um You know, it really acts as a collective intelligence of eight intelligent arms. Right? Its arms have a tremendous amount neural density to them. And I see if we can build and we just let's let's go with what you're saying. If we build a singular intelligence that interfaces with humans that has a sense of agency so we can run the cybernetic loop and develop its own theory of mind as well as it's a theory of action. All these. I agree with you that that's the necessary components to build a real intelligence right? There's gotta be something at stake. It's got to make a decision. It's gonna then run the loop. Okay, so we build one of those, Well if we can build one of those will probably build five million of them. It's about five million of them. And if their cognitive systems are already digitized and already kind of there we stick an antenna on each of them. Bring it all back to a Hive mind that maybe doesn't make all the individual decisions for them. But treat each one as almost like a neural neuronal input of a much higher bandwidth and fidelity going back to a central system that is then able to perceive much broader dynamics that we can't see in the same way that a phased array radar. Right? You think about how phased array radar works? It's just sensitivity. It's just radars and then it's hypersensitivity and really great timing between all of them. And with a flat array, it's as good as a curved radar dish. Right? So with these things, it's a phased array of cybernetic systems that will give the centralized intelligence uh much much better, a much higher fidelity understanding of what's actually happening in the environment. But </s> |
<s>[INST] whoa dude, [/INST] I'm way better than I thought I was Gary tonin all of my students. Um I pushed him in the direction of giving up bad positions so that they practice working. Getting out of critical situations is a huge part of our training program. But Gary tonin takes that to a level that just no one else even gets close. It's just amazing. Like he will put himself in impossible situations where it's a fully locked strangle 100% on with both his arms behind his back and he will try to work out from there. And Seven times out of 10 he does. But three times out of 10 it gets caught. He I'm a huge advocate of handicap training where you handicap yourself to work on skills. He's took that to heart to a level that few people I believe I can match. </s><s>[INST] I just wonder what is psychology is like because it goes [/INST] back to what we talked about, four legs, you have to understand its skill development, don't take it personally. Um, I understand, I hear where you're coming from, we've all got what you call the ape reflex, where we want to be dominant, Okay, we all do because </s><s>[INST] there's thousands of white belts out there that have tapped Gary tonin, you know, walking around and they're saying online, tap Gary [/INST] tonin, like carrie tone is like one of the best in the world. So I'm one of the best in the world and um uh, Does Gary get upset about this? No, of course not because Gary knows that when it counts on stage, he's going to be going 100% with a set of skills that very few people can match. Um he can go into an FBI overtime at the £205 weight division against an 80 cc champion starting in a full arm lock position and effortlessly get out With no problems in seconds because he's been in that situation 25,000 times with varying degrees of skilled opponents and there's just no panic, no fear. He's just doing what he's done so many thousands of times and that's a fine, fine example of a guy who didn't give a damn what happened in the training room, but when it counted on the stage in front of the cameras, it it kicked in. Yeah, he's </s><s>[INST] an incredible inspiration actually. Uh He's a practitioner or something you've recently talked quite a bit about, which is the power of escaping sort of bad positions. Uh I think you've talked about it, which is really interesting, framing is uh escaping bad positions is one of the best ways. It's not the best way to demonstrate dominance psychologically over your opponent that anything they throw at you like their weapons are useless against. [/INST] Um There's a little bit of lex Friedman kicking through in this question. Your your obsession with dominance is um uh your therapy session. It's the </s><s>[INST] therapy said, I'm coming from arresting perspective. I think it's not just lex Friedman, I think it's dan gable, I think it's dominant, that gary tonin ethic, it just goes against everything. Wrestling is about. You never put yourself in a bad position. And the fact that this, it's uh philosophic, I don't know what to do with it. It's a total reframing of showing dominance by escaping any bad position. [/INST] Yeah, let's talk about the idea of what what is the value of escapes. Why do I put this in? It is the first skill that every student must master um believe or not when I talked about how it pertains to dominance. That's its smallest value. Its greatest value has nothing to do with dominance, tested with confidence. Mhm. You can train someone and teach them technique until you're blue in the face. But at some point the athlete in question has to go out there on the stage and pulled the trigger when the time is right? What's going to give you that ability to go from the physical skills that you've learned to execution under pressure is confidence. I always talk about skill development and yes, skill development is the absolute bedrock of my training programs, but you can't finish at that level. There has to be something more than that. And you have to go from the physical element of skill into the psychological element of confidence. I can teach you an arm bar all day. You can get to a point where you can flawlessly execute arm bars and drilling and even in a certain level of competition. But if you believe that in attempting an arm bar on a dangerous opponent with good guard passing skills, say the album has been performed from guard position. Yeah, that if the arm bar fails and your opponent uses that failure to set up a strong pass and get into a side pin possibly into the mount and you don't have the ability to get out of that side panel mount, you won't pull the trigger on the arm bar. And so even though you had all the requisite physical skills to perform the technique when push came to shove and the critical moment came you back down, you didn't pull the trigger building. that confidence is the key to championship performance and the single best way to do it is to take away the innate fear that we all have of bad outcomes. That makes us naturally risk averse when you don't believe you can be pinned when you don't believe your guard can be passed, you'll take risks because there's no downside to your actions. An unpickable person and an unpassable person doesn't have much to fear. And a jujitsu match. You can come out and fire with all guns blazing because, you know, at the end of the day, no one is going to hold you down, no one's going to pass your guard. That's your first two goals in judea to they're the most boring goals. They're not exciting to learn. No one wants to come in. And the first thing we're told, okay, you're going to practice escapes for the next year of your life. Okay God, you're kidding me. But that's what you got to have. That's your first skill and that's what I push upon all of my students. You'll see almost all of them are very, very strong and escape skills. They know that if things go wrong, they can always get out, they can always live to fight another day and that is what gives them the ability to attack without fear. </s> |
<s>[INST] uh, I I think I'm truly grateful that a person like you exist at the center of the scientific community gives me faith and hope about this uh, this big journey that we call science. So, uh, thank you for writing the book you wrote recently. You have for many other books and articles that I think people should definitely read and thank you for wasting all this time with me as a truly an honor. Thank you. [/INST] So it's not a waste at all. And thank you for having me. I learned a lot from your questions and your remarks. Thank you. </s><s>[INST] Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Avi Loeb and thank you to our sponsors Zero fasting up for intermittent fasting element, electrolyte drink, sun basket meal delivery service and pessimists archive history podcast. So the choice is a fasting app, fasting fuel fast breaking delicious meals and a history podcast that has very little as far as I know to do with fasting choose wisely, my friends and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning curiosity has its own reason for existence. 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 every day, thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] It's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy. But the question is, say that this call, what was it? The horse of consciousness, let's call it the uh, the consciousness generator black box that we don't understand. And is it possible that the script that were walking along that we're playing that's already written is actually being written in real time. It's almost like you're driving down the road and in real time, that road is being laid down. And this black box of consciousness that we don't understand is the place where the script is being generated. So it's not, it is being generated, It didn't always exist. So there's something we don't understand that fundamental about the nature of reality that generates both consciousness, let's call it may be the self, I don't know if you want to distinguish between those. [/INST] Yeah, I definitely would </s><s>[INST] you because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to? There is the illusion of free will. There is the illusion of self and there's the illusion of consciousness you're saying. I think you said there's no you're not as willing to say there's an illusion of consciousness. [/INST] You're a little bit more, I would say it's impossible. Impossible. </s><s>[INST] You're a little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self And you're definitely saying there's an illusion of free will. [/INST] Yes, I'm definitely saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion. Not every we mean many different things by this notion of self. So maybe we actually just differentiate these things. So consciousness can't be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other. Very tickle perception. If you're hallucinating now, that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness as really seeing what's quote actually there. If you're if you're dreaming and you don't know it, you that is consciousness right? If you're you can be confused about literally everything, you can't be confused about the the underlying claim whether you make it linguistically or not, but just the cognitive assertion that something seems to be happening. It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness. </s><s>[INST] Can I take a tiny tangent. So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind to convince you that I'm human. So it's a useful social tool, not a fundamental property of experience, Like of being a living thing. What if it's just like a social tool to to almost like a useful computational trick two place myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality. And another way to ask that because you said it much earlier, you talk negatively about robots as you often do. So let me because um you probably die first when they take over. Um [/INST] No, no, I'm looking forward to a certain kind of robots. I mean, I'm not if we can get this right, this would be amazing. </s><s>[INST] But you don't like the robots that fake consciousness. That's what you you don't like the idea of fake it till you make it? [/INST] Well, no, it's not that I don't like it is that I'm worried that we will lose sight of the problem. And the problem has massive ethical consequences. If we if we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing, right? And if if we really are committing a murder when we recycle them, that would be about </s><s>[INST] how I know you're not rushing Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer? Isn't suffering a fundamental thing from which like beauty springs like without suffering. Do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world? [/INST] Okay, well, that's that's a tangent on a tangent? We'll go there. I would love to go there. But let's not go there just yet. But you know, I do think it would be if anything is bad, creating hell and populating it with real minds that really can suffer in that hell. That's, you know, that's bad. You know, that's the you are you are worse than than any mass murderer we can name if you created, I mean, this could be in robot form or you know, more likely it would be in in some similar simulation of a world where we managed to populate it with conscious mind so that, you know, whether we knew they were conscious or not and that world is, is a state of, you know, that's, it's unendurable. Um, that was just just taking the thesis seriously that there's nothing that mind intelligence and consciousness ultimately, or substrate independent, right? Doesn't you don't need a biological brain to be conscious. You certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent, Right? So if we just imagine the consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence, well, then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds that are miserable and that's just like creating a person who's miserable. It could be worse than grating person is miserable. Could be even more sensitive to suffering </s><s>[INST] cloning them and maybe for entertainment. Watching them suffer [/INST] just like watching a person for suffer for entertainment, you know, So, but but back to your, your primary question here, which is differentiating differentiating consciousness and self and free will as concepts and kind of degrees of illusory nous. Um the problem with free will is that what most people mean by it and you know, dan, this is where dan Dennett was going to get off the ride here, right? So like he he doesn't he's gonna disagree with me that I that I know what most people mean by it, but I have a very uh keen sense having talked about this topic for many, many years and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing seeing in myself what it's like to have felt that I was a self that had free will and then to no longer feel that way, did you know what it's like to actually disabuse myself of that sense cognitively and emotionally and to recognize what's left, what goes away and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany. Um I have a sense that I know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether free will exists. And it is it is the flip side of this feeling of self is the flip side of feeling like you are not nearly identical to experience. You feel like you're having an experience, you feel like you're an agent that is appropriating an experience. There is a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you it's not just the movie, right? It's like the every like their sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony of experience of felt experience of felt experience of embodiment. But there seems to be a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body. People don't feel truly identical to their bodies, Down to their toes. They sort of feel like they have bodies. They feel like their minds in bodies. And that feels like um a self that feels like me. And again this gets very paradoxical when you talk about the experience of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself, giving yourself a pep talk. I mean if you're the one talking, why are you also the one listening? Like why do you need the pep talk? And why does it work if you're the one giving the pep talk? All right? Like or if I said like where are my keys? Right. I'm looking for my keys. Why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys? I know I'm looking for the keys. I'm the one looking, who am I telling that? You know that we need now need to look for the keys. Right? So that duality is weird. But leave that aside there's the sense so and this this becomes very vivid when people try to learn to meditate. You know, most people they start they start they close their eyes and they're told to pay attention to an object. Like the breath say so you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath and you can feel it at the tip of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen and you're paying attention and you feel something vague there. And then you think I thought why the breath? Why am I why am I paying attention to the breath? What's what's so special about the breath? And then you then you then you notice you're thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore. And then you then you realize okay the practices, okay, I should notice thoughts and then I should come back to the breath. But this starting point is the of the conventional starting point of feeling like you are an agent very likely in your head, A locus of consciousness, a locus of attention that can strategically pay attention to certain parts of experience. Like I can focus on the breath and then I get lost in thought and now I can come back to the breath and I can open my eyes and I can I'm over here behind my face, looking out at the world that's other than me. And there's this kind of subject object perception and that is the default starting point of selfhood of subjectivity and married to that is the sense that I can decide what to do next, right? I am. I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup, I can listen to sounds, there's certain things that I can't control, certain things are happening to me and I just can't control them. So for instance that if someone asked, well, can you not here a sound right? Like don't hear the next sound, don't hear anything for a second or don't hear don't here, You know, I'm snapping my fingers, don't hear this. Where's your free will? You know, we'll just stop this from coming in. You you you realize, okay, wait a minute. My my my abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple as just being able to pay attention to something else than this. Um Okay, well, so that I'm not that kind of free agent, but at least I can decide what I'm going to do next. And I'm gonna say I'm gonna pick I'm gonna pick up this water, right? And there's a feeling of identification with the impulse, with the intention, with the thought that occurs to you with the with the feeling of speaking like, you know, what am I what am I going to say next? Well, I'm saying it. So here here goes, this is me. I it feels like I'm the thinker, I'm the I'm the one who's in control, but all of that is born of not really paying close attention to what it's like to be you. And so this is this is where meditation comes in or this is where um again, you can get you can get at this conceptually, You can unravel the notion of free will just bye bye thinking certain certain thoughts but you can't feel that it doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise. So the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself, I didn't make my jeans, I didn't make my brain, I didn't make the environmental influences that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years that have produced my brain in precisely the state it's in right now. Such with all of the the receptor weightings and densities. And you know, it's just I'm I'm exactly the machine. I am right now through no fault of of my own as the experiencing self. I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environment. Environmental influences here and yet those are the only things that could contrive two to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behavior. And if you were going to add something magical to that clockwork, like an immortal soul, you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul, right? You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in or you know, or Was a psychopath or was you had an I. q. of 40. I mean like this. There's nothing nothing about that that the person who believes in a in a soul can claim to have controlled and yet that is also totally dis positive of whatever happens next. </s> |
<s>[INST] Sure. I mean, this is a good point in terms of general flu intelligence. To mention in your paper, you describe different kinds of generalizations, local, broad extreme and there's a kind of a hierarchy that you form. So when we say generalizations, what are we talking about? What kinds are [/INST] there? Right. So, uh, generalization is the old idea. I mean, it's an older machine learning in the context of machine learning. You say, a system journalists is if it can uh make sense of an input it as it has not yet seen. And that's what I would call uh, system centric generalization generalization, uh, with respect to novelty for the specific system you're considering. So I think a goodness of intelligence should actually uh deal with developer wear generalization, which is slightly stronger than systems and strict organization. So developed marginalization developer away organization would be uh, the ability to generalize to novelty or uncertainty that not only the system itself has not access to, but the developer of the system could not have access to either. </s><s>[INST] That's a fascinating, it's a fascinating matter definition. So like the system is uh, it's basically the education thing we're talking about with autonomous vehicles. Neither the developer nor the system know about the education system, my [/INST] economy. So </s><s>[INST] it's up to get the system should be able to generalize the thing that, that nobody expected neither the designer of the training data nor obviously the contents of the train. That's a fascinating [/INST] definition. You can see generalization degrees of generalization as a spectrum and the lowest level is what machine learning is trying to do is the assumption that any new situation is going to be sampled from a static distribution of possible situations and that you already have a representative sample of the distribution, that's your training data. And so in michigan you generalize to a new sample from a non distribution and the ways in which your new sample will be new or different are ways that are already understood by the developers of the system. So you are generalizing to known unknowns for one specific task, that's what you would call robustness. You are robust to things like no small variations and so on. Um For one uh fixed known distribution that that you know through your training data and a higher degree would be uh flexibility in machine intelligence. The flexibility would be something like an L. five self driving car or maybe a robot that can uh you know, pass the coffee cup test which is the notion that you would be given a random kitchen somewhere in the country and you would have to you know, go make a cup of coffee in that kitchen. Um Alright, so flexibility would be the ability to deal with unknown unknowns. So things that could not dimensions of viability, it could not have been possibly foreseen by the creators of the system within one specific task. So generalizing to the long tail of situations in self driving for instance would be flexibility. So you have robustness, flexibility. And finally we have extreme generalization which is Basically flexibility but instead of just considering one uh specific domain like driving or domestic robotics, you're considering an open ended range of possible domains. So um a robot would be capable of extreme generalization If it's designed and trained Uh two for cooking for instance. Um And if I if I buy the robots and if I'm able if it's the bowl to teach itself gardening in in a couple of weeks, it would be capable of extreme generalization for instance. So the ultimate goal is extreme generalization. So being uh creating a system that is so general that it could essentially achieve human skill parity of uh arbitrary task and arbitrary domains with the same level of, you know, improvisation and adaptation power as humans when when when it encounters new situations and we do so over basically the same range of possible domains and tasks as humans and using essentially the same amount of training experience of practice as humans would require. That will be human level extreme organization. So I I don't actually think humans are anywhere near the uh uh optimal intelligence bound if there is such a thing. So I think for humans </s><s>[INST] or in general [/INST] in general, I think it's quite likely, you know that there is and hard limit to higher intelligence. Any system can be, but at the same time, I don't think humans are anywhere near that limit. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Last time I think we talked, I think you had this idea that uh we're only as intelligence as the problems we face sort of Yes, intelligence are bounded by the [/INST] problems in a way. Yes, we are we are bounded by all environments and we are bounded by the problems we try to solve. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. What do you make of neuralink? And uh outsourcing some of the brain power like brain computer interfaces? Do you think we can expand our augment our intelligence? [/INST] I am fairly skeptical. Uh new interfaces because they're trying to fix one specific bottleneck in human machine cognition, which is the bandwidth bottleneck input and output of information in the brain. And my perception of the problem is that bandwidth is not at this time a bottleneck at all, meaning that we already have senses that enable us to take in far more information than which we can actually process </s><s>[INST] well to push back on that. A little bit uh sort of play Devil's advocate a little bit is if you look at the internet Wikipedia, let's say Wikipedia. I would say that humans after the advent of Wikipedia are much more [/INST] intelligent. Yes, I think that's a good one. But that's also not about that's about um Externalizing our intelligence via uh information processing systems. Excellent function placing system. Which is very different from brain computer interfaces. </s> |
<s>[INST] DNA data and fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture what's going on inside you and to offer you science backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. Andrew Huberman loves it and uses it and talks a lot about it. David Sinclair as well in my conversation and in other places talks a lot about it. I feel like too much of health care is based on very limited amount of information that the doctor has to uh make decisions based on very quickly. I think tracking biological data over a prolonged period of time and having that data and making decisions based on that data is just such a more powerful way to make good decisions that are personalized to you For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire inside track or store if you go to inside tracker.com slash flex. That's inside Tracker dot com slash legs. The show is also brought to you by net suite. That's what allows you to manage financials, HR inventory, e commerce and many more business related details all in one place, running a company is really difficult. But ultimately for most people, I think work is a source of meaning a source of happiness. So I see running a company as not just a place to sort of achieve productivity but also a [/INST] place to achieve </s><s>[INST] happiness for the people involved and that means using the best tools for the job in managing all aspects of that company. That's where all the sort of complex things like HR and inventory tracking all come in and that's where nets, which is a great tool to help you out on that front. Anyway right now, special financing is back at the net suite dot com slash let's get their one of a kind financing program that's not sweet dot com slash lex if you're running a business. I wish you luck my friends. It's a heck of a journey. It's a tough journey. But I think it's a beautiful one. This show is also supported by ladder. I often meditate on my mortality. I think this is both honest and clarifying if you have others in your life you love and you do the same, you should consider getting life insurance ladder can help you with that pay a little every month in case something happens to you and the ones you love will be protected. Like I said, one of the most powerful tools from the book of the stoics is to meditate on your mortality daily to remind yourself that this ride is over. Soon to uh come face to face with that reality that really makes the moment, the minute the hour, the day taste sweeter. Anyway, go to ladder life dot com slash lex to see if you're instantly approved. That's ladder spelled L A D D er life dot com slash lex And may I humbly suggest that at this moment you take one breath in, one breath out and remember that life is finite and you may even die today. So make the most of it. This show is also brought to you by sun basket for some basket delivers fresh, healthy delicious meals straight to your door, starting at only 8 99 per meal. They have prepared meals, meal kits, raw ingredients for me eating is a source of joy. The social aspect, but also just the culinary like I said, uh sophistication, the opportunity to explore different taste. That said, I'm pretty minimalistic. I'm pretty sort of have a driven in the meals I eat, I eat basically the same thing every day. So sun basket is a great thing for me to keep things healthy to keep things efficient, but also to be able to eat all kinds of variety of foods. Anyway, right now, son basket is offering $90 off for your first four deliveries, including free shipping on the first box. When you go to some basket dot com slash lex and to code lex, that's sun basket dot com slash lex and to code lex everything they have is quite honestly healthy and delicious. This is the lex Fridman podcast and here is my conversation with sean kelly. Your interests are in post content, european philosophy, especially phenomenology and existentialism. So let me ask what to you is existentialism. [/INST] So it's a hard question I'm teaching a course on existentialism right now. You are, I am, yeah, existentialism in literature and film, which is fun. I mean, the traditional thing to say about What existentialism is is that it's a movement in mid-20th century, mostly French some German philosophy and some of the major figures associated with it are people like jean paul, sartre and camus um surrender Beauvoir, maybe martin Heidegger, but that's a weird thing to say about it because most of those people denied that they were existentialists. And um and in fact, I think of it as a movement that has a much longer history. So when I try to describe what the core idea of existentialism is, it's an idea that you find expressed in different ways in a bunch of these people. One of the ways that it's expressed is that Start will say that existentialism is the view that there is no god and at least his form of existentialism, he calls it atheistic existentialism, there is no god. And since there is no God, there must be some other being around who does something like what God does otherwise, there wouldn't be any possibility for significance in life and that being is us. And the feature of us according to start and the other existentialists, that puts us in the position to be able to play that role is that we are the beings for whom as starts as it existence precedes essence. That's that's the catch phrase for existentialism. And then you have to try to figure out what it means </s> |
<s>[INST] Don't tell me there's some kind of invariance. Yeah. Yeah. So what happens is- [/INST] Oh, and that would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So what happens is- Oh, and that would be amazing. Right. So this thing that you get is this kind of ruleial multiway graph, this multiway graph that is a branching of rules as well as a branching of possible applications of rules. This thing has causal invariance. It's an inevitable feature that it shows causal invariance. And that means that you can take different reference frames, different ways of slicing this thing, and they will all in some sense be equivalent. If you make the right translation, they will be equivalent. So okay. So the basic point here is- </s><s>[INST] If that's true, that would be beautiful. It is true, and it is beautiful. So it's not just an intuition. There is some- No, no, no. [/INST] There's real mathematics. No, no, no. There's real mathematics behind this. And it is- okay. So here's- </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's amazing. Right. [/INST] So by the way, I mean, the mathematics that's connected to is the mathematics of higher category theory and groupoids and things like this, which I've always been afraid of. But now I'm finally wrapping my arms around it. But it's also related to- it also relates to computational complexity theory. It's also deeply related to the P versus NP problem and other things like this. Again, it seems completely bizarre that these things are connected, but here's why it's connected. This space of all possible- okay, so a Turing machine, very simple model of computation. You just got this tape where you write down one's and zero's or something on the tape, and you have this rule that says you change the number, you move the head on the tape, et cetera. You have a definite rule for doing that. A deterministic Turing machine just does that deterministically given the configuration of the tape. It will always do the same thing. A non-deterministic Turing machine can have different choices that it makes at every step. So, you know, you know this stuff, you probably teach this stuff. So a non-deterministic Turing machine has the set of branching possibilities, which is in fact one of these multiway graphs. And in fact, if you say, imagine the extremely non-deterministic Turing machine, the Turing machine that can just do, that takes any possible rule at each step. That is this Reule multiway graph. The set of possible histories of that extreme non-deterministic Turing machine is a Reule Multiway Graph. </s><s>[INST] What term are you using? Reuleo? Reuleo. It's a weird word. Yeah. It's a weird word, right? Reuleum. [/INST] It's a weird word. Yeah. It's a weird word, right? Reuleum. Multiway graph. Okay? So, that... </s><s>[INST] I'm trying to think of the space of rules. So these are basic transformations. [/INST] So in a Turing machine, it's like it says, move left, move, you know, if it's a one, </s><s>[INST] if it's a black square under the head, move left and right a green square. That's a rule. That's a very basic rule, but I'm trying to see the rules on the hypergraphs, how rich [/INST] of the programs can they be, or do they all ultimately just map into something simple? I mean, hypergraphs, that's another layer of complexity on this whole thing. You can think about these in transformations of hypergraphs, but Turing machines are a little bit simpler. Just think about Turing machines, ok? They're a little bit simpler. So if you look at these extreme non-deterministic Turing machines, you're mapping out all the possible non-deterministic paths that the Turing machine can follow. And if you ask the question, can you reach … OK, so a deterministic Turing machine follows a single path, the non-deterministic Turing machine fills out this whole sort of ball of possibilities. And so then the P versus NP problem ends up being questions about, and we haven't completely figured out all the details of this, but it basically has to do with questions about the growth of that ball relative to what happens with individual paths and so on. So essentially there's a geometrization of the P versus NP problem that comes out of this. That's a sideshow. Okay? So the main event here is the statement that you can look at this multiway graph, where the branches correspond not just to different applications of a single rule, but to applications of different rules. Okay? And that then that when you say, I'm going to be an observer embedded in that system, and I'm going to try and make sense of what's going on in the system. And to do that, I essentially am picking a reference frame. And that turns out to be, well, okay. So the way this comes out essentially is the reference frame you pick is the rule that you infer is what's going on in the universe. Even though all possible rules are being run, although all those possible rules are in a sense giving the same answer because of causal invariance. But what you see will be, could be completely different. If you pick different reference frames, you essentially have a different description language for describing the universe. Okay. So what does this really mean in practice? So imagine there's us. We think about the universe in terms of space and time, and we have various kinds of description models and so on. Now let's imagine the friendly aliens, for example, right? How do they describe their universe? Well, our description of the universe probably is affected by the fact that we are about the size we are, a meter-ish tool, so to speak, we have brain processing speeds. We're about the speeds we have. We're not the size of planets, for example, where the speed of light really would matter. In our everyday life, the speed of light doesn't really matter. Everything can be... The fact that the speed of light is finite is irrelevant. It could as well be infinite, wouldn't make any difference. It affects the ping times on the Internet. That's about the level of how we notice the speed of light. our sort of everyday existence, we don't really notice it. And so we have a way of describing the universe that's based on our sensory, you know, our senses, these days, also on the mathematics we've constructed and so on. But the realization is, that's not the only way to do it. There will be completely, completely utterly incoherent descriptions of the universe, </s> |
<s>[INST] you have to write the memory. You can't erase the memory, I got it so you can't have exactly how it was in the past. Exactly, so here's the package. You have extra stuff, extra baggage [/INST] always. The really important thing I want to say on this I think if I try and get it right, is to say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of boxes that it has to store states, right? And this is where the directionality of the universe comes from, everything comes from. You could erase what's in those boxes, but the fact you've now got so many boxes at time now in this present, there's more of those boxes than there were in the past. </s><s>[INST] See, but the boxes aren't physical boxes. They're not space, it's not space or time. [/INST] Why is the number of boxes always not space? It's not space or time, so why expanding? It's very hard to imagine this because we live in space. So what I'm saying, which is, I think, probably correct, is that we just, let's just imagine for a second, there is a non-local situation, but there are these things called states, and the universe, irrespective of whether you measure anything, there is a universal, let's call it a clock, or a state creator. Maybe we can call it, that's why maybe you can call it God, but let's call it a state creator, where the universe is expanding </s><s>[INST] in the number of states it has. Why are you saying it's expanding though? Is that obvious that it's expanding [/INST] in the number of states? It's obvious because that's where, that's a source of novelty. It's a source of novelty and it also explains why the universe is not predictable. </s><s>[INST] And you know, it's not predictable. That's a source of novelty. I just like interrupting you, so it's fun, [/INST] because you're struggling, you're struggling. I'm struggling because I'm trying to be as concrete as possible and not sound like I'm insane, and I'm not insane, it's obvious because I'm a chemist, so as a chemist I grew into the world understanding irreversibility. Irreversibility is all I knew. And when people start telling me the universe is actually reversible, it's a magic trick. We can use time to do it. So what I mean is the second law is really the magical, but why does it need to be magical? The universe is just asymmetric. All I'm saying is the universe is asymmetric in the state production, and we can erase those states, but we just have more computational power. So what I'm saying is that the universe's deterministic horizon, this is one of the reasons we can't live in a simulation, by the way. You can't live in a simulation, you can't live in a simulation. Basically every time you try and simulate the universe, and I live in a simulation, the universe has expanded in states. You're like damn it, I need to make my computer bigger again, and every time you try and contain the universe and the computation, because it's got bigger in number of states. So I'm saying the fact the universe has novelty in it is going to turn out experimentally to be proof that time, as I've labeled it, is fundamental and exists as a physical thing that creates space. </s><s>[INST] Okay. So if you can prove that novelty is always being created, you're saying that it's possible to also then prove that it's always expanding in the state space. [/INST] Those are things that have to be proven. </s><s>[INST] That's what we're working on experiments for, yeah. And you're trying to, by looking at the sliver of reality, show that there's always novelty [/INST] being generated. Yeah, yeah. Because if we go live in a universe that the conventional physicists would live in, it's a big lookup table of stuff and everything exists. I want to prove that that book doesn't exist, it's continuously being added pages on. So what I'm saying, if the universe is a book, the universe at the beginning only had no pages or had one page, another page, another page, whereas the physicists would now say all the pages exist and we could, in principle, access them. </s><s>[INST] I'm saying that is fundamentally incorrect. Do you know what's written in this book? The free will question. Is there room for free will in this view of the universe is generating novelty and getting greater and greater assembly structures built? Sarah. [/INST] Yes. Okay. Done. </s><s>[INST] Next question. Why? [/INST] What's the source of free will in this? Well, I think it depends on what you mean by free will, but- </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Well, please. [/INST] There's a lot. There's a lot. I think what I'm interested in as far as the phenomena of free will is, do we have individual autonomy and agency? And when I do things, is it really me or is it my atoms that did it? And that's the part that's interesting to me. I guess there's also the determinism versus randomness part, but the way I think about it is each of us are a thread or an assembly space through this giant possibility space. And it's like we're moving on our own trajectory through that space and that is defined by our history. So we're sort of causally contingent on our past, but also because of the sort of intersection of novelty generation, it's not completely predetermined by the past. And so then you have the causal control of the determinism part, that you are your causal history and there's some determinism from that past, but there's also room for creativity. And I think it's actually necessary that something like free will exists if the universe is going to be as creative as possible. Because if I were all intelligent being inventing a universe and I wanted it to have maximum number of interesting things happen, again, we should come up with the metric of interesting, but generating, yes, I know, generating maximal possibilities, then I would want the agents to have free will because it means that they're more individual, like each entity actually is a different causal force in the universe. </s> |
<s>[INST] how does the human interact with it [/INST] by tossing it? So it's an interactive musical instrument. It actually requires another partner. So the idea was that it's something like a dance um or just like something like a choreography in space. </s><s>[INST] Got it. And then speaking of which you also talked about sports and like ball sports, like playing soccer. So what you mentioned that so you you also can move with full speed and then if you push off the wall lightly you fly across, zoom, zoom across. So how does the physics of that work for? Can you still play soccer? For example, in space? [/INST] You can but one of the most intuitive things that we all learn as babies right is whenever you throw something, if I was going to toss something to you, I toss it up because I know that it has to compensate for the fact that that florian arc is going to draw it down, the you know, equations of motion are going to drop down. I would in space. I would just shoot something directly towards you. So like straight line of sight. And so that would be very different for any type of ball sports is to retrain your human mind to have that as your intuitive arc of motion or lack of arc </s><s>[INST] from your experience, from understanding how astronauts get adjusted to the stuff, How long does it take to adjust to the physics of this world, this other world? [/INST] So even after one or two parabolic flights, you can gain a certain facility with moving in that environment. I think most astronauts would say maybe several days on station or a week on station and their brain flips. It's amazing the plasticity of the human brain and how quickly they are able to adapt and so pretty quickly they become creatures of this new environment. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so that's cool. It's it's creating a little bit of an experience. What about if you go for more than 100 days for one year, for two years for three years, what challenges start to emerge in that case? [/INST] So scott kelly wrote this amazing book after he spent a year in space and he's a twin, it's absolutely fantastic that Nasa got to do a twin studies. Perfect. Um so he wrote a lot about his experience on the health side of what changed things like bone density, muscle atrophy eyesight changing because the shape of your eyeball changes, which changes your lens, which changes how you see if we're then thinking about the challenges between a year and three years, especially if we're doing that three year trip to mars for your friend who asked earlier then you have to think about nutrition and so how are you keeping all of these different needs for your body alive? How are you protecting astronauts against radiation either having some type of a shell on the spacecraft, which is expensive because it's heavy, you know, if it's something like lead a really effective radiation shell, it's going to be a lot of mass, or is there a pill that could be taken to try to make you um less uh in danger of some of the radiative radiation effects? A lot of this has not yet been answered. But radiation is really significant challenge for that three year journey. </s><s>[INST] And what are the negative effects of radiation on the human body out in space? [/INST] A higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age. Um, So you'd probably be able to get there and get back, but you'd find yourself um in the same way, if you were exposed to significant radiation on earth, you'd find significant bad health effects as you age. </s><s>[INST] What do you think about like decades? Do you think about decades or is this like an entire, [/INST] I think about centuries. </s><s>[INST] For [/INST] Myspace marks. But yeah, for decades, I think as soon as we get past the three year mark. Well, absolutely want somewhere between three years in a decade. We'll want artificial gravity and we know how to do that. Actually. The engineering questions still need to be tweaked for how we really implemented. But the science is there to know how we would spin habitats in orbit generate that force. So even if the entire habitats not spinning you at least have a treadmill part of the space station that is spinning and you can spend some fraction of your day in a near to one G. Environment and keep your body healthy </s><s>[INST] literally from just spinning [/INST] from spinning. Yes centripetal force. So you generate this force. If you ever been in those um carnival rides the gravity Iran's that spin you up around the side. That's the concept. And this is actually one of the reasons why we are spinning out a new company from my M. I. </s><s>[INST] T. Lab spinning [/INST] out accidental but well well noted space planets as </s><s>[INST] possible. [/INST] Um But yeah we're spinning out a new company to look at next generation space architecture and how do we actually scale humanity's access to space? And one of the areas that we want to look at is artificial gravity. </s><s>[INST] Is there a name yet, [/INST] yep there's a name, we are brand new, we are just exiting stealth mode. So your podcast listeners will literally be among some of the first to hear about it. It's called Aurilia Institute or alia is an old english word for Chrysalis and the idea with this is that we humanity collectively are at this next stage of our metamorphosis like a Chrysalis into a space faring species and so we felt that this was a good time unnecessary time to think about next generation space architecture but also Starfleet Academy, if you know that reference from star trek. </s> |
<s>[INST] and you will have my deep gratitude and more dear stranger for doing so. Um, what's the programming language for mods? This is mostly their [/INST] use our internal scripting language that's built into the tool. </s><s>[INST] Okay, I'm almost afraid to explore that world because you will never, never never turn back how long you've created so, so many incredible games. Is there, uh, what does the future hold? Is there sort of going through this process? Do you still have the energy, the passion, the drive to keep creating? [/INST] I, I cannot imagine doing anything else. Um, I'd like to do it as long as possible. I will say though, as I've done it. Um, you know, soon it'll be 30 years at Bethesda. I've learned that to appreciate the developments a little bit more, you know, that the, the time it takes, I should re I should prioritize all of us enjoying the development process more than I did in the past. It was like, you know, I just wanted to the end, that's all that mattered. Um, and the more you do it, you realize? No, I'm, I'm spending the majority of my life in, in time real and the wasteland and fall out. So, you know, the moments that we're all doing this together. We need to enjoy it. Like it's a lot of work, finishing star field. But hey, we got to enjoy this? This is like incredible, We don't get that many shots. So, </s><s>[INST] so the actual process of creating the struggles along the way of stuff, not working, like, like you said at this point with star field probably creating some of the glue of how stuff feels and going back again and again and again to try to make the beginning better, all that kind of stuff. [/INST] And I would say it for anybody's vocation, whatever you're doing, you know, whatever people do, you're gonna have harder times and sometimes people have said, you know, you have to, you know, maybe recalibrate yourself, they're like, okay, how can we make this more enjoyable for all of us, no matter what you're doing and rewarding. </s><s>[INST] So if life is a video game, which most likely is what do you think is the meaning of life from having created so many games or the character has the try to figure [/INST] out. </s><s>[INST] I mean there's bigger questions than just solving the quest, your big asking the big questions of why am I here? I feel like that's good practice for answering the same question for this video game we're in. What do you think is the meaning of life dot Howard? [/INST] That's a very, </s><s>[INST] I [/INST] can say what motivates me, </s><s>[INST] That's a good start [/INST] having a curiosity, you know, the ability to not assume a lot and be curious about the world around you. It's more, it's, you know, not the same as just wanting to learn everything, but what makes other humans tick, How do they feel? How do they love? Might be cliche to say the meaning of life is to love, Right. Um so </s><s>[INST] that curiosity is just, is about noticing the world, [/INST] noticing the world around you, you know, like there's so much an anecdote. Someone says, uh Everybody has two lives and the second one starts when you realize there's only one and I think I usually preach to my Children, everything else. Like have a curiosity to the world around you and you'll have the most fulfilling days. </s><s>[INST] Are you able to be inside the world that you've created and be able to notice them, Like really, like really enjoy them. [/INST] It takes time. So like Skyrim had its 10th anniversary. So when I went back into it, I think I got to see it for what it is. My younger son got really into it, you know, a few years back on the switch, that's what we noticed people age up into it, right? So one of these is so popular is, you know, people come into, you know, they're now becoming, you know teenagers and okay, I'll finally play Skyrim and uh you know, he got obsessed with it not and he wasn't usually say, hey, check out my games and like, shut up dad, we don't, we're planning some stuff. Um and he got like obsessed with Skyrim, like we're having like deep elder scrolls lore conversations at dinner. Um and you know, I saw it through his eyes and that was pretty special and then the mods he was downloading and the Youtubers he was following talking about stuff. So the people who like the eldest girls, people don't realize how much of that I have watched with my son and then I kind of when the 10th anniversary came out like, oh, I'm gonna check out a bill. I have to check out the build out, but I haven't played it in so long and it was like, it does, it has this flow. We're like, oh my God, I just played for four hours. I need to, I need to turn </s><s>[INST] it off. Yeah, I mean there's something about enjoying enjoying it against the people you love to or the water cooler discussion and with kids. So I actually, I would love to have kids and hopefully soon in the future. So I guess the thing I need your advice on is how do I time in such way when they're old [/INST] enough, </s><s>[INST] right at the age? They're old enough. Like I want to know when to have them so that when they're old enough, that's exactly when elder scrolls six comes out. I wanna, can you give me a hint when I should have kids? All right, never mind [/INST] how to ask that question </s> |
<s>[INST] And that small subset of function is all that matters to us, humans really, that's what makes [/INST] it's all that has mattered so far. And even within our scientific realm, it's all that seems to continue to matter. But I mean, I always like to think about our senses and how much of the physical world around us we perceive. And if you look at the um, ligo experiment over the last, you know, year and a half has been all over the news, what did ligo do? It created a new sense for human beings, a sense that has never been sensed in the history of our planet. Mhm gravitational waves have been traversing the earth since its creation a few billion years ago. Life has evolved senses to sense things that were never before sensed light was not perceived by early life, no one cared and eventually for the receptors evolved and the ability to sense colors by catching different parts of that electromagnetic spectrum and hearing evolved and touch evolved etcetera. But no organism evolved a way to sense neutrinos floating through earth, or gravitational waves flowing through earth etcetera. And I find it so beautiful in the history of not just humanity but life on the planet, that we are now able to capture additional signals from the physical world than we ever knew before. And accidents for example have been all over the news in the last few weeks. The concept that we can capture and perceive more of that physical world is as exciting as the The fact that we are, we were blind to it is traumatizing before because that also tells us, you know, we're in 2020 Picture yourself in 3020 Or in 20, you know, </s><s>[INST] what new senses, what might we discover [/INST] is it, you know, could it be that we're missing 9/10 of physics </s><s>[INST] that [/INST] like there's a lot of physics out there that were just blind to completely oblivious to it. And yet they're permeating us all the time. Yes, </s><s>[INST] it might be right in front of us. So, [/INST] so when you're thinking about premonitions, </s><s>[INST] yeah, [/INST] a lot of that is ascertainment bias. Like yeah, you know, every now and then you're like, oh I remember my friend and then my friend doesn't appear and I'll forget that I remember my friend, but every now and then my friend will actually appear and like, oh my God, I thought about you a minute ago, you just called me. That's amazing. So, you know, some of that is this, but some of that might be that there are within our brain sensors for waves that we admit that we're not even aware of. And this whole concept of when I hug my Children, there's such an emotional transfer there that we don't comprehend. I mean sure. Yeah, of course, we're all hardwired for all kinds of touchy feely things between parents and kids. Beautiful between partners is beautiful and tender. But then there are intangible aspects of human communication that I don't think it's unfathomable that our brain has actually evolved ways and sensors for it that we just don't capture. We don't understand the function of the vast majority of our neurons and maybe our brain is already sensing it, but even worse, maybe our brain is not sensing it at all and were oblivious to this until we build a machine that suddenly is able to sort of capture so much more of what's happening in the natural world. So what </s><s>[INST] you're saying is we go physics is going to discover a sensor for love [/INST] for and maybe maybe dogs are off scale for that. And we've been, you know, we've been oblivious to the whole time because we didn't have the right sensor and now you're going to have a little risk that says, oh my God, I feel all this love in the house. I sense some disturbance in the forest </s><s>[INST] around and dogs and cats will have zero. [/INST] No, no, </s><s>[INST] it's just me. But let's take a step back to [/INST] unfortunately one of the 400 topics that we had actually planned. But </s><s>[INST] But to our sad time in 2020 when we only have just a few sensors and uh very primitive early computers. So in your you have a foot in computer science and and the field of biology in your son's. How do um computers represent information differently than like the genome or biological systems. [/INST] So, first of all, let me uh let me uh, correct that no, we're in an amazing time in 2020. Computer science is totally awesome. And physics is totally awesome. And we have understood so much of the natural world than ever before. So I am extremely grateful and feeling extremely lucky to be living in the time that we are because, you know, first of all, who knows when the asteroid will hit and second. Um, you know, of all times in humanity, this is probably the best time to be a human being. And this might actually be the best place to be a human being. So anyway, you know, for for anyone who loves science, this is this is it, this is awesome. It's a great time </s><s>[INST] at the same time. Just a sweet comment. All I meant is that if you look several 100 years from now and we end up somehow not destroying ourselves, people probably look back at this time in computer science and uh, at your work of minnows at M I. T. [/INST] Uh it's </s><s>[INST] a silly and how ignorant it all [/INST] was. I I like to joke very often with my students that, you know, we've written so many papers were published so much. We've been sighted so much and every single time I tell my students you know, the best is ahead of us. What we're working on now is the most exciting thing I've, I've ever worked on. So in a way, I do have this sense of, yeah, even the papers I wrote 10 years ago, they were awesome at the time. But I'm so much more excited about where we're heading now. And I don't mean to minimize any of the stuff we've done in the past, but you know, there's just this sense of excitement about what you're working on now, that as soon as the papers submitted, it's like, it's old. You know, I can't talk about that anymore. At the same time, you're </s> |
<s>[INST] Mhm. Like, sorry, simply place that second out like uh [/INST] like to put in an outlet. Is that romantic or not romantic? </s><s>[INST] I mean, it depends the look in his eyes when he does it. I mean it depends on the conversation that led up to that point depends how much uh it's like the music because you have a very you're both from the my experiences with you as a fan. You have both a romantic nature. You have a very pragmatic like you cut through the bullsh it of uh the fuzziness and there there's something about a six way plug that cuts to the bullshit that connects to the human, like he understands who you [/INST] are. Yeah, exactly. That was the most romantic gift he could have given me because he knows me so well. He has a deep understanding of me which is that I will sit and suffer and complain about the fact that I have to plug and unplug things and I will bitch and moan until the cows come home. But it would never occur to me To go buy a bloody six way plug. Whereas for him, he bought it, he plugged it in. He arranged, he taped up all my wires. He made it like really useful. And for me that was uh that was </s><s>[INST] the best [/INST] project. It was the most romantic thing because he understood who I was and he did something very or you know just the casual like we moved into a house that went, we went from having a two car garage to a one car garage and I said okay, you know I'm from Canada. I'm not bothered by snow. Well I mean I'm a little bothered by snow, but he's very bothered by snow. So I'm like okay you can park your car in the garage, it's fine every day when it snows. He goes out and cleaned my car every day. Like I never asked him to do it. He just does it because he knows that I'm cutting it really close in the morning. You know when we when we all used to go to work. Um I have a time to the second so that I can get up as late as possible, work out as long as possible. You know, just and make it into my office like a minute before my first meeting and so if it snows unexpectedly or something, I'm screwed because now that's an edit, you know, and added 10 or 15 minutes and I'm gonna be late anyways, you know, it's just these little tiny things that he's, he's um he's a really easy going guy and he doesn't look like somebody who pays attention to detail. He doesn't fuss about detail, but he definitely pays attention to detail and it is very, very romantic in the sense that he um you know, he loves me despite my little details, </s><s>[INST] it understands you, but it is kind of hilarious that that is The six way plug is um the most fulfilling richest display of romance in your life. I love it. [/INST] That's what I mean about romance. Romance is really, it's not all about chocolates and flowers and you know, whatever. I mean those are all nice too. But um sometimes </s><s>[INST] it's about the sex with, [/INST] Sometimes it's about the six weeks. </s><s>[INST] So um maybe one way I could ask before we talk about the details. You also have the author of another book as we talked about how emotions are made. So it's interesting to talk about the process of writing, You mentioned you were in new york what have you learned from writing these two books about the actual process of writing and maybe I don't know what's the most interesting thing to talk about, there may be the biggest challenges or the boring, mundane, systematic, like day to day of what worked for you, like hacks or, or even just about the neuroscience, but that you've learned through the process of trying to write them. [/INST] Here's the thing I learned. If you think that it's going to take you a year to write your book, it's going to take you three years to write your book. That's the first thing I learned, is that no matter how organized you are, it's always going to take way longer than what you think in part because very few people make an outline and then just stick to it. You know, the some of the topics really take on a life of their own and to some extent you want to let them you want to let them have their voice. You know, you want to follow leads until you feel satisfied that you've dealt with the topic um appropriately, but I and that part is actually fun. It's not fun to feel like you're constantly behind the eight ball in terms of time. Um but it is the exploration and the foraging for information is incredibly fun for me anyways, I found it really enjoyable and if I wasn't also running a lab at the same time and trying to keep my family going uh you know it would have been the whole thing would have just been fun. Um But I would say the hardest thing about the most important thing I think I learned is also the hardest thing and that for me which is um knowing what to leave out a really good storyteller knows what to leave out in academic writing, you shouldn't leave anything out, you all the details should be there. And um and I you know I've Written or participated in writing over 200 papers, peer reviewed papers, so I'm pretty good with detail knowing what to leave out, knowing what to leave out and not harming the validity of the story. That is a tricky tricky thing. It was tricky when I wrote how emotions are made, but that's a standard um popular science books, so it's 300 something pages. And then you know it has like 1000 end notes and then each of the endnotes is attached to a web note which is also long. So I mean you know it's um and it starts and I mean the final draft, I wrote three drafts of that book actually and the final draft and then I had to cut by a third, I mean or I mean you know it was like 100 and 50,000 words or something and I had to cut it down to like 110. So um obviously I struggled with what to leave out, you know, brevity is not my strong suit. I'm always telling people that it's a warning. So that's why this book was I you know, I've always been really fascinated with essays. I love reading essays and after reading a small set of essays by an fat woman called At Large and that Small, which I just love these little essays. </s> |
<s>[INST] interview. Look normal look human. [/INST] Not </s><s>[INST] head. Yeah, [/INST] not head </s><s>[INST] in agreement. Yeah. [/INST] Else </s><s>[INST] don't do it too much because it might be at the wrong time and then it will send the wrong signal. [/INST] Oh God. </s><s>[INST] And make eye contact sometimes because humans appreciate that anyway. [/INST] Okay. </s><s>[INST] Uh yeah, but something about, especially when you say mean things in person, you get to see the pain of the other person if [/INST] you're tweeting it at a person and you have no idea how it's going to land, you're more likely to do that on social media than you are in face to face conversations. So um </s><s>[INST] what do you think is more important? Eq or I. Q. E. Q. Being emotional intelligence in terms of in what makes us human. [/INST] I think emotional intelligence is what makes us human, it's it's how we connect with one another. It's how we build trust. It's how we make decisions right? Like your emotions drive kind of what you had for breakfast, but also where you decide to live and what do you want to do for the rest of your life? So I think emotions are underrated. Um </s><s>[INST] so emotional intelligence isn't just about the effective expression of your own emotions is about a sensitivity and empathy to other people's emotions and that sort of being able to effectively engage in the dance of emotions with other people. Yeah, [/INST] I like that explanation. I like that kind of yeah, thinking about it as a dance because it it is really about that, it's about sensing what state the other person's in and using that information to decide on how you're gonna react. Um and I think it can be very powerful, like people who are the best, most persuasive, most persuasive leaders in the world tap into. You know, they have, if you have higher eq you're more likely to be able to motivate people to change their behaviors. So, um so it can be very powerful </s><s>[INST] at a more kind of technical, maybe philosophical level you've written that emotion is universal, it seems that sort of like chomsky says, language is universal, there's a bunch of other stuff like cognition, consciousness seems a lot of us have these aspects. So the human mind generates all this. And so what do you think is the they all seem to be like echoes of the same thing? Uh what do you think emotion is exactly like how deep does it run? Is it a surface level thing that we display to each other. Is it just another form of language or something deep within? [/INST] I think it's it's really deep. It's how, you know, we started with memory. I think emotions play a really important, yeah, emotions play a very important role in how we encode memories, right? Our memories are often encoded almost indexed by emotions. Um yeah, it's at this core of how, you know, our decision making engine is also heavily influenced by our emotions. </s><s>[INST] Emotions is part of cognition. It's [/INST] totally it's </s><s>[INST] intermix into the whole thing. [/INST] Yes, absolutely. And in fact when you take it away, people are unable to make decisions. They're really paralyzed. Like they can't go about their daily or their, you know, personal or professional lives. So um </s><s>[INST] it does seem like there's probably some interesting interweaving of emotion and consciousness. I wonder if it's possible to have like if their next door neighbors somehow, if they're actually uh flatmates. I don't it feels like the hard problem of consciousness where it's some it feels like something to experience the thing like Red feels like red. And it's you know when you eat a mango sweet, the taste the sweetness that feels like something to experience that sweetness that whatever generates emotions. But then like I feel like emotion is part of communication, It's very much about communication and then that means it's also deeply connected to language but then probably human intelligence is deeply connected to the collective intelligence between humans, it's not just the standalone thing. So the whole thing is really connected. So emotions connected to language. Language is connected to intelligence and then intelligence connected consciousness and consciousness is connected to emotion. The whole thing is that it's a beautiful mess. So uh um [/INST] can I comment on the emotions being a communication? Because I think there are two facets of of our emotional experiences. Um one is communication right? Like we use emotions for example facial expressions or other non verbal accused to connect with other human beings and with other beings in the world, right? Um but even if it's not a communication context, we still experience emotions and we still process emotions and we still leverage emotions to make decisions and to learn and you know to experience life. So it isn't always just about communication. And we learned that very early on in our in kind of our work at a Factiva, one of the very first applications we brought to market was understanding how people respond to content. Right? So they're watching this video of ours, Like are they interested, are they inspired? Are they bored to death? And so we watch their facial expressions and we had we weren't sure if people would express any emotions if they were sitting alone, like if you're in your bed at night watching a netflix tv series, would we still see any emotions on your face. And we were surprised that yes people still emote even if they're alone. Even if you're in your car driving around your sing along the song and you joyful we'll see these expressions. So it's not just about communicating with another person, it's sometimes really isn't just about experiencing the world. And </s> |
<s>[INST] It depends on how we define it. You mentioned there's some criticism towards Bitcoin. There's a lot of excitement about the technology of Bitcoin for the resistance against this [/INST] kind of central state pursuit of power. That's part of my criticism because I don't think it works. So yeah, I can imagine a world, I'd love to see a technology evolve where money is competitive and it's a financial instrument that the government cannot touch. You think the state is too powerful in the- I think two things. I think right now, and maybe this won't be true in the future, right now I think it cannot function as money right now. It just can't. But it does. No, it doesn't. It functions as a mechanism. It functions as a mechanism to transfer. It's a technology that allows me to transfer fiat money from place to place. But it doesn't function. And it can't because it's too volatile. It does. I've sold things with Bitcoin. No, I know you have. No, running. No, I know you have. But I can sell things, I can buy things and sell things with my airline models. There's lots of ways in which you can use things as money but it doesn't make them money. If you're using something as money, it's money. Let me take something you said before and the contradicts I think Bitcoin. You said one of the things about money is that it's stable. I know what it's going to buy tomorrow. This is why we're against inflation because I know what the dollar today I can plan because I don't know what Bitcoin is going to be worth tomorrow. So I can't plan with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is way too volatile to serve right now as money. Now, the argument from Bitcoin is yes, it's still being adopted. At some point, it reaches a certain crucial mass. Yes, then it will become money because at that point it can be used with money because they don't have a stable value mass. HighAC liquidization, either. Yes, maybe. Right now, it's not useful as money because I can't predict... I can't invest in it knowing what the value will be in five years. Right now it's an asset. It's not a monetary unit. It's much more functions as an asset. Assets value can go up. I agree, it's functioning much more as an asset than its money. That's not in dispute. So I don't think it's money, but so I think it's still, I think it can compete as a money with something tangible. So I think in a free market, some kind of crypto backed by gold would </s><s>[INST] be more successful. So Bitcoin folks argue that Bitcoin has all the same fundamental properties that does gold. So it's backed by, there's a scarcity to it, and it's backed by proof of work. So it's backed by physical resources. And so they say that's a very natural replacement [/INST] of gold. So it doesn't need to be connected to gold to gold. So the two things that gold has that it doesn't have, one is gold is not finite. Gold supply actually grows over time. Bitcoin at some point is truly finite. Yes. At least unless you count the fact that you can split Bitcoins and create coins, but that's a whole other question. So that's one. The second is that gold has value beyond its use as a currency, beyond its use as money. For jewelry and stuff. Yeah, but you minimize that. But jewelry and stuff has been important for the human race for a hundred thousand years. You can find jewelry in caves, for the cavemen design jewelry and war them. So we obviously as human beings value jewelry a lot. And almost all jewelry evolved to be made out of gold because whatever it is within us is attracted to shiny gold in particular, shiny object generally. So there's something about gold that appeals to human beings. There's some value that gold has beyond its being a currency. Bitcoin doesn't. Now it's not enough to use it as money. Lots of things appeal to human beings. But those are two characteristics. One, that it's not finite. And second, that it is a value beyond that Bitcoin doesn't. </s><s>[INST] For jewelry and stuff. Don't you think the finiteness could be framed as a feature, [/INST] the scarcity of Bitcoin? No, because I think it creates a real problem with scarcity economically. It's the issue of planning. There is a beautiful mechanism in markets that as the supply of gold is, in a sense, the quantity of gold is.... Prices are going down because there's too little gold. So the value of gold in a sense in dollar terms, that the prices are going down. What happens then is there's an incentive to then go mine for more gold. Because it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine as the price goes down. So you mine for more gold. So it keeps increasing. It keeps increasing basically, very correlated to the rate of increase in productivity. That's the beauty of gold mining because prices are related to gold, gold is the dominant money, and it increases at about the same rate as productivity. So it keeps prices relatively stable. You still have bouts of inflation and deflation, but it keeps it relatively stable. With Bitcoin, it's finite. It ends. Now prices will only decline. What rate will they decline at? They'll decline at the rate of productivity increases. It's hard to predict at the rate at which productivity increases. For example, technological shocks can change that dramatically. You could get bouts of dramatic deflation, dramatic price drops that could be problematic in terms of planning, the same problem of inflation just reversed that you had before. So again, it's a technical issue. I'm sure there are ways to get around it, and again, I'm not sure. I don't know if you guys consider Bitcoin the end or the beginning, that is, is Bitcoin it, or is Bitcoin just the first example of a technology that might evolve? I was just going to say, there's the same technological issue with regard to gold, which is we now have the technology that was very expensive to turn elements into different elements. And at a certain, yeah, you could fire electrons at it or whatever, you can make gold. They figured out how to do it. It's not cheap, and it's called big process. If gold is the standard, a lot of resources are going to be going toward turning other things into gold, making the production of gold cheaper, and that's going to have a similar </s> |
<s>[INST] Yeah, there's uh, I mean, that's the thing, We're struggling now as a society. Maybe you'd be nice to get your quick comment on that, which is, um, the people who have traditionally been powerless are now, you know, seeking a fair society a more equal society and in entertaining more power justly uh there's also a realization, at least from my perspective that power corrupts everyone. Even if you're even if the flag you wave is that of of justice, right? And so, you know, not to overuse the term, but it'd be nice if you have thoughts about the whole idea of cancel culture and the internet and twitter and so on, where there's a nuanced, difficult discussions of uh of race, of gender, of fairness, equality, justice, all of these kinds of things. There's a shouting down, oftentimes of nuanced discussion of kind of trying to reason through these very difficult issues through our history through what our future looks like. Do you have thoughts about the internet discourse that's going on now? There's something positive? [/INST] Yeah, I can pull out of this. It's an interesting thing to see, I guess, as you mentioned, any time you're wielding power, whomever you are doing so carefully is important and it's very, very easy to look at the people that have power and they are using it poorly or have used it poorly and go, hey, you're the bad guy. And then go, well, of course, if I had power, I'll use it properly and I may intend to use it properly and maybe I will, but at the same time we see a lot of times people are people are people, I think that um a lot of the, I think if you if you believe that human beings are all one, which I do, you know, no matter whether you're here, you're there, you're you got two arms, two legs are hard of brain if we all live a similar experience, you know, and obviously with variations on a theme, but uh, you know, you're no less a human being. If you're a person I've never met from china than than some person in Virginia, it's we're all, we're all people and I guess ultimately if I believe that human beings are corruptible, that power corrupts and that we're all fallible and we say and do things that either intentionally or unintentionally, um that we wish would not. Um, I think that I have to allow for a space of guess the word, it's almost a religious term, but I guess I would just say grace and that's something that I see disappearing from discourse in the public or maybe it wasn't there, I'm not sure. But it's interesting, you know, watching this occur on the internet because also now no longer are you and I just having a talk, sitting on a, on a bus stop, it's now in writing, everything's in writing the old, the old saying like don't put that in writing, you know, like don't put anything in writing that you get in trouble. And basically uh, you know, with, with the degree to which everything is recorded, but recorded in tiny little bites, it's very, very easy for me to wave every lesson foolish, ignorant, incorrect or correct thing that someone has ever said or done in their face to support whatever argument that I'm trying to make about them or, or a situation. And I think that you mentioned cancel culture, you know, as it seems to exist. Obviously this is poisonous on its face. This is poisonous. Um, it's, it's the sort of thing that doesn't incentivize proper behavior. I mean, you look at, let's say one of the great monsters of history, Adolf Hitler obviously who's done awful, awful things, but also for anyone that's even a minor student of history did some positive things as well. We don't have to, I don't have to embroider this person's crimes. I don't have to act as if there was nothing good a monster has ever done and nothing bad that, that a great person throughout history has ever done. But imagine the ghost of Adolf Hitler were to pop up and go, oh my gosh guys, I'm so sorry, I know what I've done, but I'd like to apologize and start to make it right. Well, I mean, you'd hope that, you know, if you popped up over here, you go, well, I don't really like what you've done and I don't like you. But at the same time I'm glad to hear that you're attempting to make this right and pushing a posit direction even you can't make it right Because otherwise what am I doing? I'm dis incentivizing change for the better. I'm looking to wield whatever power I have in a punitive fashion, um, which does not encourage people to do anything other than double down on on the wrongs that they've made knowing that at least they're going to have some support from the people that support that. And I guess I want to, you hopefully look at the use of the internet as a tool that can educate and I guess I don't like the word empower but empower people to do various things, extend their reach. But, but educate and learn rather than to further solidify little tribal things that it exists, which I think everyone in humanity and human history is vulnerable to me. Look at the course of human history is deeply tribal and the tribes of the groups that have been on top at various points in time have done a lot of times, bad things to the ones that have not. And you'd hope that we can learn lessons from the past and rather than, you know, committing the crimes that were, you know, that were committed against us, recommitting them when we slide into the top position, um, say, you know, I could do this now, but I'll not, you know, I understand the urge to seek vengeance is strong of anyone that says differently. I don't, I wouldn't trust, you know, but at the same time we go, I've we have enough experience in history, enough experience in life, enough, Hopefully, wisdom time in to go, this isn't the right answer, this is only going to replay the things, the worst parts of our history, not the best, and I want to encourage positive behavior and if I just again further lash out at people, although understandably, dun, dun, understandably, I'm simply just going to just perpetuate the cycle that's gone on to this point. So you hope that even though we're seeing a lot of, a lot of turmoil societally at the moment and globally at the moment, that uh I guess our better angels can prevail at a certain point, but it's going to take a great deal of leadership and I think that we're we're sorely missing like a martin Luther king style character at the moment or a great leader and I just, I'm hoping that one will show up </s> |
<s>[INST] thank you for exploring with me some of the more challenging things. I'm sure there's a few more that we'll jump back to but let me jump into the fun part, which is um, maybe the basics of the quote unquote Youtube algorithm. What is the Youtube algorithm look at to make recommendations for what to watch next was from a machine learning perspective or when you search for a particular term. How does it know what to show you next? Because it seems to at least for me do an incredible job. Both. [/INST] Well, that's kind of you to say it didn't used to do a very good job, but it's gotten better over the years. Even even I observed that it's improved quite a bit. Um those are two different situations like when you search for something, uh, Youtube uses the best technology we can get from google um to make sure that that the youtube search system finds what someone's looking for. And of course the very first things that one thinks about is okay, well, does the word occur in the title for instance, um uh you know, but there but there are much more sophisticated things um where we're mostly trying to do some syntactic match or or maybe a semantic match based on uh words that we can add um to the document itself, for instance. Uh you know, maybe is this video I watched a lot after this query. Right. That's something that uh we can observe and then as a result, make sure that that that document would be retrieved for that query. Um Now, when you talk about what kind of videos would be recommended to watch next? Um that's something again we've been working on for many years and probably the first um the first real attempt to do that well, was to use collaborative filtering. </s><s>[INST] So you can describe what collaborative filtering is. [/INST] Sure, it's just um basically what we do is we observe which videos get watched close together by the same person. And if you observe that. And if you can imagine creating a graph where the videos that get watched close together by the most people are very close to one another in this graph. And videos that don't frequently watch close too close together by the same person or the same people are far apart. Then you end up with this um graph that we call the related graph that basically represents videos that are very similar or related in some way. And what's amazing about that is that it puts all the videos that are in the same language together for instance and we didn't even have to think about language. It just does it right. And it puts all the videos that are about sports together and it puts most of the music videos together and it puts all of these sorts of videos together. Um Just because that's sort of the way the people using Youtube behave. </s><s>[INST] So that already cleans up a lot of the problem. It takes care of the lowest hanging fruit. Which happens to be a huge one of just managing these millions of videos. [/INST] That's right. Um I remember a few years ago I was talking to someone who was um trying to propose that we do a research project concerning people who um who are bilingual. And this person was making this proposal based on the idea that Youtube could not possibly be good at recommending videos well to people who are bilingual. And so um she was telling me about this and I said well can you give me an example of what problem do you think we have on Youtube with the recommendations. And so she said well I'm a um a researcher in in the U. S. And when I'm looking for academic topics I want to look I want to see them in english. And so she search for one found a video and then looked at the watch next suggestions and they were all in any english. And so she said, oh I see Youtube must think that I speak only english. And so she said, now I'm actually originally from Turkey and sometimes when I'm cooking, let's say I want to make some baklava. I really liked to watch videos that are in Turkish. And so she searched for a video about making the baklava and then and then selected it was in Turkish and the watch next recommendations were in Turkish and she, I just couldn't believe how this was possible and how is it that, you know that I speak both these two languages and put all the videos together and it's just as a sort of an outcome of this related graph that's created through collaborative filtering. </s> |
<s>[INST] And one of the things that I believe technology can help us fight the trolls of all definitions of troll, like I believe that a better twitter can be built [/INST] interesting. I do not, I don't believe that a twitter successor can be built that solves most of the problems. I think you can always improve what we have, but I don't think that converges in something that really works because I think ultimately the problem isn't twitter, the problem is us, for example, I recently made a very disturbing realization which is academics and trolls have very many similar behaviors. Absolutely. It's largely a trolling community. </s><s>[INST] I tend to believe that the trolls are not, it's like the peter thiel many mind idea which in all of the trolls there is the possibility of goodness and all you have to do not, all you have to do what you have to do is create technology that incentivizes them too. To embrace, to discover, to embrace, to practice the better angels of their nature. And I believe that like the people actually want to do that, that trolls is a short term dopamine rush of childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome. I believe that like deep within we want to overcome [/INST] that, I try to keep myself from believing what you believe </s><s>[INST] because you'll be disappointed if it's not because it's [/INST] dangerous because a lot of these people are implacable foes and there aren't many of them. But when you meet somebody like yeah, I just like screwing people up, I'm here for the pain. </s><s>[INST] I just believe even in them, there's a good [/INST] it's a wonderful book that I'm gonna recommend to you, where I hope this comes from, Maybe I've got the source wrong, but in any event, it's a great book called Maximum City about Bombay. Mhm And I believe that the conceit is that the author um leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult. He realizes he has to rediscover the city because he can't live in the city he left. So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas of the city and one of them is the underworld hangs out with the police, but in the underworld he's talking to contract killers. And um he says, you know, it's really weird, everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them. And they always say this thing about I've got a I've got two kids at home, he says, never say that to a contract killer because we have terrible relationships with our parents doesn't interest you. And I was just like, wow! So there's a minus sign in front of that statement. You're sitting there saying, you know, I've got a three year old, it's like, okay, well I'm gonna take this pos out of out of that kid's life, maybe I'll have a chance. You don't know how people are wired and as much as I hate to say it, there are people whose wiring is so disturbing and so different from yours that you will never guess why you can't reach them or how much pleasure they may have gotten because they may have gone over a point of no return. </s><s>[INST] Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis. You do not know this for sure and I am, you know, whatever the hell I am uh that has a different hypothesis that even in the darkest human beings that, that seemed to be only full of evil. There's a good person there that could be discovered. Mhm. [/INST] And that's one of the reasons I love doing your show is that you have these beliefs. Even as a Russian, </s><s>[INST] the [/INST] Russian special as you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness which is a total cynicism and total idealism locked together, right? That's very much part of the Russian character. </s><s>[INST] The reason I was, I was kept bothering you, kept bothering to have this conversation is I'm really worried about the next couple of months. No kidding. And if there's anybody in this world that could help alleviate my worry by um by at least walking along with me through this worry of mine, it's you do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war, some kind of division that explodes beyond just stuff on twitter, but something that's really destructive, destructive to the fabric of our society? [/INST] Well, I believe we're in a revolution as you know, I've called the no name revolutionary and squared revolution. I've been talking about it for years. I don't think, I think waiting for this to be called the civil war is not smart, </s><s>[INST] only history will call it such fine. But I [/INST] think that the problem is that you're encountering things that you've never seen, trying to fit them into things that you already know, right? And but history repeats itself. Yes, ish </s><s>[INST] You don't see lessons from history, and I do. We see today, [/INST] but I don't see it repeating itself. You know, the famous quote is that it rhymes, </s><s>[INST] it rhymes. I mean, the thing I guess I'm speaking to is violence [/INST] and we're in there, the abstraction of violence. Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class. Okay, </s><s>[INST] thank you for speaking to the audience, trying [/INST] to lose these people. Come with me, Go on. I've dealt with your audience and your audience contains the smartest people around. I guarantee you if I say some stuff, first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say they're going to detail so that that will be a little bit of catnip to bring in the smart people, but they'll also digest it for each other is one of the great lessons of long form podcast. If you don't if you don't waste all your time explaining things, that's the job of the audience to do amongst themselves. They're happy doing the work. And those who aren't they leave isn't that great? They'll leave the people who don't want to struggle, will leave and get rid of them. I think that the point is you would want to say violence is defined relative to a context. So let's call it meta violence so that we don't get into the the problem, we already have a term for physical violence, right? So we have meta violence and physical violence. I would say that physical violence is sub classed from meta violence. Meta violence is the disruption of a system. It's sort of, you know, it's a, for example, if a cell dies, you can die through apoptosis, or necrosis. Apoptosis is controlled, programmed cell death. Uh, necrosis is just like, okay, this didn't work. That was a violent disruption of the system. </s> |
<s>[INST] Cool bed. Warm blanket. The simple things. The simple things that bring you true happiness I think anyway that's not what I'm about right now but it is one of the big things I miss a sleep currently ships within the United States Canada and the U. K. Have a pot pro cover. So you can just add that to your mattress. Check it out and get special savings as a listener of this very podcast. If you go to eight sleep dot com slash flex this is a lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends here's bishop robert Barron mm Let's start with the big question who is God? According to Christianity? According to Catholicism whose God [/INST] I'll give you thomas acquaintance definition. God is ipsum esse a subsistence god is the subsistence act of to be itself. Another way to state that an acquaintance is God is that reality unique? Absolutely unique in which essence and existence coincide to be God is to be to be. Those are all ways of talking about what we mean by God. They are kind of gnomic and that's on purpose. There's almost a zen koan kind of quality about the way we talk about God. I'm saying something that's substantive but it's more in like a v a negative a mode. It's more like what God is not because there's nothing in the world that would correspond to those descriptions. So anything in the world would be a being of some type or an event of some type. Some particular mode of existence and God is not an entity in the world. I would say that's the fundamental mistake that atheists all the new make all the time is they think of God </s><s>[INST] as a [/INST] big being when acquaintance says that God is not in any genus, even the genus of being. It's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition. That's really interesting. So you say, well, at the very least God must be a being right. And acquaintances answer is no, he's not in the genus of being. So we talked about God being beyond being and so on to say in God essence and existence coincide is to say God's very nature is to be and that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world. So what I'm doing there is, I'm gesturing the way the tradition does toward God using language that's at the same time philosophically precise and gnomic. It's both accurate. It's true God essence and existence coincide what God is the same as God's active to be. But now, what does that mean? I'm not quite sure because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that. Everything in our experience is a being of some type. So it's existence received according to the mode of some essence. That's not true of God, which is why you can't be found in the world. And, and that's as I say, </s><s>[INST] the [/INST] fundamental mistake is, oh, I guess these are those that believe there's this being alongside the other beings in the universe. And then atheists say, oh no, there is no such being. Um, and that's precisely wrong. That's just a category error. Dawkins, I think sites Bertrand russell to the effect that proving the nonexistence of God is a bit like proving the nonexistence of a china teapot orbiting between earth and mars. No, that's precisely what God is not. Some entity that sort of hidden among the other entities of the universe. God is the reason why there's a contingent relevant, all this is a way to put it more theological language. God's the creator of all things. </s><s>[INST] So if God is outside of our world, is it possible for us to visualize to comprehend to know God? [/INST] Not utterly, of course. And I would say our knowledge begins always in this world, begins in ordinary experience. But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis through philosophical reasoning can come to some knowledge of a reality which is transcendent to our experience. So we gesture toward it. I always like acquaintance who says the language about God that we use is an illogical, so it's not, it's not Univ ical meaning what I say about that, you know, can about this bottle, I can say about God. No, that makes God an entity at the same time, it's not simply equivocal. So I say, well that thing is, and God is, I mean totally different things. No, no, I mean something analogous. So to be God is to be to be so the real meaning of being is the being of God, the being of that thing or this thing, or the being of Galaxies, or subatomic particles would be analogous to God's manner of being. So on that basis, I can make some statements, I can, I can theorize, and even at the limit as you suggest, I can visualize. So we have metaphors for God, and the bible is replete with those right, God is a rock. Uh, you know, God's like a lion, God's like this and that the bible will sometimes imagine God as a as a human being walking around. You know. Now, only the crudest fundamentalism would say, well, that's an Univ ical accurate description of God. It's an image that's catching something of God's manner of being, </s><s>[INST] then what does it mean to believe in God? So, there's a word and we have to limit ourselves to human interpret herbal words. Today, there's a word called faith. What does faith mean? So we can't really directly know God, you kind of sneak up to the idea of God with metaphors [/INST] better he sneaks up on us because I like the language of grace. God's action comes first. So, if I stay perfectly within the realm of I'm seeking with my kind of eagle eyes and my enquiring mind, I'm not going to find God that way, I might find a path that opens up, but I would say finally God finds me, and I think then the language of faith begins to make more sense. Um, I'm with paul. Tillich though, the protestant theologian said the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabularies, faith because he said, the way we take it usually is something sub rational. You know, I have, I have proof of this, I I really know this and I only kind of believe that like that's just a personal opinion or impression, but that's to identify faith with the kind of infra rational and that's not it. I mean, I don't want something infra rational. I don't want superstition or, or childish credulity. So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason. And on the far side of reason, it's super irrational, not infra rational. And that's a very important move at the limit of what I can know at the limit of my striving and my vision, there's this horizon that opens up. And I think that's true even in ordinary ways of knowing there's a kind of a horizon that lures us beyond what I've got, faith has to do more with that kind of darkness rather than a darkness prior to reason. </s><s>[INST] The darkness beyond the horizon. Prior to reason. First of all the poetry, language is incredible to be, to be, you have a million questions. [/INST] I </s><s>[INST] uh, so first of all, let me just jump around, you mentioned to be to be a few times. What does that mean? [/INST] Well, to be me, is to be a human being, right? To be this, to be a table, this would be a microphone. So it's, I'll use acquaintances language? It's the act of being poured if you want into the receptacle of some essential principle. So it's got an ontological structure. It's, it's an existent, it's a thing that exists, but it's, it's existing in a limited way according to an essential principle. God said, well, what's God? What's God's name? What kind of being is he? We'll go back to moses now. Um, when the Israelites asked me, you know, what's your name? What shall I tell them? And he says, you know, famously I am who I am. But sequence reads that as a very accurate remark. So moses wondering, okay, there's a lot of gods and there's a lot of things, a lot of entities which one are you, you got to be one of them. So tell me your name in philosophical language, give me the essence that receives your active existing right. And God's answer blows the mind of moses and the whole tradition I am who I am to be God is to be. So I'm not this or that I'm not up or down. I'm not here or there. God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere as, as the mystics put it now, can I get a clear and distinct idea that no, and in a way, that's the whole point. If I could, I'd be talking about a being of some kind. So to be God is to be to be is too, and that's, you know, moses take off your sandals, you're on holy ground. So I'm gonna go over confidently and find out what this thing is. This burning bush. I'm going to find out, No, no, no. Take off your shoes, you're on holy ground because you're not in charge here, you're not in command. Because if you got shoes on, you can walk wherever you want, you can walk with confidence, but you take your shoes off, you're much more vulnerable. Uh and that's appropriate when you're talking about God, you know, here's something interesting, but I didn't think about the burning bush in in this connection before, but it's a bush that's on fire but not consumed, beings are competitive with each other. And so these can't be in the same place at the same time, these two beings, they're mutually exclusive if you want. But as God comes close to a creature, he doesn't destroy it or consume it, but the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant, right? And see compare it to the to the classical gods and Goddesses when when they come bursting into life and experience things are incinerated and people give way and they're overwhelmed, then there's this biblical idea of God comes close and sets things on fire, but doesn't burn them up and that's because he's not a competitive being in the world. If he were a big being, then he'd be in this, he'd be competing for space, so to speak, on the same ontological grid, but he's not like that. So God can come close and we come more fully alive. Now, we're starting to gesture toward the incarnation. I mean, the central christian doctrine that God can actually become a human without overwhelming the human he becomes. Right? So, I think that's that's kind of the next step. But the basic idea of God is non competitively transcend into the world. That's another way to get at it. </s><s>[INST] Non competitively transcendent to the world. So it's beyond being is the source of being. [/INST] Let me make it maybe more more imagistic. I think a really good analogy would be author to book. Right? So, like Tolkien or someone that writes one of these big, sprawling novels, And Tolkien is good too, because he creates a whole world, He creates a new nature, a new language, new history, I think, of the thousands of characters and the plots and subplots and all of it. Tolkien is utterly responsible for every bit of that story, right? Every character, every plot, every subplot, every description, he's completely responsible. He's involved in every nook and cranny of it, but he's not in the story, he's not in the book, you're not gonna find him as a character in the book. So that's the category mistake of the atheist in a way is I'm looking for God. He's a character in this story somewhere. No, he's the author of the story mysteriously present to every aspect of the story, but not a character in it. </s><s>[INST] Right. He is deeply in the story somehow he's present, but he's not um, even if he is a character, he's not really the full embodiment is not a character. And people inside the book can't really know about the author. Right, [/INST] know, right. We'll see Augustine says God is simultaneously in timmy orantes Romeo at superior sumo manoa. He's closer to me than I am to myself, and he's higher than anything I could possibly imagine at the same time. Because once you get the insight that God is, is the sheer act of to be. Well, of course, that's true. So, right now, God is sustaining us in existence. True. Aquinas says God is in all things by essence presence and power and most intimately so. And and he's nowhere in this room. Okay, where's God? That is nowhere in this room, He's totalitarian terror. We say he's totally other same time. But once you cracked the code though, I think you see it of like why that would be true. Now, I'm getting from more philosophical language to more mystical language, because all the mystics talk that way in these high paradoxes about God's availability and unavailability. I've often thought in the bible story after story. God can neither be grasped nor hidden from. So the first sinful instinct is to grasp at God. I've got him, I understand him, I can, I can manipulate him. No, no, no. Story after story is told. You can't do that well then the other extreme of the center. Alright then I'm going to I'm going to run from God. I'm going to avoid God Jonah and the whale, you know, so he has the call from God and they said no, no, I'm going to refuse that. I'm going to run as far away. I'm going to go to Tarsus which meant like Timbuktu for them at the end of the world, God's got the whale swallows them up and bring them right back where God wants them. It's a poetic way of saying, you can't escape the press of God at the same time, Tower Babel, I'm gonna build a tower up to God. I'm gonna, I'm gonna grab hold of God. No, no, no, you can't do so live in the space in between those two things, which would be the space of friendship with God. Falling in love with God is neither grasping nor hiding from God. </s><s>[INST] You mentioned again, a lot of beautiful poetic things, you mentioned grace, you mentioned sin, you mentioned incarnation. Is there a philosophical pragmatic way to start talking about the pillars of Christianity. What are the defining things that make Christianity to you and and broadly speaking to those that follow the religion, [/INST] you know, in a way, what we're doing so far is a necessary, proper duty? Because we're talking about God, um what makes Christianity distinctive of course, is the claim of the incarnation. So we come up out of Judaism, we come up out of this great monotheistic tradition and you know, the bible itself and all the great commentaries within Judaism, I think would agree with this basic theistic stuff that I've been talking about taking most of my manganese, for example. Now what makes Christianity distinct? This supremely weird claim that God becomes one of us, God becomes a creature, but without ceasing to be God and without overwhelming the integrity of the creature, he becomes what we see in the burning bush, that principle which obtains across the board. So the closer God comes to me, the more radiant I become right, but take that now to the end degree would be what we mean by the incarnation, the incarnation of the son of God becoming a creature in such a way as to make humanity radiant and beautiful. That's the pillar of Christianity, It's the incarnation, you know. Um, and what follows from that is the redemption of of all of reality. So not just of human beings, but in becoming creature God divine eyes is the world. You know, the greek fathers always said God became human that humans might become God and that's a good way to sum up, I think the essence of Christianity? </s><s>[INST] Why is this such an important thing. So it's a distinctive thing, but why is it so important philosophically to what it means to be a christian? Like, what impact did that have on our world? On human civilization, On human nature, on our morals of why live what to live for? The meaning of it all? Like, why is incarnation so important? [/INST] I think it's it's massively important because it's it's the Divine ization principle that God wants to divine eyes his creation and sort of in this concentrated point of jesus of Nazareth. But then we talk about the mystical body of jesus. So that goes right back to paul, as we're grafted onto christ, we talk about that as the Church, we become like cells and molecules in an organism, that's the Church, it's not an organization, that's a that's a d formation of ecclesial ology, The Church is this organism that begins with jesus, and then he's drawing all of humanity, but ultimately, all of nature, all of creation to himself. When the Son of man has lifted up, he will draw all things to himself, that idea of the gathering in of a scattered creation. So in that way it's at the heart of it, then there's all kinds of things. If God becomes human, that means there's a dignity to humanity, which goes beyond anything any humanist of any stripe has ever said, write ancient, medieval, modern contemporary Christianity is the greatest humanism imaginable God became one of us in order to demonize us. The goal of my life is not just to be a good person, not just to be, you know, materially successful, not just to be a member of society. The goal of my life is to become a participant in the divine nature. And so there, I don't think there is a humanism greater than that, even conceivably. So that's where I think humanism is profoundly influenced by the incarnation. Uh, just our notion of God is non competitive to us. That's so important because I think it's so many systems from mythology on word, you have these competitive understandings of God. When jesus says to his disciples the night before he dies, I no longer call you servants but friends. It's an extraordinary moment because every God right who's ever been served well that's, that's the best we can hope for is is the servant of God. You know, I've tried to obey you Lord, I'll try to do what you want. But when jesus says, I no longer call you servants or slaves, he would have said in the greek there, you know. Um, but friends, I don't know, I can't imagine anything greater than that becoming God's friend. </s><s>[INST] That's a call to become one with, with God, it's possible to become, become one with God. Now I should mention, you're one of the greatest religious communicators I've ever experienced that. A lot of, a huge number of people are fans of yours. You've done a lot of great conversations. You've done Reddit Amas, which is a very unique, bold brave thing. And on one of them somebody asked, um, what's the most challenging of the seven deadly sins? So first, what are the seven deadly sins? What do they have to do with Christianity? How essential, how crucial they are to the religion? And what's the most challenging in our modern day? [/INST] Yeah. To name him pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony & Lust are the seven deadly sins? Capital sins sometimes of couple it there. The head sins from which things tend to flow. The most fundamental is pride. Probably most people today, if you talk about vice or you talk about deadly sin, they would think about lust. But the classical authors, including Dante who does this pictorially there, that's the least of the deadly sense is lost because it's the one that's most sort of dependent upon the body and its and its passions and so on. The most important pride. Pride is the deadliest of deadly sins. And it's very simple to see why pride is the Augustine calls it in calvados and say I'm caved in around myself like a black hole right to get into the scientific, but the black hole to me is a great symbol. You know that it's so heavy that draws everything including light, nothing can escape from it. See that's the center that we're all sinners. We're like black holes that we draw everything into ourselves. So as a sinner and you know, I'll confess I'm a sinner, the temptation is okay, this is the Bishop Baron moment and I'm gonna I'm drawing you now into my you know world and so on. What that does is it kills us off and it makes it it darkens life and it makes it small and and heavy and awful. It's like but see compared to the to the contrasting thing is when you're lost in a moment, you're not concerned about the impression I'm making, you're not concerned about drawing the world into yourself. You're not concerned about this monkey on my back. That's always telling me, you know, look good and sound right, but you're lost in something, you're just you're just talking you know, to a friend and the two of you together discovering something true or or beautiful. You're lost in a movie or you're lost in a book. Those are the best moments in life. Those are the best. These are the least prideful moments, right? That's when I the light comes out. I I become radiant because I'm overcoming this tendency to fall in on myself. Um Dante is so good because the way he pictures um satan in the divine comedy and you know, he's at the center of the earth. So like like a black hole that way he's at the center of gravity is at the heaviest place and there's not fire where he is, but ice, which is much, much better image that your frozen in place and you're stuck. And he's got wings, right? And they used to be angel wings because he's an angel, but now they're like bat wings for Dante and they're flapping. And all they're doing is making the world around him colder because he's ice, he's stuck in his own icy nous. And then he's beating his wings over the ice and making everyone else colder. It's a great image. And then he has this cool too. He has three faces, satan because he's the simulacrum of the trinity. So every center thinks he's God. So I pretend I'm God. So he's got the three faces and from all six eyes he weeps Also from all three miles. He's chewing a sinner, he's got cassius, Brutus and judas in the three miles, you know the three traders. But I thought it's just a great image of all of us sinners is we're stuck, it's heavy, it's cold. Were chewing on our past resentments were weeping in our sadness and we're making the world around us colder. It's beautiful. It's a great, So that's Pride. That's an image of pride because satan that's his great sin, Pride, which is why he needed Michael, right? Mickael who is like God. So that the great challenge to him, which we need all the time is someone to say wait a minute, wait a minute, you're not God. But the minute we say I'm God black hole. I know cave in on myself, I suck everything into myself and I turn into Dante satan. So that's a great image. That's pride, that's the most fundamental, that's the Uber capital sin. It's all the other ones flow from that in a way. </s><s>[INST] So in general empathy, humility, compassion, love thy neighbor always the way to fight the sin of pride, [/INST] right? Which is why the masters tend to say this was Bernard ST Bernard was asked, what are the three most important virtues? And he said humility, humility and humility because it's the opposite of pride. So, but you know, they're bring acquaintance in again because we think of human humility, I'm no good, that's not what it means at all. It means what I was describing before, when you're, you're just lost in something, you're just lost in it. Um my image, I live out in santa barbara and uh I like to walk on the beach out there and there's a section of the beach where they let the dogs run free without leashes and uh when you see a dog and he's well cared for and his master's right there and the master's throwing the tennis ball and the surf and the dog was galloping out into the surf and he gets it with a big smile and comes running back, that's, that's humility. That's an image of heaven because he's just lost in that moment, he doesn't care about impressing anybody don't care about uh, what people think of him. He's just lost in it. That's it. That's heaven. Right? And those moments in our life when we, when we get that, it's a little hint of of paradise. But but the trouble is, most of us live frankly, most of the time in various levels of hell, you know, and we're, and we're dealing with these deadly sins. Like envy flows from pride because if I'm prideful, I'm a black hole, I'm in calvados and say I'm collapsed in what am I really going to be concerned about? That guy's getting more attention than I am. That guy is richer than I am. That that lady, she's got a bigger reputation than I do and why why don't I have that? Right. So envy is a very close daughter of pride. Um, anger flow from why do I get angry? The dog isn't getting angry on the beach when he's running after the tennis ball, but I get angry all the time sputter with anger when things aren't going my way and and you're insulting me and you're not doing what I want and I'm being hurt, my reputation. So anger flows from pride. You know, all of them do all of the deadly sins do. </s><s>[INST] So you said I'm a sinner? So we're all sinners. Um, you mentioned satan, where's the, so there's heaven and hell, there's God and satan. Where's the line between what it means to be good and not good enough or I hesitate to use the word sort of evil, but maybe overwhelmingly sinful. Where's the line between hell and heaven? [/INST] Think of them as limit concepts. Maybe they're like heuristic devices. So heaven would name this ultimate friendship with God. So think of the dog on the beach who is just, he's fallen in love with his environment with his master with the surf. He's just lost in it, right. He's forgotten himself. He's transcended himself and is now lost in the wonder of the beauty of that place. Now imagine the limit of that is the is the friendship with God that we talked about that I become the friend of God. I become so forgetful of myself, so lost in the beauty and truth and goodness of God that I'm I've found beatitude. Oh right. I found joy. The beatific vision, we call it. Uh that's the limit case. That's what, that's what we're attending. That's where God wants us to go. Think of hell as a limit case in the opposite direction. That's curvaceous and say that's the black hole and we're all sinners, meaning we're somewhere on that spectrum. You know, we we have good days and bad days and we have good moments and bad moments and I can be drawn toward sin, What's God's purpose and Christianity's reading is to bring us out of that, you know now, where did he go? He went all the way into it to get us out of it. It's like pulling the sock back out socks inside out, I have to go all the way in and pull it back out. And so God had to go all the way down, you know? And there there's the trajectory of the incarnation though he was in the form of God, this is Saint paul, jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped, but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave being born, the likeness of men. But then he was known to be a human estate and he accepted even death, death on a cross. And so paul imagines that the incarnation, this downward journey in order to get all of us, all of us who were stuck, we're stuck in our sin. And so again paul says he became sin on the cross is a really, really powerful idea. He wasn't a sinner because then he need to be saved too. He's not a sinner, but he entered into our dysfunction in order to pull us back out of it. </s><s>[INST] So that's a really powerful message, an embodiment uh sort of educating the world about sin that said day to day, there's like uh oscillations in terms of how much each human sins and there's a struggle against that. So, you know, that dog that loses himself on the beach may have had a lot of sex with other dogs leading up to that, that was uh may have been not the best dog, he could be leading up to that. So how, you know if it's a math equation, what is the final calculation look like in terms of ending up in heaven? What does it mean to live a good life in the end? Is it? Um, the average modest thing you do is is low. Can you, are you allowed to make mistakes? [/INST] Yeah. You know the the metric is love, right? And love is not a feeling. It's an act of the will to will the good of the other. That's acquaintance again to will the good of the other as other. You see that's the anti black hole principle when I I </s><s>[INST] will the good of the other [/INST] as others because if I'm willing you're good because it's good for me. So I guess it's good for you that I'm on this program. I guess I'm willing you're good, but that's because it's going to be down to my benefit. That's just an indirect egotism. That's why I see love is really rare and strange that I really want what's good for you as other. So not connected to the black hole tendency of my own prideful ego when I've broken that I've forgotten self and I've moved into the space of your own good, that's what love is now God wants us to be by this, they will know that you're my disciples that you love one another, jesus says, so that's it now. I mean life is ups and downs and back and forth and were better or worse at that. Oh the point of the churches to graft us on to christ that we might become more and more conformed to love. But you know the final calculus, I'll leave that to God, I mean, but but use love as the metric at the end of the day when you examine your conscience, did I will the good of the other today? How how effective was I at that And and be just like Ignatius Loyola, be brutally honest or was I just willing someone's good because it was good for me. Uh what where were those moments where I was like the dog on the beach see and play at the not so much God, the lawgiver surveying and you did you know three of those and four if God wants us to be fully alive, ST ironies is one of my great heroes, ancient Patrice stick figure and his famous line is Gloria dei homo of events, right? The glory of God is a human being fully alive and that gets us over this sort of obsession with the legalism. And did I do enough. And is that that's a big enough sin and God wants us fully alive. The key to that is willing the good of the other. He died that we might come to a richer appropriation of that. </s><s>[INST] So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world or to love the world deeply. And what love means is the other is get [/INST] out of yourself. </s><s>[INST] It's it's it's the humility getting out of yourself. [/INST] That somehow </s><s>[INST] is not that's not even selfless because the word selfless requires her to be a self. It's almost like just letting go. [/INST] You might talk about like a gift of self that you yourself aware, but you you give a gift of yourself yourself becomes not a magnet drawing things into itself, but it becomes a radiant source of life for others. Like mother Teresa would have had a keen sense of herself. It seems to me, but it was to light other people up so that they might be radiant. You know, that's the game. So I think you probably articulate it that way too. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I love love. It's such an interesting thing, but [/INST] we have to be hard nosed about it. Like, you know, your friend dostoyevsky that love is a harsh and dreadful thing, right? It's not a feeling and our our culture is so sentimentalized love that it's having warm feelings or doing what people want. And that's not it at all. Love is always correlated to the order of the good because if I'm willing the good of the other. I have to know what that good is so apparent. Doesn't give the kid whatever she wants. But that's not love That's that's indulgence or that's sentimentality. But I have to know what the goods really are if I'm going to will them for you. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. In some sense, you're absolutely right. A component of love is the struggle to know the other. It's a struggle to understand. I mean that's um, that's what I mean by empathy. It's the it's not it's yeah, it's not valentine's day romantic gifts. It's it's a struggle. It's like trying to understand, trying to perturb your own mind and that of another human being to try to figure out who they are, what they want, what makes them happy, what are they afraid of, what are they hoping for? And it's like a dance dance of conversation and dance of just shared experiences and all that kind of stuff and all of that required for you to be, I guess. Um yeah, empathize, imagine yourself in their place and then love that person when you're living inside that person. Yeah, [/INST] several minutes ago about the pillars of Christianity. So we talked about God talk about incarnation, but you're getting now to a third key one namely the trinity because were monotheists, right? But we don't think God is monolithically one. We think God is a play of persons and the father from all eternity by a great mental act forms his interior word as acquaintance puts it. And that's the law goes, right. That's the very boom, that's the word by which the father knows himself and we call it the sun. So the imago it's the image of the father. But that's the great thing is that imago is not like just a dead image on a, on a mirror or a dead image of a pond or something. It's it's a full reflection of the father's being. He's one in being with the father. Therefore the sun has everything the father has except being the father. But that means that the two of them look at each other and they're just crazy in love with each other because the father is the fullness of being the son is the fullness of being and they're so crazy in love with each other that they, this is Fulton, she put it this way that there's this, they just, they love each other with this sigh and we call that the spirit of santos, that's the holy breath right? The holy sigh of love between the father and the son and that's one being one essence we say of God. But in these three persons but all your language of like dance and play and community. The greek fathers talked about perry choruses, which means God, the three persons kind of sit in a choir together. So they they they sing together, you know, and and that's why I see Christianity is unique in this claim that God is love. So every religion will say God loves, you know, in some way loves an attribute of God. God is love is a thing that God does sometimes but Christianity is unique in all the religions in saying that God is love </s><s>[INST] and somehow the whole eternity embodies that idea. I mean that philosophically has always been confusing to me what it means to be three things And at the same time be one God, the father son and the Holy Spirit. What what is this dance between these three? What exactly? Like how do how do you visualize, how do you understand this? Yeah, this this very, very fascinating essential thing for Christianity. The [/INST] first thing I'd say is what we already have been sort of talking about is if you say God is love and most people probably yeah, I like that, that's a good idea. God is love but it's very peculiar because if he is love there has to be in his unity lover a beloved and the love that they share, otherwise he isn't loved by his very essence, he would love, it would be an attribute of God or an action of God. But if its very nature, there has to be lover beloved and love shared and the tradition eventually came to see that the image I was using before of the father, his imago the son. Well that's born of God's infinite mind. So of course God has an image of himself heck I've got an image of myself that's something I can pull off as a, as a puny little creature, God in his infinity has a perfect imago of himself and they have to fall in love with each other. What else can they do? Because they're in the presence of infinite good and so it has to follow that you then have the shared love that connects them and that's how we generate. If you want this idea of the three persons in God, </s><s>[INST] let me ask you about the church. One of the defining characteristics of Catholicism is the catholic [/INST] church. </s><s>[INST] What is the catholic church? I [/INST] would say it's the mystical body of jesus. So, as I said before, it's not an organization. If we do it that way, we're gonna miss it. It's got organizational elements to it, you know? So I'm a bishop, I'm a I'm a officeholder within the church. But the church is an organism, not a, not an organization. So it's a organism of interconnected cells I said, namely all of the baptized gathered around christ mist in a mystical union. That's the church. </s><s>[INST] But there's buildings, there's titles uh, [/INST] process itself institutionally then. But </s><s>[INST] so are the sort of heavy things about that all have to do with pride. Yeah, [/INST] sure. Whatever </s><s>[INST] buildings, [/INST] Yeah, no, whatever is corrupted the church, of course, it comes from pride, from sin. And one thing I like about the new testament is so clear on that, I mean paul is in his little tiny communities. So before there was a Vatican or dioceses or anything apologies. Little tiny communities of christians like in Corinth and Ephesus, you know, what's the one thing we know about them is they fought with each other because paul is always upgrading them and you know, telling them, come on, would you people get it together and you know, who has Bewitched you? And so from the beginning we've been fighting with each other because we're made up of sinners. And you know, so one thing we do in catholic ecclesial ology is the official name for the study of the church, is to talk about the treasure and earthen vessels, paul's language. Again, the treasure is christ. The treasure is is the love he's bequeathed to the world. That's the treasure that we have. But it's always held in these really fragile vessels, namely us. And so it's gonna be marked by corruption and stupidity and pride and everything else. </s><s>[INST] Well, nevertheless, there's a hierarchy, There's titles and so on. If we remove pride from the picture. So the best possible interpretation of the hierarchy that makes up this one organism, This living organism. What's the, what's the role of the pope, for example, what is the role of a bishop? For example, like what is the role of the hierarchy in terms of the broader vision of Christianity Catholicism as the religion, [/INST] I'm a devotee of this guy named Johann Adam Muller who was a theologian, early part of the 19th century and he was part of the romantic movement and he said the purpose of the pope is to symbolize and embody and draw together the unity of the entire church. So he's the personal symbol of the unity of the church who's a bishop. The bishop is the personal symbol of the unity of a diocese who's a pastor of a parish. He's the personal symbol of the unity of that parish. So he understood it not so much organizationally as organically. Again, it was like a what that around which the pattern organizes itself. And if you don't have that, that unifying figure, the community will kind of precip a rate and you see it all the time without headship we would say. So it's more symbolic and organic than it is organizational </s><s>[INST] so simple as for community. But there is such uh fascinating peculiarities to each individual symbol. See there's different characteristics that make up the different people that have different ways of communicating. They have different hopes and fears and all that kind of stuff. What if they're all symbols? What's the role of the different peculiarities of those symbols of being an inspiring uniter versus maybe a stronger type of um more judgmental kind of communicator, all that kind of stuff. Can you maybe speak to the human part of this, of these symbols. [/INST] Yeah, well I might just shift to another image of shepherd. So that's a classic biblical image and as a bishop, I walk around with this thing called the Crosier, which is a shepherd's staff, right? So it's the symbol of the bishop's office. And the crosier though is a kind of, it's a kind of in your face thing in a way because it's got the end of it was meant to hold off wild animals and then the crook part of it was meant to bring sheep back to the fold. Right? So I walk in with that. Oh, that's nice. Look at the bishop coming in, but that's a kind of in your face symbol that I'm here to defend the church against predators and I'm also here to draw people in who are wandering too far away. So that's okay. And that's part of the role of the hierarchy and the pope and bishops and pastors posture just means shepherd and the shepherd of a parish. So that's okay. It's not like just all, you know, sunshine and light and what a pretty image, The one who embodies the unity of the community is also the Shepherd. </s><s>[INST] Okay. But again, leaning on the human thing, the church is an institution and I don't know if you've heard, but there's an element to power that corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. As the old saying goes, um let me ask you something else that came up on the reddit a m a mega churches and the Prosperity Gospel and you've mentioned that you may not be a fan, what are your views on this? And what are your views in general, of money and power corrupting the heads of these institutions? [/INST] I don't like the Prosperity Gospel because the Gospel is about jesus journey into radical self forgetfulness on the cross and he never makes a promise of earthly well being. </s><s>[INST] Can you explain what the Prosperity Gospel is? [/INST] Yeah. The view that, you know, if I follow jesus and I follow God with great trust that I will be rewarded with wealth and and position and status in this world, it might be God's will when I get that. But you know, acquaintance said this, that say, look at a very simple person. I said he's got a great house and he's richer than I am and all that acquaintance says. Yeah, but what maybe that's a punishment because maybe all that is leading him away from God. And actually, that's God's way of punishing him. And the fact that you don't have wealth in a big house is actually a great gift to you. Because now it frees you for doing God's will. So we can't read, you know, God's favor in worldly terms. I would say God's favor is am I awakened to deeper love? Then I know that I'm finding God's favor. Now God might decide sure I want you to have this and that I want I want to provide this to you. Fine. Then I say, thank you Lord. How can I use it as an instrument of love. Three, all the masters talk about detachment. And that's another reason I don't like the Prosperity Gospel as though I'm I'm getting attached now to all these material advantages and I'm even seeing them as a sign of God's favor. Let go of all that. You let go of it and use it as a vehicle of love. So if you're rich, the right question is, Okay, Lord, why did you allow me to become rich? So that what can I do? How can my riches be an expression of love if I am popular? If I am healthy? Okay, why am I popular? Why am I healthy? How can I use that for your good? I'm sick in bed. I'm suffering. Okay, Lord, how can I use that as an expression of love? So I'd rather measure it that way than through worldly success. That's why I'm against the Prosperity Gospel. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so there's uh, don't seek worldly possessions, but whatever happens to you, Good or bad seek how that could be used to increase the amount of love in the world. [/INST] Right? The image I love for this is the wheel of fortune, which is a device and a lot of the Gothic cathedrals. And it's it's this great circle, right? This wheel at the top of this is a king and then it turns this way and the king has lost his crown. And the bottom is a pauper. And then over here is a king is a guy climbing up to power right? And then in the middle is a depiction of christ and the idea is very simple but very profound that the wheel is life. You know, it's sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down, sometimes you have power and popularity and prestige. Other times you're losing it, you're going down. Other times you got none of it, other times you're coming back up, Okay, don't live on the rim of the wheel. It'll make you crazy. Every point on the rim of the wheel is a point of anxiety where you should live is the center of the wheel where christ is right because that's the link now to the eternity of God, that's the point of love where love can flow through you to the world and then you can look at the wheel, you're a Beatles fan, right? And I discovered that I love the Beatles and the song that always comes to my mind when I, when I think of that image is john Lennon at the end of his life. So a guy that, I mean rode the wheel of Fortune like crazy, you know, he was at the top of the world in every way And then Beatles break up and he kind of loses it and then he's at the lost weekend in the 70s at the very bottom when he died, he was just kind of coming back up again. But the song I always think of is watching the wheels, right? I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round around. I really love to watch them roll because I'm no longer writing on the merry go round. That's right out of the medieval mystics that he's not riding on the, on the wheel. He's just watching it go round and round. That's the point of the Greeks called mafia and the Latins called it, uh, indifference. You know, not like I'm blase, it just means I'm I'm detached from success, failure, less success, more success detached from that. I'm sitting here watching the wheels go round and round because I'm not writing on it anymore. The Mystics have always made that transition. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask you a difficult question about the darker side of human nature, of human power, of institutions. What's your view on the long history and widespread reports of sexual abuse of Children by a catholic priest? So, this is a difficult topic, but maybe an important one to shine a light on. [/INST] Yeah, it's awful. You know, and it's it's been a problem. Go back to Peter Damian back in the 11th century was talking about it. So it's been a problem and whatever, really sinful human beings have been in close proximity to Children. We we find this issue has been around the church. Yes. Um, Has it surfaced in a kind of sickening way in the last 30 years. Absolutes. Um, I'm glad the church has made important strides and it has back in 2002, there was a thing called the Dallas accords with the bishops of America, put a lot of these protocols in place that really have been effective at Ameliorating this problem. The numbers spiked in the 70s and 80s and that's been demonstrated over and over again, and then they fell dramatically after that. So that's not to excuse anything. But to say, I think progress has been made with it. </s><s>[INST] What's the impulse to secrecy? [/INST] Yeah. Well, to protect institutions, you know, that's always that's a sinful instinct. I'm not altogether sure an institution is worth protecting, but if it reaches the point where you're indifferent to people's well being, then you're in trouble. </s><s>[INST] So, institutions role should be transparent and honest with the sins of its members and of itself. [/INST] Sure, yeah. </s><s>[INST] So maybe you can speak to the fact as a priest, the bishop, as part of Catholicism, you're not allowed to marry, not allowed to have sex. You're you're sworn to celibacy. What is what is behind that idea? What is the sort of, we talked about some broad stroke ideas of love, what's behind the idea of celibacy [/INST] and that's a good way to get out. It's a path of love. So, the church is always in favor of inculcating love, marriage is a path of love, but so is celibacy. Um, ST paul talks about someone who is preoccupied with the things of this world and family and those who are free from that are free or for doing the work of God. So that's kind of a pragmatic justification for celibacy, and we still, I think, take that seriously, look at my own life, I mean, celibacy has enabled me to do all kinds of things and go places and and and and minister in a way that I could not if I had been married, so I get it, I get the pragmatic side, but I'm more interested in the sort of mystical side of it ever, Jesus was challenged about the person who had, you know, a whole series of husbands and and then they all died, and so in heaven, which one will, will, you know, which which husband with the wife have, and his answer is in heaven, people don't marry and they're not given in marriage, there's a there's a higher way of love, it's a more radical way of love. It's not tied to a particular, but I think through God is tied to everybody, the celibate, and this has been to the beginning of the church, not as a law, but there were there were celibate from the very beginning of the church, including jesus of course, and paul, um they sense something that that way of living mystically anticipates the way we love in heaven, it's a sign even now within this world of how we will all love in heaven. So, in that way it's a bit like pacifists, um I'm glad there are pacifists in the church. And I've known some, you know, some very powerful witnesses to pacifism. I'm glad they're pacifists because they witness even now to how we will be in heaven when every tear is wiped away and we beat our swords into plowshares and you know, heaven is a place of radical piece that some people even now live in at the same time. I'm glad not everyone's a pacifist because I would hold with the church to a just war theory that there's sometimes all we can do in this finite world is to is to fight, you know, manifest wickedness. So </s><s>[INST] just in the same way there's just sex. [/INST] Well, no, right, I'm glad there are celibate, but I'm glad not everyone to celebrate, I wouldn't want that because because married love is a marvelous expression of the divine love. So that's why it's good, there are some and it's it's always been a small number. </s><s>[INST] The actual experience of it, Would you uh the spiritual nature of it, is it similar to fast things, I've been enjoying fasting recently, so not eating [/INST] uh </s><s>[INST] for several days, that kind of stuff. And that somehow brings you even deeper. I'm in general in love with everything and with nature and everything, I see the beauty in the world, but there's a greater intensity to that when you're fasting, for example. [/INST] Yeah, I might use the language of, you know, sublimation or redirection of energy and all that. I I think that's true. There's certain sublimation of energies into um prayer into mysticism, into ministry, a redirection of energies. So it's meant to be life enhancing the same way fasting is, is meant ultimately to be life enhancing and make you healthier and happier. So celibacy is a path of love. And I think it does involve you have certain redirection of energy. Say that, </s><s>[INST] don't you think, do you think it's a heavy burden for some humans to bear some priest to bear? Is that, is that the thing given this the the sexual abuse scandal, um, is that the thing that breaks? [/INST] No, I wouldn't tie that to celibacy. And that's been demonstrated over and over again. There's a priest named Andrew Greeley who was a priest from my home diocese of Chicago. And Andy did a lot of research, sociologists of religion to a lot of research into that very question. And there really is not a correlation between celibacy per se and the sexual abuse of Children or anybody. So I wouldn't make that correlation </s><s>[INST] bad people sinful people are going to do what they're going to [/INST] do. I think people who have a tendency toward uh abusing Children sexually are drawn to situations where they get ready access two kids and they get institutional cover. So that's how we go through the list of, you know, from sports and and Boy Scouts, etcetera. Um, and that's been proven again and again. So I would tie it more to that, I wouldn't tie into celibacy. </s><s>[INST] So the, the challenge of course is all kinds of, you said institutional cover. There's all kinds of institutions that cover for people that don't, that do evil onto the world to do sinful things in the world. But there's something about the Church which is, um, the as an organism is supposed to be an embodiment of good in this world of love in this world. And it breaks people's hearts to see this kind of, even a small amount, uh, this kind of thing happen within the church. It wakes you up to the cruelty of the absurdity of the world sometimes. Like it's it's it's back to the the question of why do bad things happen to good people, why does God allow this kind of thing to happen? And sort of maybe an unanswerable question, do you have an answer to that question? [/INST] I can gesture toward it using rather of strike language, which is true enough, it's completely emotionally unsatisfying, but its naming it truthfully enough. And it goes back to Augustine, which is God permits evil to bring about a greater good. Now again, I know how unsatisfying, that sort of spare, austere language can sound, but it gets us off the horn of the horns of a dilemma, you know, acquaint is, you know, when he lays out a question, he always has the objections first. So is there a God? Well, objection one objection two objection three. And he's really talking about steel manning and argument acquaintances. Great at that. Um, one of the really steel manned arguments is that the right grammatical form </s><s>[INST] of one [/INST] of the, what's the past participle about the steel man? Um, but one of the best arguments, he formulates it this way. Um, if one of two contrary is be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. And his example from his medieval physics, he goes, if there were an infinite heat, there'd be no cold, right? But God has described as infinitely good, therefore God exists, there should be no evil, but there is evil, therefore God does not exist. That's a darn good argument. That's a really persuasive argument. And I think I've done this for a long time and apologetics and then sort of higher philosophy, that's the best argument against God. Um, but here's something before I press ahead with it, something I find really interesting. I think the three best arguments against God all come from within the religious tradition, namely the book of Job. So Job, he's great. I mean, he's a great guy, he does everything right. He's he's God's great servant and he and he's punished in every possible way, You know, he has every possible suffering. Aquinas argument from the suma. And then to your friend and mine dostoyevsky, I think in the brothers Karamazov, Yvonne's argument when he's trying to wreck the faith of Alyosha. And it's um these examples drawn they think from from the headlines of his own time, of the most abject cruelty to Children, like an innocent child being made to suffer. How in God's name could that happen if God exists? And he's all good. So I get it. But see the book of job thomas, the coin is dusty. These are all profoundly believing people. Like when I hear um Stephen fry, you know, the famously atheist writer, he he will bring out this argument with great authority. He does of, you know, Children with bone cancer and worms that go into the eyes of Children and blind them before they kill them. And but he's been preceded by the author of job thomas Aquinas and dostoyevsky, who who stood right think of job in, in the whirlwind, he stands there in the, in the whirlwind, you know, so you can't blame the christian tradition for not dealing with this problem, you know, for like brushing under the carpet. I mean, it is, it has stood in the whirlwind of this problem. </s><s>[INST] It's still a difficult problem to deal with, that. There's all this cruelty of the world. It's there's a lot of examples through history, just in my own family history with the soviet union with Stalin, Yes, The atrocities that Stalin has brought onto its the people of the Soviet Union throughout the 20th centuries and nearly measurable and yet When you look at the entirety of human history, you will see progress, not just the Soviet Union, but the entirety of the civilization throughout the 20th century. And Stalin has a role to play. There's a there's a dark aspect to somehow evil helps us make progress. And I don't know how to put that in the calculation, it's, I don't, you know, on a local scale, I want to alleviate suffering. I'm probably lean heavily, lean pacifist, not out of weakness, but out of strength, but man, it does seem that history Sprinkle with evil and that evil does somehow not just towards good. [/INST] Yes, sometimes we can see it and that's where the that's where the idea comes from, that evil is permitted to bring about some greater good and we can sometimes really see it. Um can we always see it? No. In fact, typically we don't see it, but now you bring another factor into this, which is the difference between our minds and God's mind. So our minds, I mean, look, even they're remarkably capacious, but they take in a tiny, tiny tiny swath of of space and time and even like our eyes kind of taken so much of the light spectrum and these little, these little ape sensory um that we have that can just take in a little tiny bit of reality, really? How are we ever in a position to say, oh no, there's no possible good that would ever come from that, even the greatest evil that, you know, every dostoyevsky and and can conjure up and Stephen fry still, how could we have the arrogance to say? I know there's no good that could ever come from that? I know there's no morally justifiable reason why God would ever permit that, because I think that's hubris to the ends degree for us to say that. And that's the the assumption behind this claim that God can permit evil to bring about a greater good. Now God understands it. But we're like, we're like little kids, you know, like a four year old and their parents make a decision. And we said, what, why in the world would you do this to me? Um this is my pastoral experience. Years ago there was a young father and his son was like three or something and he was in the hospital for something, I forgot what it was, but he had to undergo surgery, right? So after the surgery, he's in great pain, this poor kid, this three year old kid and the dad was there with him, you know, holding his hand and you know, and the sun, this is what the father told me, he said, he's looking at me like, what gives here, I mean, why would you, you love me? I've always assumed that and yet you're presiding over this somehow, you're approving of this and doing nothing to get me out of it, right? And he said, a kid couldn't articulate that, but his eyes did and his I and the father said it was just killing me because I knew I couldn't explain it to him. And it's true, I mean, you could vaguely gesture toward, but the kids don't understand surgery and cutting his body and taking things out of it and that this was going to, you know, make him much better in the long run. But I remember thinking that's a great metaphor for us, vis a vis God is, here's God infinitely loving God who is with us all the time. And we say, what are you doing? Why aren't you taking this away from me? And the answer ultimately is, trust, trust me, trust me, surrender to me </s><s>[INST] and when we don't, that's ah get in trouble with the old pride and the hubris and all that kind of stuff, [/INST] you know? But trust me, when I tell you, I mean, I completely get it in my own life and as a priest, you're dealing with suffering all the time with people in pain all the time. Remember as a young priest, there was a, there was a policeman in our parish, so he had a gun and inexplicably no one had any clue. He got up one night and shot his son to death and then shot himself is in my parish. So I went to the the wake, remember I show up and I'm this young 27 year old goofball priest, I might roll my collar and I walk in and there were two coffins, the two coffins in the room, you know, there's the son and the father and the mother was there and she, she went like this to me like, like she saw me like, okay, you're the you're the religious guy </s><s>[INST] here, what? [/INST] And just by instinct, I I went like that too. I don't I don't know what to tell you. I I can't I don't have an answer for you, but but I was there and I'm not going to pat myself on the back, it says that's where the church goes because jesus went there. Now, we're gesturing toward a more theological response. The first one is more austerely philosophical. God permits evil to bring about a good but the theological responses, that's where christ went is he went all the way down, he went all the way down into our suffering and see the cross as the limit case of evil, um, humiliation and cruelty and institutional injustice and psychological suffering and spiritual suffering and death. It's all there. And that's where the son of God went. And I would say that's why as a priest, I went there, that's my job is to go to those places, you know, so that's the ultimate answer to the problem. </s><s>[INST] So there is we can't comprehend it, but there is meaning to the suffering and the injustice [/INST] we trusted because we know on other grounds of God's existence, ci I would resist the claim that, well, this is such a, such a knockdown argument. So now we know there is no God, I would say no, there are all kinds of other rational warrants for God. And so I I know that God exists. I know that God is infinite love. And now I got to square that with this experience. And the way I do that is by a trusting confidence that God knows what he's about. You know, again, I know how, how inadequate that always seems to anyone who's suffering, including myself, when I'm in great suffering, but I think that's the best that we've done in the great tradition. </s><s>[INST] So, if you were to steal man that case against God or the existence of God, you find the most convincing argument is there's evil in the world, therefore there's no God, [/INST] there's too much of it. If I were to steal man that argument, I do what Stephen fry does, I would do what dostoyevsky's even does, I would do exactly that. I would say there's just too much. And then if you want to keep pressing it. Um, animal suffering. So we talk about human suffering, but the suffering of animals over the eons and so on. Um isn't there just too much suffering to be reconciled with with an infinitely good God. And that's again, thomas, Aquinas, I've just used his very steel manned argument, </s><s>[INST] You mentioned that again on Reddit, Somebody asked who your favorite communicator of atheist ideas was? And you mentioned Christopher Hitchens. Are there other ideas um for Atheism, do you find particularly challenging? [/INST] That's the one is the problem of evil? The other objection in Aquinas, which has a lot of contemporary residence is, can't we just explain everything through natural causes? Why would you have to invoke a cause beyond the causes in the world? So, as I'm trying to explain, let's say for a Qantas motion, causality, you know, finality, can I just do that with natural causes? Wouldn't that suffice to explain it? So I get like when naturalists are speaking or people that are pure materialist, just say no, that's perfectly adequate. A scientific account of reality is utterly adequate to our experience. Um so I would steal man that and say, well, show me why we need something more and to do that, you gotta get out of Plato's cave. It seems to me because that my my objection to naturalism is, it's staying within the realm of the immediately empirically observable and making the mistake of saying that's all there is to being, that's all there is that needs to be explained and long before we get to religion, just stay with plato the first step out of the cave, If you combine it with the parable of the line is mathematical objects? And and I'm with those many people that would say mathematics is an experience of the immaterial. I've stepped out of a merely empirical, physical, naturalistic world the minute I understand a pure number or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship uh which would obtain in any possible world which are not tied to space and time. Uh that's the first step out of the cave and then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections, for example, in the nature being. I mean, so I could I could talk about this thing as a physical object and I can analyze it all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists, you know, up and down through this thing and fine, fine. But I'm still in plato's cave. I'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall. But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm, I have entered a different realm of being. Seems to me, </s><s>[INST] do you think it's possible for the cave to expand so large that it encompasses the whole world, meaning? Is it possible to is it possible that we're just clueless right now in terms of uh scientifically speaking with most of the world, we haven't figured out yet. But do you think it's possible through science to know God to look outside the world? So it's fundamentally the limit of the empirical scientific method is that we can't know some of these very big questions. [/INST] No, I I I love this. I'm not a scientist and I was never all that good at science. You know, I was more humanities guy, but I love and respect the scientist, but I hate scientists. Um and scientist um is rampant today with especially young people, the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. And I'm a vehement opponent of that. There are dimensions of being that are not capturing all through a scientific method of mere observation, hypothesis, formation, experimentation, etcetera. As great as that is as wonderful as it is. But it's still, I think within Plato's cave and that's not to say it's not real, it's just at a relatively low level of reality. Um you step out of Plato's cave when you go into the pure mathematics, That's why, you know that article, I just came across it recently and discovered this whole literature around it is Eugene Wagner's article 1960 called the unreasonable applique ability of mathematics to the physical sciences. I think that's the title of it. But it's so cool. You know, he's not a religious man. He was a kind of a secular jew, but yet he uses the word miracle like eight times in that article and because he just is so impressed by the fact that hi complex mathematics describes so accurately the physical world and can be used to create things and to manipulate and why should that be true? There's something very weirdly mysterious about that relationship, you know, and I would say it's because you you stepped into a higher order of being which is inclusive of a lower level of being? That's the platonic approaches that as you move, I'm going to different metaphor. You move to higher levels. They're inclusive of the lower levels. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, there's some magic there that seems to at least in our current understanding of science uh to be not quite capture, believe unconsciousness, the idea of consciousness. [/INST] Can I ask you, where do you think the laws of nature come from? So, I mean sort of the bigger question, where does the deep, the deep mathematical structure of things come from? How do you explain that </s><s>[INST] the mathematical structure or the fact that the structures is somehow pleasing and beautiful because those are two different. [/INST] Do the 1st 1? For I'm just curious where do you think it comes from? </s><s>[INST] I tend to believe, even in terms of physics, we don't really know what's going on. There's so, so, so much more to be discovered. We're walking around in the dark trying to figure out a little puzzles here and there and we're patting ourselves on the back and how many puzzles we've discovered so far. Even ghettos, incompleteness theorem. What are the limits of mathematics? Axiomatic systems? I don't I don't know what is the purpose of mathematics? What is the power of mathematics? Is it just a useful tool to um study the world around us or is it something deeper that we're just discovering all I know from my emotional perspective. Now I am an engineer, I'm a robotics ai person from an emotional perspective, I just find the whole thing beautiful, [/INST] but that's really cool to me. That's a very interesting clue. See one of the arguments for God is based on the intelligibility of the world. This is very, it's like victor. It's very peculiar fact, it seems to me that the world is so radically intelligible. Why should that be true? Why should it be the case that being has this intelligible structure to it? So it corresponds to an enquiring mind. So acquaintance can say that the the intelligible in act is the intellect and act. Mean, there's some there's some deep correspondence between this and that and it it's I'm with vigor that's I think really weird and unreasonable and strange. Now, my answer is because the the creator of the universe is a great mind and has stamped the world with intelligibility in the beginning was the word right? And the word was with God and all things came to be through the word don't, we shouldn't picture that so much. It's a it's gesturing in this very powerful direction, There's an intelligence that has imbued the world with intelligibility and we discovered that, you know, </s><s>[INST] there's something about the simplicity of the way the world works? That that's where the beauty comes from? And yes, there's something profound to the mechanism whatever that is Um God that brought that to be the [/INST] thought it into being that the world has been said that when the bible says that God, God said, let there be light and there was like God said again, we don't liberalize the poetry, but it's, it's very rich that God spoke the world into being. So that means it's, it's been, it's been imbued with intelligibility from the beginning. Um they say that, you know, the condition for the possibility of the, of the Western physical sciences was a basically christian idea, namely that the world is not God. Therefore I can, I can analyze an experiment upon it. I can, I don't demonize it. I don't have a mystical relation to the world, it's not God. But secondly that it's, it's absolutely in every nook and cranny intelligible. And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation. So it's been created, it's not gods other than God, but yet it's touched in every dimension by God's mind. And when those two things are in place, the sciences get underway, you know, I don't worship the world anymore, but I'm also utterly confident, I can come to know it and those are theological ideas </s><s>[INST] well, we live in this world. So we can solve quite a lot of problems of this world by making the assumption that this world is fully understandable and we don't need to worry about what's outside the world in some sense, in order to build bridges and rockets and computers and all that kind of stuff? It's only when we get to the questions that are deeper about why we're here at all, what does it mean to be good, all those kinds of things do we need to reach outside of this world? [/INST] Can interest another one. So I talked about mathematics, I think it's stepping out of the cave is stepping out of just the purely empirical, you know, world. But the very fact we use a word like universe to me is very interesting, even if multiple universes to me that it's like, well there whatever this the whole is the Totality Universum turned toward the one. Um why would we call it that? Why would why don't we just call it an aggregate aggregate of stuff? It's an aggregate of all, but we call it a universe. And my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition is, is the intuition of being. So I immediately experienced things here, the color and shape and I can measure them. But when I've really stepped out of the cave and I've now engaged beyond mathematics, even I'm now into metaphysical reflection. I'm interested not just in this thing as an object and how it's colored and shaped and what its atoms and quirks and all that are, that's fine. But I'm interested now in doesn't mean to say this thing is real? So what makes this a being and then what are the characteristics of being? So now from Aristotle to Heidegger, you know this question of the nature of being. But I would say we call it a universe because it's turned toward the one of being. It's this intuition that whatever, from corks to Galaxies to whatever give me a billion other universes that it would still be, existence is turned toward the one that being unites our experience. And so now I'm at the metaphysical level of analysis, I take another step out of the cave in Plato's language. I'm at the formal level now beyond mathematics level of forms and and the formal is inclusive of the mathematical, which is inclusive of the physical. And I think that's Eugene Wagner, is that the mathematical includes the physical, it it is metaphysically prior to it. </s><s>[INST] But here we are, sitting in the physical trying to make sense of why the unreasonable effectiveness of the thing. That's it's beyond which is the mathematics. [/INST] My answer is God. And I don't know a better answer. And I as I read Wagner, he wasn't ready to say that. But I think the language is gesturing who has read someone recently, some very well known physicist who said his answer to Wagner's question is that whoever is responsible for the universe must be a mathematician. </s><s>[INST] And [/INST] I thought, yeah, that's right. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask you about Jordan Peterson, you had a great conversation with him? Um here's a complicated and nuanced view of faith or faith period. Um he has said that he believes in jesus, the person and the myth and some of the full richness and complexity that you've talked about. But he's surprised by his faith, he's not sure what to make of it. He's almost like meta, struggling with what the heck is faith means. He's a super powerful intellect that can't compute the faith that he's experiencing. So what are some interesting differences between the two of you or some commonalities in terms of your understanding of faith? [/INST] He's a very interesting guy and I've had a couple of conversations with him and I do think he's he's moving in the direction of faith and his lectures in the bible are very fine. I think he reminds me of the church fathers because the church fathers would have looked at the they call it the moral sense of the scripture Peterson called the psychological meaning, but I think he's doing a lot of that. He, as I read him and talk to him, I think he's kind of at a constant level in regard to jesus. What I mean, there is for Kant, Jesus is it's not so much the historical jesus, this figure from long ago, it's jesus as an archetype of the moral life, you know, he says he's the image of the person perfectly pleasing to god. And so jesus inhabits are kind of moral imagination as a, as a heuristic, as a, as a goal that we're tending toward. But the historical person of jesus for contact. Well let's not fuss about that so much. It's this figure and as I read Peter's especially and talk to him, I think he's kind of there with the archetype of jesus and even languages like live as though God exists. That's the job of cons, you know, the kind of as if um, attitude and where I press them when we talk is in the direction of no, that's not Christianity yet. I mean that's enlightenment, moral philosophy, but Christianity is very interested in this historical figure and very interested that God really became one of us and he's not just an archetype of the moral life, he's someone, he's a person who has invaded our world and gone all the way to the bottom of sin and thereby saved us. You know, So the fact is city of jesus and the resurrection. So I, Peterson will talk about the resurrection as a, as a myth and all that and you can find that in different cultures, etcetera, but Christianity um, is saying something else. </s><s>[INST] So in Christianity, we're talking about who is jesus, it's not just an archetype, it's not just a myth, it's a historical figure and the very grounded fact that God became one of us is fundamental to this idea, what what Christianity is what it means to be a christian, it's the the sin and the love that came here down to earth means we can be one with God. So that's essential. It's not just [/INST] you know, it always strikes me the difference between, let's say mythic expressions and the new testament. Yes. Read someone like you know, Carl young and then and then joseph Campbell whom he influenced and then now Jordan Peterson was very union and this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures and great, I think it's very interesting and there's a lot going on there. There's a sort of calmness though about it like yeah, interesting and that's in this culture and that culture and that. It's the form of the moral life and I understand all that. Then you read the new testament, whatever those people are talking about, it's not that they are grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you to get your attention to tell you about something that happened to them, right? Like the resurrection, you know that the myth of the dying and rising god and how powerful that is and shaping our consciousness. That's fascinating. That's not the new testament testament is. Did you hear, did you jesus of Nazareth whom they put to death God raised him from the dead and he was seen by 500 he was seen by by Peter and and and and and then lastly I saw him that's how paul talks. It's not the detached, you know, um psychologist amusing on archetypal things and I think that makes a huge difference when it comes to Christianity, </s><s>[INST] the intensity of the historical details are essential here. So, if you, you know, if you look at Hitler and Nazi Germany, it's not enough to say, well, power corrupts. And sometimes, so looking at the archetype of Hitler, it's much, much more important, much more powerful to look at the details of how he came to power. What are the ways he did evil onto the world? And then then you can get really intense about your struggle with some of the complexities of human nature and power on institutions and all that kind of stuff. So, the historical nature of the bible [/INST] were an historical religion and we've been </s><s>[INST] is important, we [/INST] generate philosophical reflection. We can find common ground with archetypal thinking and all that we can, and the church fathers used greek philosophy and Aquinas uses Aristotle and all that's great. But we're an historical religion and that matters immensely. </s><s>[INST] Is the bible, the literal word of God. How do you make sense of the words that make up the bible? I [/INST] think the best way to get at the bible is to think of it as a library, not a book. So, it's a collection of books right from a wide variety of periods, different authors, different audiences and different genre. So in the bible you find poetry, you find song, you find something like history, not in our sense, but something like history, you find gospel with his own genre. You find uh epistolary literature like paul you find apocalyptic, there's all this in the bible. So is the bible literally the word of God. It's like saying is the library literally true. It depends on what section you're in. Right? So parts of like one and two Samuel, one and two kings, uh number of places. The old testament. Are there elements of the historical in there? Sure. But it's theologically interpreted history. It's not like our sense of history of, you know, give me 10,000 footnotes and you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna look at all the source material I can possibly find. It's more like ancient history, uh Herodotus, people like that. Um, but then there's poetry and there's myth and there's legend and there's song and all that stuff in the bible. So God breathes through all of it. I would say he inspired all of it, right, inspire our he's breathing through all of it. God is speaking through all of it. But he speaks in different voices. Uh, he uses different human instruments and he uses different genre and different types of language. So we have to be sensitive to that when we're interpreting the bible. </s><s>[INST] So the different instruments are more or less uh somewhere more perfect than others. [/INST] So I wouldn't say that it was more perfect. I'd say they're just different. It's like a symphony and God's like a conductor and there's all kinds of different instruments in the orchestra and he loves his debris through the psalms. I pray the psalms this morning. I do every day in my, in my office, you know that those are songs, they probably were literally sung most of them At one point he breathes through um, apocalyptic, we're reading the Book of Revelation now in the easter season and this wild and wooly book. It should be filmed by, you know, Spielberg or somebody today and he speaks to the gospels. The gospels was corresponding genre to what I call ancient biography there. That's the genre of the gospels. It's wrong to call them like mythic or simply literary. They're like ancient biographies. Um, you have the pauline letters which are about, you know, particular cities that paul was visiting, in particular people he knew. So you just got to be sensitive to the genre all the time. </s><s>[INST] Let's return back to human institutions and talk about history of human civilization and politics. So one question to ask is, was America founded as a christian nation in your view, what if we look at the declaration of Independence? What do the words mean? We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It seems like God is breathing through those words to [/INST] yeah, I think so, yeah. The founders will be some kind of combination of deism. Um, certainly Christianity is, is coming up through them, enlightenment, rationalism all in kind of a mix, you know, So you're not going to find our founding fathers simply thomas Aquinas or like a purely, you know, classically christian understanding, it's Christianity in those various expressions because actually, I would see the enlightenment as a sort of um child of Christianity. We could talk about that. But having said all that, yes, I think they are expressing at least the residue of a once deeply integrated christian sense of things that our rights are not created by the government. They're not uh, doled out by the government. They come from God. And the other thing I find really interesting is equality because um look in classical philosophy, political philosophy, plato Aristotle cicero, it's not equality for them. It's our inequality. That's really interesting. So plato divides us into the three classes. And aerosols has only a tiny little coterie of property. Males of sufficient education should be in the political life. The rest should all be in private life, you know? And then some are suited for slavery. So I mean, he divides us dramatically. Same with cicero and so on. Um where did this come from? This weird idea that we're all equal. I mean, how we're not equal in beauty, not equal in strength, not equal in moral attainment were not equal and intelligence. So what is it? And I think the residue especially comes through in that little word that all men are created equal? That's our equality, that we're all equally Children of God. So take God out of the picture, I think we are going to slide rapidly into an embrace of inequality now in the classical world. Yes. But heck, look at the 20th century, I mean, when God is excluded in a very systematic way, I think you saw the suspension of rights and the suspension of equality like mad. So, no, I think it's very important that God is in the picture and that we're a nation under God. It matters enormously. That's not pious boilerplate. That's at the at the rational foundations of our democracy. </s><s>[INST] So, do you think Nietzsche was onto something with the idea Looking into the 20th century that God is dead? That there is uh, a cultural distancing from a belief in God? [/INST] Yeah. You know, I I'd be somewhat sympathetic to Jordan Peterson's reading of Nietzsche there, namely, it's not Nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop, hey God is dead. You know, it's more of a lament, You know, God is dead and we've killed them. And what will happen in the wake of that? And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism in the 20th century follows from that, that questioning of God and the dismissal of God from, from public life. So I would be sympathetic with that. Um, when we're beyond good and evil? You know, and all that's left is the will to power. And then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes? When we forget ideas like equality and rights which are grounded in God? Why are we surprised that that death camps follow? So I think there's a correlation there for sure. </s><s>[INST] I don't know. I believe that there's a capacity to do good in all of us and a capacity to do evil and there's something that tends towards good, whatever that is. I tend to think that if that community that love that we talked about, they find each other, they find the good. If you don't constrain the resources, if you don't push them, if you um don't artificially create conflict through power centers and evil charismatic leaders, then people would be good to each other. And whether that's God or some other source of deep um moral meaning that seems to be essential for functioning civilization. And it's hard. I mean, that's what humans are. We're searching for. What that God is what that means. [/INST] You know, that triggers in my mind. I wonder if you agree with this, that the modern sciences drew their strength from their narrowness. What I mean there is is they almost completely bracketed formal and final causality in the aristotelian sense and they focused on efficient and material causality. And that gave, as I say, great strength. But from the narrowness of focus. But for Aristotle the more important causes are the final and the formal causes and so final causality there. What's drawing us? So for air style, he'd look at someone like me and say, okay, you're you have an intelligible structure and that leads you to seek certain things for the perfection of that structure, you know? And fair enough. And that's right. So I seek the good. Right now, I'm seeking the good of being with you. I said, yeah, I'll sit down with lex Friedman and we'll talk about deep and important things. That's the good. I saw it this morning when I woke up now, why am I seeking that? Well, for a higher reason to hire good, you know, because it's part of my work, my ministry is to, you know, the the church reaching out beyond itself to the wider culture and okay, well, why do you want that? Because I want to bring more and more people into into the what I think is beautiful and true and good in the church? Well, how come you want that? Well, because a long time ago, I was kind of myself brought into that realm and find it very compelling. Yeah. But then why do you want that? Because ultimately I want to be, I want to be friends with God. Now I've given you one example there, but but any act of the will. It seems to me has to be analyzed that way. The will seek something. It seeks the good right by definition but the good always nest like a Russian doll in a higher good right. Which then nesting is still higher good until you come. This is acquainted to some in this sense uncalled cause an an caused final cause there has to be some some um bonham right some supreme good that you're looking for and that's God by the way, that's another I think rational path to God is is every single moment every day we are implicitly seeking God. </s><s>[INST] So with your word on fire ministries and and and the website and the communication efforts. What what what is the thing you're seeking? Just you if we can pause and for a brief moment allow you to be prideful or um of course just joking. But what what is your local efforts, your small little pocket of the world with small in quotes. Um, what was the word on fire? [/INST] Yeah, it's just using the, you know media especially the new media social media to get the gospel out. So I started what 20 some years ago just on a radio show in Chicago 5 15 on sunday morning I had a 15 minute sermon show And I asked the people in this parish, I was at I said I need $50,000 to get on for 15 minutes at 5:15 on Sunday morning and they all laughed when I proposed that. But they gave me the money. So that's how I got started just doing a sermon on the radio and then it branched off into into video stuff and TV and then I did a documentary, I went all over the world and kind of told the story of Catholicism. So that's how we started and now I'm using all the new media and social media. But what I really love what we're doing today is something I really like, which is having a conversation outside of just the narrow catholic world or even the narrow christian world, but to look out to the wider culture and you know, who's talking about interesting things and how can the church engage there? And you know, so that's the purpose of word on fire. </s><s>[INST] Is it overwhelming to face so many different sort of atheists then complex thinkers like Jordan Peterson and some of the more political style thinkers that you've spoken with is that what is it Dave Rubin who's also um, has a way different worldview as well. How is that terrifying? Is that exciting to [/INST] you? </s><s>[INST] Is it challenging? [/INST] Yeah, maybe I'll be above, but I'm more exciting, you know, I would say I like doing that. I was a teacher for a long time. I taught in the seminary for like 20 years and so you know, I've been engaging these questions for a long time. I'm a writer, I've written about 20, some books. So and I write some at a popular level. I write some at a high academic level and I like doing all that. So, I I I love those ideas. I love those questions. I love engaging people and I find my own experience you do run into of course a lot of the, you know, vitriol and kind of just stupidity and all that online. And I get it, and religion is such a magnet for people's hostility for different reasons. So I get that, like you read it, we talked about you have to wade through, you know, swamps of of obscenity and everything, but but I do it, I like it and it's worthwhile because in that reddit experience so many of the issues that preoccupy young people, I can name them for you exactly what they are, it comes to religion. How do you know there's a God? So the God question, secondly, why is there so much suffering in the world? Third question, why do you think your religion is the right religion? Fourth, why are you so mean to gay people? So those are the four things that I again and again, come up when dealing with young people. I I've told my brother bishops and priests about that. I said structure your adult education programs, or structure your youth outreach around those four questions. </s><s>[INST] Uh, well, let me ask you about gay marriage, how do we make sense of the love between a man and a man and a woman and the woman and the institution of marriage. [/INST] We love friendship and friendship is at the heart of things. And so nothing wrong with friendship between, you know, a man and a man and woman and a woman. But go back to Aristotle thomas, Aquinas about natural finality, ease and intelligible forms that there's a certain form to human being which includes the physical and includes the sexual, it has a proper finality. And so we recognize that finality is twofold, both you native and procreative. And so those two we recognize as the appropriate expression of human sexuality. So that's why the church holds two, you know, sex between a man and a woman within the context of marriage is the is the right expression. We reach out to everybody in love and in respect and deep understanding and seeking to understand their lives from the inside. I mean, all of that, I agree with the bridge building that we need to do to people like in the gay community and people in gay marriage and so on. So the church holds to the the intelligible structure if you want of human sexuality and it reaches out to real human beings, always in an attitude of invitation and love and so on. So it's somewhere in there that the church takes its stance </s><s>[INST] and then uh so there's probably variation in the stances that it takes. So you're saying the institution of marriage is about the unity of which is like the friendship, the deep connection between two humans and the procreative. So being able to have Children, all that kind of stuff. It's interesting. So is our gay couples seen as sinful. So does the church acknowledge the love? That's the deep love that's possible between them. [/INST] Which is why the church says in its official teaching. It's the physical expression, let's say of of sexual passion between two men that is problematic, not their friendship, not their love for each other. Um So I think, yeah, we we confirmed the first, </s><s>[INST] Well, let me ask you another difficult topic. That's just like the other ones that we talked about. Uh that's going on in the news now, as we sit here today, the Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights in a draft majority opinion striking down the landmark roe versus wade decision. What are your thoughts on this, first of all, the human institution of the Supreme Court, making these decisions throughout its history? And second of all, just the idea uh they're really powerful. Their controversial the difficult idea of abortion. [/INST] Yeah, I mean, I'm against abortion. I'm I'm pro life. The church recognizes from the moment of conception, we're dealing with a human life that's worthy of respect and protection, especially as you see the unfolding event of that person, you know, across a pregnancy, but at every stage we recognize the beauty and the dignity of that human being. And so we stand opposed to this, the outright killing of the innocent. So that's the church's view. Um, again, reaching out always in love and understanding and compassion to those who are dealing and believe me, every single pastor, every single priest understands that because we deal with people all the time, who are in these painful situations. But um, that's the moral side of it. The legal side, I think roe V wade was terribly decided. I think one of the worst expressions of, of american law since the dread scott decision. So I stand in favor of overturning roe V wade and Casey. I think they were terrible. The Casey decision is instructive to me. The it belongs to the nature of freedom that that decision says to determine the meaning of one's own life. And even, I don't get the language exactly right, But and of the universe like it gives this staggering scope to our freedom that we can determine the meaning, but that's repugnant to everything. We've just talked about that. I'm inventing the meaning of my life and of the universe. And so Casey that was instructive in a way because it it tips its hat toward the problem culturally is that I think in my freedom, I can determine everything, my choice is all that matters. And I would say no, your your choice should be correlated to the order of the good. It's not sovereign. It doesn't rain sovereignty over being and it makes its own decisions. So I think Casey was terrible law. And it was backing up roe v wade, which is terrible law. So I'm in favor of the overturning of those. I've spoken out that many times now. It will return it to the individual states. It's not going to, you know, solve the problem. The individual states will have to decide. I just heard yesterday, we were up in sacramento, the bishops having our annual meeting. And so we got the word, you know, from the governor and the legislators, um, that they're going to push for a constitutional amendment in California. So basically to make any attempt to limit abortion in any way, just illegal. You know, I think that's barbaric. You know, so I stand radically opposed to that. </s><s>[INST] It's such an interesting line because if if you believe that there's a it's a line that struggles with the question of what is does it mean to be a living being or to give life to something. Um, because if you believe that at the moment of conception, you're you're basically creating a human life, then abortion is murder. And then if you don't, then it's a sort of basic biological choice that's not taking away of a life. And the gap between those two beliefs is so vast. It's hard and yet so fundamental to the question of what it means to be alive. And the fundamental question about the respect for human life and human dignity. It's interesting to see um and also about freedom to, you know, all of those things are mixed in [/INST] there, it's a </s><s>[INST] beautiful struggle, [/INST] Maybe the freedom is the most important, you know, this is a freedom run amok or in classical philosophy and theology, freedom is not self determination. Freedom is the disciplining of desire. So as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless what I'm saying. So modern freedom and the roots of that are people like William back. Um uh in the late Middle Ages, freedom means I hover above the yes and no yes or no, and I'm the sovereign subject of that choice and I will know basis, I will say yes or no, I'm like, louis the 14th, you know, I'm like Stalin or something, you know, but the queen's wouldn't have recognized that as freedom for him. It's I got this desire, you know, in me, I've got this will and it's pushing toward the good. But the trouble is I got so many attachments and and I'm so stupid and I'm so conditioned by my sin that I can't achieve it. So I need to be disciplined in my desire so as to make that achievement possible and then effortless. So right now I'm freely speaking, english to you and, you know, you have the experience and I've had a two of learning a foreign language and don't you feel unfree, you know, like when you're struggling with the language, when I was over in paris doing my doctoral work and you know, I was okay with french. But you know, my first time in a seminar and all these like, you know, intelligent francophones around the table and they're all just and I'm trying to say my little thing in my awkward french and I felt unfree because I, my desire wasn't wasn't directed, you know. But then over time I became freer and freer speaker of french. I was ordered more to the good. That's a better understanding of freedom than sort of sovereign self determination. But our country is now, I think really in the grip of that I decide. And that's why the Nietzschean thing comes to my mind, you know, the will to power. I'm beyond good and evil. It's just up to me to decide. God help us. No, it's the values that we intuit around us. Intellectual moral and aesthetic. The values think of the dog on the beach again, and that you get ordered to those, by your education, by your family, by your religion. And that's beautiful. That makes you free. You know, I can freely enter into this. So this sovereign self determination business, that's not my game. </s><s>[INST] The values come in part from the tradition carried through the generations. Let me ask you to put on you're wise hat and give advice to young folks. So high school and college, thinking about, you know what to do with their life career. There's so many options out there. Um how can they have a career they can be proud of or even just the life they can be proud of. [/INST] I think I say find something you're good at because that's from God, it's a gift that God has given you and then dedicated to love what I'm saying. So you're you're good at science or math or sports or whatever. Okay, I'm going to use that now for my aggrandizement, for my wealth, for my privileges and to become famous. No, no, no, don't find what you're good at, but now dedicated to willing the good of the other, so use your science and use your mathematics and use your sports and use your musicianship to benefit the world, you know? Um that's right to them. So find what you're good at. That's that's from </s><s>[INST] finding what you're good at what, because it's not just raw skill, it's also what you connect with. And it's also um like this iterative process of, if you want to add love to the world, you have to see how can you be effective at doing that. So it's not just the things you're good at, there's like there's you know, I'm good at building bridges out of toothpicks, I'm not exactly sure that's going to be useful for the world then again to push back on that. The joy brings me maybe somehow the joy radiates out. [/INST] Yeah, well you're good at what you're doing right now, and you've dedicated that to bringing more light and illumination and joy to the world. That </s><s>[INST] was that was a searching that's the process of trying stuff and figuring it out. And ultimately, yes, asking the question, how is this making the world at all better and every step of the way as opposed to enriching yourself and all those kinds of things, [/INST] Right? I think that's the name of the game, you know, But it's it's tricky. And if we don't have moral mentors and intellectual mentors, it becomes hard. And if you tell a kid that's deadly to me, just decide for yourself, just, you know, just off you go and and you make your own choices. Your your choice has to be disciplined. Your desire has got to be directed. You know, then you're you'll find your creative path. Everyone does it in his own way. But it's it's a guided choice. Your freedom is not sovereign. It's a it's a guided freedom. </s><s>[INST] So, in the in the struggle and the suffering you've seen in the world, let me ask you the question of death. Have you? How often do you think about your own mortality [/INST] every day? </s><s>[INST] And one are you afraid of it, the uncertainty of it? And what do you think happens after you die? [/INST] Sure, I'm afraid of it because it's I don't I don't know what's next. I mean, I I can't know what the way I know you. So of course I'm afraid of it. And I think of it every day. Uh that's true. Uh my prayer life compels me, you know, we have this the the hail mary prayer, you prayed the rosary now and at the hour of our death amen now and at the hour of our death. Amen Now, at the hour of our death, Amen you pray the whole rosary 50 times. You reminded yourself of your own death. But I do, I think about it because it's the ultimate limit. That's why it's, it's beguiled every artist and writer and philosopher. It's the ultimate limit, you know, Question. But yeah, sure I'm afraid of because it's the unknown. What do I think happens? I think I'm drawn into the deeper embrace of God's love, you know, and that's stating it kind of in a, in a more poetic way. Um do you know john Polkinghorne is work, you know that name, John polk was a very interesting, it just died recently. He was a Cambridge university particle physicist. Right? High high level scientist who at midlife became an anglican priest. He left his job at Cambridge and went to the seminary became an anglican priest, right? And then wrote, I think some of the best stuff on science and religion because he really knew the science from the inside here's poking horns account, but I've always found persuasive, he said what, what survives after we die. So this body clearly dies and goes into the ground or it's burned up and it goes away, right? But what's preserved? And he says, what Aristotle would have called the form, poking, recalls it. The pattern. So the pattern that's organized the matter that's made me up over all these years, that's obviously not the same as it was. Even, you would know how often it all changed all your atoms and cells and you know, it was the little, you know, bobby baron who was growing up in Birmingham michigan there, I could have a picture of him and then there's me and I said, oh, this is the same person. Well, clearly not materially speaking. Not at all, it's completely different, but there's there's a unity to whatever that pattern is by which all of that material, it has been kind of organized. So poker and says, I think that pattern is remembered by God and remember is the wrong word as though it's like derivative, it's known by God. And so God can therefore re embody me according to that pattern at a higher pitch. What we call the resurrected body. Uh, so paul talks about a spiritual body body for sure, because he believes in the resurrection of jesus. Um but it's not a body like ours from this world. It's a, it's a body at a higher pitch. So </s><s>[INST] something, some pattern that's there persists [/INST] pattern persist in the mind of God and then is used as the ground of the re embodiment of me. So it's not like I've just become a platonic form. I'm going to be re embodied because the christian hope is not for platonic escape of soul from manner. That's never the christian hope. It's for the resurrection of the body, we say. And he said, what a fantastic idea. Well, I don't know. I mean, this body is being reconstituted all the time according to this pattern. Right, It's not the same matter. And so might there be another sort of higher material that is organized according to the same pattern which has been remembered by God. So therefore we can hang on to the language of body and soul if you want, or matter and form, but it's the form remembered by God and then reconstituted in an embodied way by God that we call heaven the heavenly state. That's what I hope for. That's my christian faith. My christian hope. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask you about the big question of meaning we've talked about in different directions from different perspectives. What's the meaning of our existence here on earth? What's the meaning of life? Love? [/INST] God is love and the purpose of my life is to become God's friend and that means I'm more conformed to love. And so my life finds meaning in the measure that I become more on fire with the divine love. I'm like the burning bush is to become more and more radiant with the presence of God. That's what gives life meaning meaning. It is to live in a purpose of relationship to a value, I would say. So there's all kinds of values, as I say moral, aesthetic intellectual values and when I have a purpose of relationship. So right now, you and I we have a purpose of relationship to the value of, let's say, you know, finding out the truth of things and we're speaking together to seek that Well, good. What's the ultimate value? The value of values is God the supreme Good, the supremely knowable. The supremely intelligible is God. And so to be conformed to God is to have a fully meaningful life and who's God, God is love. So that's where I would fit the package together. That way </s><s>[INST] you're adding a lot of love to this world and which is something I deeply appreciate and that you would sit down with me given how valuable your time is is a huge honor. Thank you so [/INST] much. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bishop robert Baron to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Bishop robert Baron himself, which reminds me of the dostoyevsky line spoken through Prince Michigan that quote, Beauty will save the world roberts says, begin with the beautiful, which leads to the good, which leads you to truth. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] Well, let me on the merger with ai question and and the incredible work is being done in your link. There's a lot of fascinating innovation here across different disciplines going on. So the flexible wires, the robotic sewing machine that response to brain movement, everything around ensuring safety and so on. So we currently understand very little about the human brain. Do you also hope that the work at neuralink will help us understand more about our about the human mind about the brain. [/INST] Yeah, I think the work in your like will definitely shut a lot of insight into how the brain the mind works right now, just the data we have regarding how the brain works is very limited. You know, we've got FmRI which is that that's kind of like putting a, you know, a stethoscope on the outside of a factory wall and then putting it like all over the factory wall and you can sort of hear the sounds but you don't know what the machines are doing. Really. It's hard, you can infer a few things, but it's very broad restaurant in order to really know what's going on in the brain. You really need. You have to have high precision sensors and then you want to have stimulus and response. Like if you trigger a neuron, what how do you feel? What do you see? How does it change the perception of the world </s><s>[INST] you're speaking to physically just getting close to the brain. Being able to measure signals from the brain will give us sort of open the door and inside the factory. [/INST] Yes, exactly. Being able to have high precision sensors, tell you what individual neurons are doing and then being able to trigger a neuron and see what the responses in the brain. So you can see the consequences of if you fire this neuron, what happens? How do you feel? What does change? It'll be really profound to have this in people because people can articulate uh their change, like if there's a change in mood or if they, you know, if they can tell you if they can see better or hear better or be able to form sentences better or was or you know, memories are jogged or that, you know, that kind of thing. </s><s>[INST] So on the, on the human side there's this incredible general malleability plasticity of the human brain. The human brain adapts, adjusts and so on. So that's not that [/INST] plastic for Tony frank. </s><s>[INST] So there's a firm structure. But nevertheless, there's some plasticity in the open question is sort of, I could ask a broad question is how much that plasticity can be utilized. On the human side, there's some plasticity of the human brain. And on the machine side we have neural networks, machine learning artificial intelligence. It's able to adjust and figure out signals. So there's a mysterious language that we don't perfectly understand that's within the human brain. And then we're trying to understand that language to communicate both directions. So the brain is adjusting a little bit. We don't know how much and the machine is adjusting. Where do you see as they try to sort of reach together almost like with an alien species, try to find a protocol, Communication protocol that works. Where do you see the biggest, the biggest benefit arriving from on the machine side, or the human side. Do you see both of them working together? [/INST] I should think the machine side is far more malleable than the biological side by a huge amount. So it will be the the machine that adapts to the brain. That's the only thing that's possible. The brain can adapt that well, to to the machine. You can't have neurons start to regard an electrode as another neuron because you're on just this is like the pulse and so something else is pulsing so that there is that there is that elasticity in the interface, which we believe is something that can happen. But the vast majority of malleability will have to be on the machine side. </s><s>[INST] But it's interesting when you look at that synaptic plasticity at the interface side, there might be like an emergent plasticity because it's a whole another, it's not like in the brain, it's a whole another extension of the brain. You know, we might have to redefine what it means to be malleable for the brain. So maybe the brain is able to adjust to external interfaces. [/INST] There will be some adjustment to the brain because there's going to be something reading and stimulating the brain and so it will adjust to to that thing. But both the vast majority the adjustment will be on the machine side. This is just this is just has to be that Otherwise it will not work ultimately, like we currently operate on two layers. We have sort of olympic, like prime primitive brain layer, which is where all of our kind of impulses are coming from. It's sort of like, we've got we've got like a monkey brain with a computer stuck on it, that's that's the human brain. And a lot of our impulses and everything are driven by the monkey brain. And the computer of the cortex is constantly trying to make the monkey monkey brain happy. It's not the cortex that's steering the monkey range the monkey brains during the cortex, you know what the </s><s>[INST] cortex is, the part that tells the story of the whole thing. So we convince ourselves it's more interesting than just the monkey brain. [/INST] The cortex is like what we call, like human intelligence, you know? So it's like that's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures, uh creatures do not have either really, They don't have the computer or they have a very weak computer relative to humans, but but it's it's like it sort of seems like surely the really smart things should control the dumb thing, but actually I don't think controls the smart thing. </s> |
<s>[INST] And now here's my conversation when neck Backstrom at the risk of asking the Beatles to play yesterday or the Rolling Stones to play satisfaction. Let me ask you the basics, what is the simulation hypothesis [/INST] that we are living in a computer simulation? </s><s>[INST] What is a computer simulation, how we're supposed to even think about that [/INST] well. So the hypothesis is meant to be understood in a literal sense, not that we can kind of metaphorically view the universe as an information processing physical system, but that there is some advanced civilization who built a lot of computers and that what we experience is an effect of what's going on inside one of those computers so that the world around us, our own brains, everything we see and perceive and think and feel would exist because this computer is uh running certain programs. So do you think </s><s>[INST] Of this computer as something similar to the computers of today? These deterministic six of touring machine type things? Is that what we're supposed to imagine? Or we're supposed to think of something more like a quantum mechanical system, Something much bigger. Something much more complicated. Something much more mysterious. From our current perspective, [/INST] the ones we have today, We do find them in bigger certainly you need more </s><s>[INST] more memory [/INST] and more processing power. I don't think anything else would be required. Now. It might well be that they do have maybe they have quantum computers and other things that would give them even more of. It's just kind of plausible, but I don't think it's a necessary assumption in order to uh get to the conclusion that a technologically mature civilization would be able to create these kinds of computer simulations with conscious beings inside them. </s><s>[INST] So, do you think the simulation hypothesis is an idea that's most useful in philosophy, computer science, physics sort of. Where do you see it having valuable kind of Okay, start starting point in terms of the thought experiment of it. [/INST] Is it useful? I guess it's more uh informative and interesting and maybe important, but it's not designed to be useful for something else. </s><s>[INST] Okay, interesting. Sure. But is it philosophically interesting or is there some kind of implications of computer science and physics? [/INST] I think not so much for computer science or physics per se. Certainly it would be of interest in philosophy, I think also um to say cosmology and physics and as much as you're interested in the fundamental building blocks of the world and the rules that govern it. Um If we are in a simulation understand the possibility that, say physics at the level where the computer running the simulation um could could be different from the physics governing phenomenon in the simulation. So, I think it might be interesting from the point of view of religion or just for for a kind of trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Um So we mentioned the simulation hypothesis so far, there is also the simulation argument, which I want to make a distinction. So the simulation hypothesis, we are living in a computer simulation simulation argument. This argument that tries to show that one of three propositions is true, one of which is The simulation hypothesis, but there are two alternatives. Um in the original simulation argument, which which we can get to </s><s>[INST] let's go there by the way, confusing terms because people will, I think probably naturally think simulation argument equal simulation hypothesis, just terminology wise, But let's go there. So simulation hypothesis means that we are living in simulations, that the hypothesis that we're living in a simulation simulation argument has these three complete possibilities that cover all possibilities. So what are the [/INST] Yeah, so it's like a disjunction. It says at least one of these three is true, although it doesn't on its own, tell us which one. Um, so the first one is that almost all uh civilizations at our current stage of technological development um go extinct before they reach technological maturity. So there is some great filter um that makes it so that basically none of the civilizations throughout, you know, maybe a vast cosmos we'll ever get to realize the full potential of technological development. This </s><s>[INST] could be theoretically speaking, this could be because most civilizations kill themselves too eagerly or destroy themselves to regularly or it might be super difficult to build a simulation to the span of time, [/INST] theoretically it could be both. Now, I think it looks like we it would technically be able to get there in a time span that is short compared to, say, the lifetime of planets and other sort of astronomical processes. </s><s>[INST] So, your intuition is to build simulation is not [/INST] well, so this is interesting concept of technological maturity. Um, it's kind of an interesting concept to have other purposes as well. We can see even based on our current limited understanding what some lower bound would be on the capabilities that you could realize by just developing technologies that we already see are possible. So for example, 11 of my research fellows here, eric Drexler back in the eighties um studied molecular manufacturing that is, you could um analyze using theoretical tools and computer modeling the performance of various molecularly precise structures that we didn't then and still don't today have the ability to actually fabricate. But you could say that well, if we could put these atoms together in this way then the system would be stable and it would, you know, rotate with at this speed and have these computational characteristics. And he also outlined some pathways that would enable us to get to this kind of molecularly manufacturing in the fullness of time. And you could do other other studies we've done, you can look at the speed at which say it would be possible to colonize the galaxy. If you had mature technology, we have an upper limit which is the speed of light. We have sort of a lower current limit, which is how fast current rockets go. We know we can go faster than that by just, you know, making them bigger and have more fuel and stuff. And you can then start to um describe the technological afford ince's that would exist once a civilization has had enough time to develop. Even at least those technologies were already not possible, then maybe they will discover other new physical phenomena as well that we haven't realized that would enable them to do even more. But at least there is this kind of basic set of capabilities can </s> |
<s>[INST] Mhm. Uh I'm trying to just end it there. [/INST] Uh </s><s>[INST] you elaborate. [/INST] Uh of course datasets and architecture are something you want to always play with, but I think the crucial thing is more the training objectives training frameworks um for example, going from um passive observation of data to more active agents which um uh learned by intervening in the world, the relationships between causes and effects. Um the sort of objective functions which could be important to allow the highest level explanations to to rise from from the learning, which I don't think we have now, the kinds of objective functions which could be used to reward exploration, the right kind of exploration. So these kinds of questions are neither in the dataset nor in the architecture, but more in how we learn under what objectives and so on. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's uh afraid. You mentioned in several contexts the idea of sort of the way Children learn to interact with objects in the world and it seems a fascinating because in some sounds, except with some cases in reinforcement learning that idea, it's not part of the learning process in artificial neural networks, it's almost like do you envision something like an objective function saying, you know what [/INST] if you </s><s>[INST] poke this object in this kind of way, it would be really helpful for me to further further learn right, sort of almost guiding some aspect? [/INST] Right. Right, so I was talking to Rebecca Saxe just an hour ago and she was talking about lots and lots of evidence from uh infants seemed to clearly pick what interests them in a directed way. And so they're not passive learners, they focus their attention on aspects of the world, which are most interesting, surprising in a non trivial way that makes them change. There are theories of the world. </s><s>[INST] So, uh that's a fascinating view of the future progress, but uh and the more maybe boring uh question, do you think going deeper and larger? So do you think just increasing the size of the things that have been increasing a lot in the past few years? Well, will also make significant progress. So, some of the representational issues that you mentioned that they're kind of shallow in some sense. Oh, prior [/INST] in the sense of abstraction, </s><s>[INST] in the sense of abstraction, they're not getting some I [/INST] Don't think that having more more depth in the network in the sense of instead of 100 layers, we have 10,000 is going to solve our problem. </s><s>[INST] You don't think so. Is that obvious to you? Yes. [/INST] What is clear to me is that engineers and companies and labs grad students will continue to tune architectures and explore all kinds of tweaks to make the current state of the art slightly ever so slightly better. But I don't think that's going to be nearly enough. I think we need some fairly drastic changes in the way that we're considering learning to achieve the goal that these learners actually understand in a deep way the environment in which they are, you know, observing and acting. </s><s>[INST] But I guess uh I was trying to ask the question is more interesting than just more layers is basically once you figure out a way to learn to interacting, how many parameters does it take to store that information? So I think our brain is quite bigger than most neural networks. Right, [/INST] right. Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, I I'm with you there, so I agree that in order to build your nets with the kind of broad knowledge of the world that typical adult humans have probably the kind of computing power we have now is going to be insufficient. So the good news is there are hardware companies building neural net chips and so it's going to get better. However, the good news in a way, which is also a bad news is that even our state of the art, deep learning methods fail to learn models that understand even very simple environments, like some grid worlds that we have built, even these fairly simple environments. I mean, of course if you train them with enough examples, eventually they get it. But it's just like instead of what, instead of what humans might need, just uh dozens of examples, these things will need millions, right, for very, very, very simple tasks. And so I think there's an opportunity for academics who don't have the kind of computing power that say google has um to do really important and exciting research to advance the state of the art and training frameworks, learning models, agent learning in even simple environments that are synthetic, that seems trivial. But yet current machine learning fails on. </s><s>[INST] You talked about prior fires and common sense knowledge, it seems like uh we humans take a lot of knowledge for granted. Uh so what what's your view of these prior to forming this broad view of the world, this accumulation of information and how we can teach neural networks or learning systems to pick that knowledge up. So knowledge, you know, for a while, the artificial intelligence, uh what's maybe in the 80 like there's a time where knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, expert systems, I mean the symbolic ai was it was a view, it was an interesting problem set to solve and it was kind of put on hold a little bit, it seems like because it doesn't work, it doesn't work. That's right, but that's right. But the goals of [/INST] that remain important. </s><s>[INST] Yes, remain important. And how do you think [/INST] those goals can be addressed? So first of all, I believe that one reason why the classical expert systems approach failed is because a lot of the knowledge we have. So you talked about common sense intuition, um there's a lot of knowledge like this which is not consciously accessible. There's lots of decisions we're taking that we can't really explain, even if sometimes we make up a story. Um and that knowledge is also necessary for machines to take good decisions and that knowledge is hard to codify in expert systems, rule based systems and you know, classical ai formalism and there are other issues of course with the old the I like and not really good ways of handling uncertainty, I would say something more subtle which we understand better now, but I think still isn't enough in the minds of people, there's something really powerful that comes from distributed representations. The thing that really makes neural nets work so well and it's hard to replicate that kind of power in a symbolic world. The knowledge in an expert systems and so on is nicely decomposed into like a bunch of rules. Whereas if you think about annual net it's the opposite, you have this big blob of parameters which work intensely together to represent everything the network knows and it's not sufficiently factory sized and so I think this is one of the weaknesses of current neural nets that we have to take lessons from classical ei in order to bring in another kind of composition, Haliti, which is common in language for example, and in these rules, but that isn't so native to neural nets </s> |
<s>[INST] first of all, it is tough to be a rabbi if this is I mean the masks to me symbolized these kinds of discussions symbolize not necessarily the issues at hand, but the intensity of feeling and people are really struggling. People are in pain. They're lonely, they're the uncertainty of it. You don't know who to trust. Everything is under question. The institutions, even the scientific institutions and there's all these conspiracy theories flying around, You don't know who to believe. And there's people just yelling at each other and politics is weaved into this whole thing in some messy way and you just getting I mean honestly it's just like legit simple, just frustration going back to marriage of just hanging out with the kids and [/INST] your wife </s><s>[INST] husband, just distress just building up over time, no release. And just people want to tell you when the rabbis not wearing a mask even though it's at the damn [/INST] super bowl maybe want to </s><s>[INST] comment on the super bowl [/INST] part, which </s><s>[INST] is awesome. But anyway, [/INST] but it it released clearly a damn of all the kinds of feelings that you're talking about. So how do you </s><s>[INST] write a sermon? [/INST] So well, so what I did was I didn't answer on social media because I knew That I wouldn't be able to formulate it the way I wanted and I was gonna wait and I was going to be able to give a longer. I mean the sermon is 15 minutes, not that long, but I wanted to be able to give a longer answer as opposed to a tweet. And so I was really, I mean I tried to make two points during the sermon and I also I published the text of it, which I never do because I never speak from a text. Always speak from either notes or not even from notes. But this time I thought it was really important that I have a text out there too so that people could actually look over it. Um and and I just wanted to make two points, one of which was that I really feel terrible and I did that I all these people were hurt and that there is this, you know, contradiction between the way I acted and the way they want me to act. And I also think by the way I didn't speak about this, but I also think that there are some people who just don't like the idea of a rabbi being at the Super Bowl, it's like you're supposed to be doing rabbi stuff. So I understand that too. But then, </s><s>[INST] but yeah, [/INST] but you know, rabbi at </s><s>[INST] the Super Bowl, I mean you're also, I, I hate to say it, but there's there's a rockstar nature to you talking to Christopher Hitchens contending with ideas, inspiring so many other minds. I mean there's an educational [/INST] aspect that's </s><s>[INST] making ideas cool. I mean that's a very powerful, that, I mean that is also the job of a rabbi. You're not just supposed to do rabbi stuff, [/INST] but I didn't do so much of that, you know, at the game. So um, nonetheless, so, but the second part of it was I said that we have to be able to express our anger and disappointment better than this, you just have to in part because it doesn't get you the result that you want. I mean when you scream at someone that's not going to get them to realize what they did. Um, and and the the most painful um, moment of it was this letter that I got from a christian pastor who said, you know, I always admired that you so much, I can't believe they could be so cruel and especially to a rabbi. And I thought that's not how I want my congregation to be perceived in the world. Um, and by the way, some of them were from my congregation, some were were many were not from my congregation. But um but and I spoke about what you talked about, which is that uh you know, I mentioned before that moses broke those tablets coming down the mountain and the Torah doesn't say what happened to the tablets. But the rabbis do. They say that they were carried together in the ark with the second set, that was intact and that we all have Brokenness, communities and individuals, we have Brokenness and especially now and we have to learn how to give each other space to be mistaken and broken and hurt and all of that. Um and </s><s>[INST] the cool thing when you give people that space, you feel better. I mean you for caring for the community. It feels better when you show empathy and compassion and kindness on the internet, you'll actually feel better a week from now, you'll feel much worse if you make some kind of negative statement of principle on the internet, it's almost just exclusively true. So if you care about feeling good, just be kind first be empathetic first. [/INST] Almost always the case. Exactly. So, um so it's uh I mean it's settled down a lot. The most really the single best reaction there were people and you can, again, you can go on, Social media can see all the criticisms and so on and so forth. Um, but the single best reaction I got was from a man who came up to me right after the sermon um, and said, I have four words for you and I thought, oh no, I gotta confess that. I said, I said what? He said, you changed my mind and I thought, wow. And I said to him, you know, that's so, it's like two takes so much courage to come up to somebody and say that in front of them and I was so grateful. And The other thing that it tells me is, look, I've been the rabbi of the congregation for 25 years and I taught 10 years before that, I've been a rabbi for a long time. I still, I still have a lot to learn. </s> |
<s>[INST] This is the LexVietman podcast, support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now to your friends, here's Robin Hanson. You are working on a book about, quote, grabby aliens. This is a technical term, like the big bang. [/INST] So what are grabby aliens? Grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they change stuff. That's the key concept. So if they were out there, we would notice. That's the key idea. So the question is, where are the grabby aliens? So Fermi's question is, where are the aliens? And we could vary that in two terms, right? Where are the quiet, hard to see aliens and where are the big loud grabby aliens? So it's actually hard to say where all the quiet ones are, right? There could be a lot of them out there cause they're not doing much. They're not making a big difference in the world, but the grabby aliens by definition are the ones you would see. We don't know exactly what they do with where they went but the idea is they're in some sort of competitive world where each part of them is trying to grab more stuff and do something with it. And almost surely whatever is the most competitive thing to do with all the stuff they grab, isn't to leave it alone the way it started, right? So we humans, when we go around the earth and use stuff, we change it. We would turn a forest into a farmland, turn a harbor into a city. So the idea is aliens would do something with it. And so we're not exactly sure what it would look like, but it would look different. So somewhere in the sky, we would see big spheres of different activity where things had been changed because they had been there. </s><s>[INST] Expanding spheres. Right. So as you expand, you aggressively interact and change the environment. And so the word grabby versus loud, you're using them sometimes synonymously, sometimes not. Grabby to me is a little bit more aggressive. What does it mean to be loud? What does it mean to be grabby? What's the difference? And loud in what ways? A visual, is it sound? Is it some other physical phenomena like gravitational waves? What are you using this kind of in a broad philosophical sense? Or there's a specific thing that it means to be loud [/INST] in this universe of ours. My co-authors and I put together a paper with a particular mathematical model. And so we use the term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model. And the idea is it's a more particular model of the general concept of loud. So loud would just be the general idea </s><s>[INST] that they would be really obvious. So grabby is the technical term. Is it in the title of the paper? [/INST] It's in the body. The title is actually about loud and quiet. So the idea is there's, you want to distinguish your particular model of things from the general category of things everybody else might talk about. </s><s>[INST] So that's how we distinguish. So the idea paper title is, if loud aliens explain human earlyness, quiet aliens are also rare. If life on earth, God, this is such a good abstract. If life on earth had to achieve and hard steps to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the end to power. So we'll talk about power, we'll talk about linear increase. So what is the technical definition of grabby? How do you envision grabbyness? And why are, in contrast with humans, why aren't humans grabby? So like, where's that line? Is it well-definable? [/INST] What is grabby and what is non-grabby? We have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations, i.e. aliens in space and time. That model has three parameters and we can set each one of those parameters from data and therefore we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space-time. So the key idea is they appear at some point in space-time and then after some short delay, they start expanding and they expand at some speed. And the speed is one of those parameters. That's one of the three and the other two parameters are about how they appear in time, that is they appear at random places and they appear in time according to a power law and that power law has two parameters and we can fit each of those parameters to data. And so then we can say, now we know. We know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time. So we are right now a new civilization and we have not yet started to expand, but plausibly we would start to do that within say 10 million years of the current moment. That's plenty of time. And 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe. So we are at the moment, a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might appear because we may or may not become grabby, but if we do, we'll do it soon. And so our current date is a sample and that gives us one of the other parameters. The second parameter is the constant in front of the power law </s><s>[INST] and that's arrived from our current date. So power law, what is the N in the power law? That's the more complicated thing to explain. [/INST] Right, that's the more complicated thing to explain. Advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps. So starting with very simple life and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life. And so we had to go through some intermediate steps such as sexual selection, photosynthesis, multi-cellular animals and the idea is that each of those steps was hard. Evolution just took a long time searching in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps. And the challenge was to achieve all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host a simple life. And so Earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there and that we managed to achieve all these steps in the short time of the five billion years that Earth can support simple life. </s> |
<s>[INST] studying whether that's so [/INST] awesome. Yeah thank you. Um So what we found was that there was no occupation in our data set where machine learning just ran the table and did everything And there was almost no occupation where machine learning didn't have like a significant ability to do things like take radiology. A lot of people I hear saying you know the end of radiology and one of the 27 tasks is read medical images. Really important one like kind of a core job and machines have basically gotten as good or better than radiologist, there's just an article in nature last week but you know they've been publishing them for the past few years um showing that uh machine learning can do as well as humans on many kinds of diagnostic imaging tasks. Um But other things radiologists do, you know they sometimes administer conscious sedation. Uh they sometimes do physical exams, they have to synthesize the results explained to the other uh doctors or to the patients and all those categories. Machine learning isn't really up to snuff yet. So that job we're gonna see a lot of restructuring parts of the job, they'll hand over to machines others humans will do more of that's been more or less the pattern all of them. So you know to oversimplify a bit, we can see a lot of restructuring, reorganization of work and it's a real going to be a great time. It is a great time for smart entrepreneurs and managers to do that, reinvention of work, not going to see mass unemployment to get more specifically to your question, the kinds of tasks that machines tend to be good at are a lot of routine problems solving mapping uh inputs X into outputs. Why if you have a lot of data on the indexes and the wise the inputs and outputs you can do that kind of mapping and find the relationships. They tend to not be very good for even now. Fine motor control and dexterity, um emotional intelligence and and human interactions. Um And thinking outside the box, creative work. If you give it a well structured task machines can be very good at it. But even asking the right questions, that's hard. There's a quote that. Andrew Mcafee and I use in our book second machine age um Apparently uh Pablo Picasso was shown an early computer and he came away kind of unimpressed. He goes well honestly all the fuss is all that does is answer questions. And you know to him the interesting thing was asking the questions Yeah </s><s>[INST] try to replace me. Gpt three dare you? Although some people think I'm a robot. You have this cool plot that shows um I just remember where economists land uh where I think the X. Axis is the income and then the Y axes I guess aggregating the information of how replaceable the job is. Or I [/INST] Think there's an inability for machine learning index. Exactly. So we have all 970 occupations and they're scattered in all in all four corners have some occupations but there is a definite pattern which is the lower wage occupations tend to have more tasks that are suitable for machine learning, like cashiers. I mean anyone has gone to a supermarket or CVS knows that, you know, they don't not only read barcodes but they can recognize you an apple and an orange and a lot of things that cashiers humans used to be needed for. Um at the end of the other end of the spectrum, there are some jobs like airline pilot that are among the highest paid in our economy, but also a lot of them are suitable for machine learning. A lot of those tasks are um And then yeah, you mentioned economists, I couldn't help peeking at those and there paid a fair amount. Maybe not as much as some of us think they should be, but but they uh have some tasks our school for machine learning, but for now at least most of the task of economists do our didn't end up being in that category. And I should say I didn't create that data, we just took the, took the analysis and that's what it came out of it. And over time that scatter plot will be updated as uh as the technology improves. But it was just interesting to see the pattern there and it is a little troubling in so far as if you just take the technology as it is today, it's likely to worsen income inequality and a lot of dimensions. </s><s>[INST] So on the on this topic of uh the effect of ai and our on a landscape of work is one of the people that have been speaking about it in the public domain public discourse is the presidential candidate. Andrew yang. What are your thoughts about? Andrew, what are your thoughts about you b. I That uh universal basic income that he made one of the core idea by the way he has like hundreds of ideas about like everything is kind of, it's kind of interesting, but what are your thoughts about him and what are your thoughts about UBI? I [/INST] let me answer, you know, the question about his broader, you know, approach first. I mean, I just love that he's really thoughtful analytical, I agree with his values. So that's awesome and he read my book and and mentions that sometimes it makes me even more exciting. Um and uh the thing that he really made the centerpiece of his campaign was U. B. I. And I always originally kind of a fan of it and then as I studied it more became less of a fan, although I'm beginning to come back a little bit, So let me tell you a bit of my evolution, you know, as an economist we have by looking at the problem of people not have enough income. And the simplest thing is well why don't we write him a check problem solved. But then I talked to my sociologist friends and people being and they really convinced me that just writing a check doesn't really get at the core values, you know, Voltaire once said that work solved three great kills boredom, vice and need and uh, you know, you can deal with the need thing by writing a check, but people need a sense of meaning, meaning they need something to do and when, you know, say steel workers and coal miners, um lost their jobs and we're just given checks, alcoholism, depression, divorce, all those social indicators, drug use all went way up. People just weren't happy just sitting around collecting a check. Um, maybe it's part of the way they were raised, Maybe it's something innate in people that they need to feel wanted and needed. So it's not as simple as just writing people to check. You need to also give them a way to have a sense of purpose and that was important to me. And the second thing is that, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we are far from the end of work, you know, I don't buy the idea that there's just not enough work to be done. I see our cities need to be cleaned up and robots can't do most of that. You know, we need to have better childcare, we need better health care, we need to take care of people who are mentally ill or older, we need to prepare our roads. There's so much work that require at least partly may be entirely a human component. So rather than like right, all these people off, let's find a way to repurpose them and keep them engaged. Um Now that said, I would like to see more buying power um from people who are sort of at the bottom end of the spectrum. The economy has been designed and evolved in a way that I think very unfair to a lot of hard working people. I see super hardworking people aren't really seeing their wages grow over the past 2030 years while some other people who have been, you know, super smart and are super lucky have have had, you know, have made billions or hundreds of billions and uh I don't think they need those hundreds of billions to have the right incentives to invent things. I think if you talk to almost any of them, so I have, You know, they don't think that they need an extra $10 billion dollars to to do what they're doing most of them probably would would love to do it for only a billion or maybe for nothing </s> |
<s>[INST] Okay let's go to this thought experiment. Okay imagine that mortality is actually uh like a prerequisite for happiness. So if we become immortal will actually become deeply unhappy and the model is able to know that. So what is this supposed to tell you stupid human about it? Yes you can become immortal but you will become deeply unhappy if the model is if the A. G. I. System Is trying to empathize with you human, what is it supposed to tell you that? Yes you don't have to die but you're really not gonna like it is that is it going to be deeply honest? Like there's a interstellar, what is it the Ai says like humans want 90% honesty, so like you have to pick how honest I want to answer these practical questions. [/INST] I love Interstellar by the way, I think it's like such a sidekick to the entire story but </s><s>[INST] at the [/INST] same time it's like really interesting. It's kind </s><s>[INST] of limited in certain ways, right? [/INST] Yeah it's limited and I think that's totally fine by the way, I don't think uh I think it's fine and plausible to have limited and imperfect A G. I. S. </s><s>[INST] Is that the feature almost as [/INST] an example, like it has a fixed amount of compute on its physical body and it might just be that even though you can have a super amazing mega brain, super intelligent. Ai also can have like you know less intelligent ai so you can deploy in a power efficient way and then they're not perfect, they might make mistakes. </s><s>[INST] No I meant more like say you have infinite compute and it's still good to make mistakes sometimes. Like in order to integrate yourself? Like [/INST] um what </s><s>[INST] is it going back to good Will hunting Robin Williams character says like the human imperfections, that's the good stuff, right? Isn't that isn't that like we don't want perfect, we want flaws in [/INST] part </s><s>[INST] two to form connections with each other because it feels like something you can attach to your feelings too, the flaws in that same way you want ai that's flawed, I don't know, I feel like a perfectionist [/INST] But then you're saying okay </s><s>[INST] but that's not a G I C A G. I would need to be intelligent enough to give answers to humans that humans don't understand. And I think perfect isn't something humans can't understand because even science doesn't give perfect answers. There's always gaps and mysteries and I don't know. I don't know if humans want perfect. [/INST] Yeah. I can imagine just having a conversation with this kind of oracle entity as you'd imagine them. And yeah, maybe it can tell you about you know based on my analysis of human condition. Uh You might not want this and here's some of the things that might but </s><s>[INST] every every dumb human will say, yeah trust me I can give me the truth. I can handle it. [/INST] But that's the beauty like people can choose. So But </s><s>[INST] then I think [/INST] the </s><s>[INST] old marshmallow test with the kids and so on. I feel like too many people like I can't handle the truth. Probably including myself like the deep truth of the human condition. I don't I don't know if I can handle it. Like what if there's some dark, what if we are an alien science experiment and it realizes that what if it had I [/INST] mean I mean this is the matrix. You know all over again. </s><s>[INST] I don't know I would what would I talk about? I don't even Yeah I [/INST] probably I will </s><s>[INST] go with the safer scientific questions at first that have nothing to do with my own personal life immortality, just like about physics and so [/INST] on. </s><s>[INST] Uh to build up like let's see where is that or maybe see if it has a sense of humor. That's another question. Would it be able to presumably in order to, if it understands humans deeply would be able to generate uh [/INST] yeah, to </s><s>[INST] generate humor. [/INST] Yeah, I think that's actually a wonderful benchmark almost. Like is it able, I think that's a really good point basically </s><s>[INST] to make you laugh [/INST] if it's able to be like a very effective stand up comedian that is doing something very interesting computational e I think being funny is extremely hard. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] because </s><s>[INST] it's hard in a way like a touring test. The original intent of the touring test is hard because you have to convince humans and there's nothing that's why that's what comedians talk about this. Like there's this is deeply honest because if people can't help but laugh and if they don't laugh that means you're not funny, they laugh. That's funny [/INST] and you're showing you need a lot of knowledge to create to create humor about like the occupation, human condition and so on. And then you need to be clever with it. </s><s>[INST] You mentioned a few movies, you tweeted movies that I've seen five plus times but I'm ready and willing to keep watching Interstellar Gladiator, contact good will hunting the Matrix Lord of the Rings all three avatar, fifth element So on it goes on to make [/INST] it to </s><s>[INST] me and girls. I'm not gonna ask [/INST] about </s><s>[INST] great [/INST] um </s><s>[INST] what are some of the jump onto your memory that you love and why? Like you mentioned the Matrix as as a computer person. Why do you love the Matrix? [/INST] There's so many properties that make it like beautiful interesting. So there's all these philosophical questions but then there's also a G. I. S and there's simulation and it's cool and there's you know the black you know </s><s>[INST] the look of it, the feel [/INST] the feel of it, the action, the bullet time. It was just like innovating in so many ways </s><s>[INST] and then uh good will good will hunting. What do you like that one? Yeah [/INST] I just I really like this uh tortured genius sort of character who's like grappling with whether or not he has like any responsibility or like what to do with this gift that he was given or like how to think about the whole thing and uh </s> |
<s>[INST] thing is just like what happens with light cones and all this kind of thing. That's where the causal invariance comes into play. I mean, that's, you know, most of your conversations are about physics, but it's kind of funny that this probably and possibly might have even bigger impact and revolutionary ideas in totally other disciplines. Right. [/INST] Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. So the question is, why is that happening? Right. And the reason it's happening, I've thought about this obviously, because I like to think about these meta questions of, you know, what's happening is this model that we have is an incredibly minimal model. Yeah. Once you have an incredibly minimal model and this happened with cellular automata as well, cellular automata are an incredibly minimal model. And so it's inevitable that it gets you it's sort of an upstream thing that gets used in lots of different places. And it's like, you know, the fact that it gets used. You know, cellular automata or sort of a minimal model of let's say road traffic flow or something. And they're also a minimal model of something in, you know, chemistry and they're also a minimal model of something and in epidemiology, right? It's because they're such a simple model that they apply to all these different things. Similarly, this model that we have of the physics project is another cellular automata or a minimal model of parallel computation where you've defined space and time. These models are minimal models where you have not defined space and time. They have been very hard to understand in the past, but I think perhaps the most important breakthrough there is the realization that these are models of physics and therefore that you can use everything that's been developed in physics to get intuition about how things like that work, that's why you can potentially use ideas from physics to get intuition about how to do parallel computing and because the underlying model is the same and but we have all of this achievement in physics. I mean, you might say, oh, you've come up with the fundamental theory of physics, that throws out what people have done in physics before. Well, it doesn't. But also the real power is to use what's been done before in physics to apply it in these other places. </s><s>[INST] Yes. And this kind of brings up, I know you probably don't particularly love commenting on the work of others. But let me, let me bring up a couple of personalities just because it's fun and people are curious about it. So there's a Sabine Hasenfelder. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She, she wrote this book that I need to read. But I forget what the title is, but it's Beauty Leads Us Australian Physics is a subtitle or something like that, which so much about what we're talking about now, like this simplification is a, to us humans seems to be beautiful. Like there's a certain intuition with physicists, with people that a simple theory like this reducibility pockets of reducibility is the ultimate goal. And I think what she tries to argue is, no, we just need to come up with theories that are just really good at predicting physical phenomena. It's okay to have a bunch of disparate theories as opposed to trying to chase this beautiful theory of everything is the ultimate beautiful theory. A simple one. [/INST] You know, it's always, it's always, what's your, what's your response to that? Well, so what you're quoting is I don't know the Sabine Hasenfelder's, you know, exactly what she said, but I'm quoting the title of her book. Okay. Let me, let me, let me respond to what you were describing, which may or may not have anything to do with what Sabine Hasenfeld says, or thinks. </s><s>[INST] Sorry, I might be misquoting the title of a book. Sorry, Sabine. Right. Sorry for misquoting. [/INST] Right. Sorry for misquoting. But, I mean, the question is, you know, is beauty a guide to whether something is correct? Which is kind of also the story of Occam's razor. You know, if you've got a bunch of different explanations of things, you know, is the thing that is the simplest explanation likely to be the correct explanation. And there are situations where that's true, and there are situations where it isn't true. Sometimes in human systems it is true, because people have kind of, you know, in evolutionary systems sometimes it's true because it's sort of being kicked to the point where it's minimized. But, you know, in physics, does Occam's razor work? You know, is there a simple, quotes beautiful explanation for things or is it a big mess? You know, we don't intrinsically know. You know, I think that before I worked on the project in recent times, I would have said we do not know how complicated the rule for the universe will be. And I would have said, you know, the one thing we know, which is a fundamental fact about science, that's the thing that makes science possible, is that there is order in the universe. I mean, early theologians would have used that as an argument for the existence of God, because it's like why is that order in the universe? Why doesn't every single particle in the universe just do its own thing? Something must be making there be order in the universe. In the sort of early theology point of view, the role of God is to do that, so to speak. In our, we might say it's the role of a formal theory to do that. And then the question is, but how simple should that theory be? And should that theory be one that, you know, where I think the point is if it's simple, it's almost inevitably somewhat beautiful in the sense that because all the stuff that we see has to fit into this little tiny theory. And the way it does that has to be, you know, it depends on your notion of beauty. But I mean, for me, the sort of the surprising connectivity of it is, at least in my aesthetic, </s> |
<s>[INST] You know, I work with a bunch of folks in the Adobe creative Suite and I'm kind of forcing them or inspired them to learn python to do a bunch of stuff that helps them and it's interesting because they probably wouldn't call themselves a python programmers, but they're all using python. I would love it if the tools like Photoshop and premiere and all those kinds of tools that are targeted towards creative people. I guess that's where Excel. Excel is targeted towards a certain kind of audience that works for data, financial people, all that kind of stuff. If they knew there would be easy ways to leverage to use python for quick scripting tasks. And, you know, there's an exciting application of artificial intelligence in the space that I'm hopeful about looking at open ai codex with generating programs. So almost helping people bridge the gap from kind of visual interface to generating programs to something formal and then they can modify it and so on, but kind of without having to read the manual, without having to do a google search and stack overflow, which is essentially what a neural network does when it's doing code generation, uh, is actually generating code and allowing a human to communicate with multiple programs and then maybe even programs to communicate with each other via python. So, that, that, to me is a really exciting possibility because I think there's um, there's a friction to kinda like, how do I learn how to use python in my life, there's a oftentimes you kind of what started a class, you start learning about types. Yes, I don't know, functions like this is, you know, python is the first language with which you start to learn to program, but I feel like that's going to take a long time for you to understand why it's useful, you almost want to start with the script. [/INST] Well you you do, in fact, I think starting with the theory, the theory behind program languages and types. And I mean types are there to make the compiler writers jobs easier. Types are not, I mean, heck, do you have an ontology of types or just the objects on this table? No. So types are there because compiler writers are human and they're limited in what they can do. But um I think that the beauty of scripting, like there's a, there's a python book that's called Automate the boring stuff, which is exactly the right mentality. Um, I grew up with computers in a time when I could uh, when, when steve jobs was still pitching these things as bicycles for the mind. They were supposed to not just media consumption devices. Um, but they were, they were actually, you could, you could write some code, you can write basic, you could write some stuff to do some things. And that feeling of a computer as a thing that we can use to extend ourselves has all but evaporated for a lot of people. So you see a little bit in parts of the current generation of youth around Minecraft or roadblocks, right? And I think python circuit python, these things um could be a renaissance of that, of people actually shaping and using their computers as computers um as an extension of their minds and curiosity, their creativity. So, you know, you talk about scripting the adobe suite with python um in the three D graphics world, python um is a scripting language that some of these three D graphics sweets use and I think it's great we should better support those kinds of things. But ultimately the idea that I I should be able to have power over my computing environment if I want these things to happen repeatedly all the time, I should be able to say that somehow to the computer right now, whether um the operating systems get there faster by having some, you know, Siri backed with open Ai with whatever. So you can just say Siri, make this, do this, do this and every other friday. Right? We probably will get there somewhere. And apples always had these ideas, you know, there's the apple script in the menu that no one ever uses. But um you can do these kinds of things. But when you start doing that kind of scripting, the challenge isn't learning the type system or even the syntax of the language. The challenges, all of the dictionaries and all the objects of all their properties and attributes and parameters like who's got time to learn all that stuff. Right? So that's when then programming by prototype or by example, becomes the right way to get the user expressed their desire. Um So there's a lot of these these different ways that we can approach programming but I do think when as you were talking about the the adobe scripting thing I was thinking about you know when we do use something like Numpy when we use things in the python data and scientific let's say expression system. There's a reason we use that which is that it gives us a mathematical precision. It gives us actually quite a lot of precision over precisely what we mean about this data set, that data set. And it's the fact that we can have that precision that lets python be powerful over as a duct tape for data. You know you give me a TsV or a C. S. V. And you if you give me some massively expensive vendor tool for data transformation, I don't know I'm gonna be able to solve your problem. But if you give me a python prompt you can throw whatever data you want at me. I will be able to mash it into shape. So that ability to take it as sort of this like um you know machete out into the data jungle is really powerful and I think that's why at some level we're not we're not going to get away from some of these expressions and a P. I. S. And libraries in python for for data transformation </s> |
<s>[INST] I found one in Connecticut out of all places. [/INST] That's amazing. How I grew up with it or I saw it is, my family was on Guadalupanos. We were Catholic and we venerated the Virgin of Guadalupe specifically, the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But every now and then there were winks and nods to a skeletal saint in family practices. And even when I went to work, the older guys that I was working with would tell me like, we gotta go ask for protection. So they would drive me over to the church and I thought it was going to the cathedral. And then we made a left turn and it wasn't the cathedral. It was the market next to the cathedral in Tijuana. And in the little corner, there was a big Santa Muerta Reaper effigy. And then I knew why I had to bring a bottle tequila. It was like, why am I bringing a bottle tequila to the church? It was for her, for death, la Muerta. It was partly hazing. And also they did believe that they were basically imbued with the being agents of death in a way. So it was like a cultural thing as well, something that they wore on them as not only protection, but as also like a samurai would wear this death iconography on them or how the Maori would do haka dances to some of these guys in their kind of warrior culture that they were growing up with or trying to imbue on us, the young guys, they would take us there and they would imbue us with iconography of Santa Muerta </s><s>[INST] to be like a psychological thing. So that gives you strength and meaning in the face of struggle, [/INST] like in the face of difficulties in life? I think, you know, you're close to death and having a relationship to death in the form of a symbolic representation of it like a Santa Muerta or an icon like that makes it not as scary, I guess, or not only that, but it's also something that the other side, the enemy, the cartels groups, they would venerate it as well. So when they would see it on you, it was almost debilitating to them. They were like, oh, are you guys cops? Are you guys, why are you wearing that? So there was an aspect of that to it, a memento mori type thing </s><s>[INST] where, you know, remember death, you know, type thing. There's some aspect in which you don't wanna mess [/INST] with a person who meditates on death. There was some of that, yeah. There was a saying, I think they probably took it from a movie or something like that, but I don't know where they got it. </s><s>[INST] May I earn your need and be your wrath? [/INST] Oh man, that's a good line. They would say that to the statue of La Santa, you know. Another thing people, it's not a cartel specific saint though. It's like everybody, like on all levels, from the lady that sells tortillas to the cops, to the military. There's some people in the military that venerate it. There's a very specific symbol of how this is like a weird relationship specifically in Santa Marta in Mexico. There's a shrine outside of Tijuana right across the Presa. It's like a water reservoir right outside Tijuana. And there was a big Santa Marta altar there, like on the roadside. And my former boss, Leza Ola ordered that thing destroyed. So he ordered a truck to destroy it. It was a famous thing. And it was rebuilt the next night. And I know for a fact that some of the people that rebuilt that were some of the same guys </s><s>[INST] that were destroying it. Oh man, that's pretty symbolic. So it's just, it's not something that can be killed. [/INST] It's a part of the spirit of the people. It keeps getting destroyed by ultra Christian groups or Catholic groups, and it keeps getting rebuilt. Personally for me as a, you know, I don't believe that there's a reaper skeleton in the sky protecting me. But I do believe in the aspect of an ending, you know, and how it's important to, you know, the ending is important in all things and death should be present in life. And if it's not, then you're delusional about things. So it's a mechanism to meditate on death once again. Yeah. And, you know, having my daughter who's eight view it as a benevolent thing, you know, she's a kid and she sees a skeleton that represents death. And Jesus does, it's like, I think in a way, Mexicans have taken some of those aspects, be it day of the dead, some of these practices related to some occultism, aspects around, you know, St. Judas, you know, St. Judas, St. Judas is the patron state of lost causes. And it's one of the most venerated saints in Mexico, you know, Jesus probably, I don't know, the fourth or fifth you pray to, which is pretty funny and ridiculous. But the reason why, and this is something I heard from somebody that was actually, we found him with a gun and on his gun, he had a St. Judas effigy and he said, oh like why St. Judas? Perca Sancudas? And he's like, well, he's the last saint you pray to. What do you mean? Well, on the list of Saint's you pray to, he's the last one because when you pray to Judas, you might get the other Judas on the line. That's the last one you pray to, that's why he's like the lost cause of St. I remember like even how we try and bribe or like maneuver our way even in spirituality, it's spiritual practices. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] You know? Such, yeah. You know? Such a fascinating culture that it's unlike anything else. [/INST] And it's right next door and it's here too. Again, I found an altar in Connecticut, which is pretty fascinating. There's one in Arizona. Again, it's one of the fastest growing spiritual practices in the, and not only in the US, but like across the, there's somebody from Russia reached out. There's an altar out there and there's a group of people praying to Santo Marte. And I've been posting and writing a lot about it recently, just from my own experience and some of the stuff that I gathered for myself and all the way out there. Those people are fascinated by some of those aspects. </s> |
<s>[INST] handle this? Will the leg lock training kick in and you'll see the result. Uh, John Carla is, [/INST] as on top passing an open guard so you can see his legs away from any attacks. Yes. His opponent, Owen from Ireland is employing the same tactics that we made famous years ago. The idea of sitting to butterfly guard and looking to entangle the legs, he's kind of playing that game. So, um, so John Carla is obviously used to this from training the gym. So he's doing a good job of preventing entanglement, controlling his opponent's shoelaces and moving out to an angle which limits his opponent's entry options. So hands on the shoelaces and angles, uh, is a good defense here. It's an initial defense. Now his opponent wants to get underneath the center of gravity. So John Carla wants to get outside the, uh, the line of his legs. At some point your opponent's going to entangle. If he's determined to entangle, at some point it's going to happen. So John Carla decides, okay, let's let it happen and let's see where his feet go and let's see how disciplined he is with his feet. And the opponent is inverted. Uh, uh, here does a good job getting behind John Carla's knee. So now they're fully locked in. So John Carla moves away to protect the heel, rotates out, controls his shoelace. Now at this point, the Irishman's starting to lose discipline with his own foot position. Okay. He's so focused on his own attack that he's starting to get a little sloppy with his own foot position. You see, he's assuming, oh, I'm the guy who's attacking. So my opponent will be afraid of my leg locks and is starting to make some small </s><s>[INST] technical errors that John Carla will be able to take advantage of. So he's threatening the sort [/INST] of the north-south passer, like, uh, he's not putting too much pressure on the pass because we're still pretty early in the match and he's not ready to score yet. So here again, he turns away his heel. Now his opponent's starting to get more and more cavalier with his foot positioning to a point where now it's just downright sloppy. So John Carla sees it, </s><s>[INST] identifies it, locks up a wrist to wrist toe hold and breaks his foot. Where's the [/INST] dumb question? Where's the control here? How is he? The control comes from his opponent. The entanglement is his opponent. His opponent is holding his own body in place with his own legs. </s><s>[INST] So he's the root of his own problem here. So he got sloppy. Well done. Well done. A little smile [/INST] from John Carla was very nice. The reason for that smile, you can probably guess is because a year ago, this would have been a disaster. And now instead it's a guaranteed ticket to the finals and either a gold or a silver medal. And so you can see in that compressed moment, that's the look of a man who's recognized just how much progress he's made and what was once </s><s>[INST] a weakness in roughly 10 months was the time it took. And so he faces Lucas Hulk by Bosa [/INST] in the final here. Now these two have a history. Hulk has beaten John Carla many times. And so for John Carla, it's a question of, okay, here I'm matched up against a guy who's repeatedly beaten me. How am I going to turn this around now? We talked earlier about confidence. If confidence was just a mental thing, John Carla never would have won this fight. When you've lost all those times to an athlete, words aren't going to change anything. But you can see right from the start, when they get into the handfight, John Carla is much more tactically adept with his handfighting. He's doing a good job of controlling his opponent's hands, preventing any kind of prolonged pressure on the head. And Hulk gets a sense here in which he realizes he's fighting a very different person. </s><s>[INST] And this goes a long time. Again, another super grueling match. Wrestling that eventually leads [/INST] to a back take care, back triangle, body triangle. Here you can see the same tactics utilized by Gordon Ryan. Back control based around the body triangle, many attempts to try and entrap his opponent's arm and take away those defensive arms. The main difference here is, again, you have an athlete with a very powerful, compact neck. So neck penetration is difficult. </s><s>[INST] And so John Carla will switch to a palm to palm strangle instead of the conventional figure four. And now there's eight minutes left. So all the time in the world, is it only just a matter [/INST] of time at this point in situations like this? Yeah. John Carla has a massive tactical lead in points. There's literally no way he could lose this match at this point. Even if his opponent did get out of here and take him down, John Carla would still be a hit on points. So the question now is not whether John Carla will get the gold medal, but whether John Carla will get it by submission. And there it is. There's the penetration of the neck and he can't get the figure four. So he opts for palm to palm instead, and there's the submission. Now, what a journey. John Carla's relatively unemotional man, but you can see there's emotion. That's not fake. That's genuine. And that's the emotions of a man who 10 months ago couldn't have done that. And then 10 months later, by dent of his own hard work and dedication and his ability to actively attack his weaknesses and turn them into strengths and then develop an ability to finish, that was a truly, truly </s> |
<s>[INST] I've gotten a gift when I was, we were just talking about the watch from joe Rogan and this almost beats it. So [/INST] uh </s><s>[INST] tell me what this particular book on Hitler is. This is volume [/INST] two. So this is Ian Kershaw, he wrote the famous two volume on Hitler. I'm a big book Nerd. And I spent a lot of time reading biographies in particular. So this one, um if you need a one volume rise and fall of the third Reich right, I think you talked about that William Shirer because that's like Hitler's Rise in Nazi Germany, the War etcetera. But I like bios because it's the good biographies story, the Times, Right? And so this one, the first volume does exactly that, which is that it doesn't just tell the story of Hitler. It's the context of poor, you know, this kid in Austria and he's got all these dreams, but then actually pretty courageous in terms of World War right, gets pinned a medal on by the Kaiser and then what it's like to have to lose World War and actually like lose this stain. And then the Rise within Everybody knows that story, The Beer Hall putsch and all that. This one I like and the reason I like Kershaw is obviously number one is english, which is actually hard, right? Like in order to write that story, who can do both, the primary source material and then translate it for people like us. But he tells the dynamic story of Hitler so well, um in the second volume, just like the level of detail and you talked about this looks like, what was it like inside that room? Inside with chamberlain, like, what was it like in terms of who was this like magnetic madman, who did convince the smartest people in the world at the time? And you know, Up until like 1940, the Soviet gamble, like was a trumpet took tremendous risks, but highly calculated thinking, no, no, no, I'm not going to pay for this one, I'm not going to pay for this one. And put himself had a remarkable ability, not just to put himself in the minds of the german people, but in terms of his adversaries with when he was across from Mussolini calculate like how exactly did Mussolini, the guy who created fascism, becomes like second fiddle to Hitler? I think it's an amazing bio and yeah, like Ian Kershaw along with Richard Evans to my favorite authors on the third Reich no question, </s><s>[INST] do you think he was born this way, that charisma, whatever that is? Or was it something he developed strategically? That's like the question you apply to some of the great leaders. Was he just a madman who had the instinct to be able to control people one in the room together with them? Or is this like, he worked [/INST] at it? I think he worked at it, but also there is an innate quality, I'm forgetting his name, his lifelong Rudolph, the one who flew to Berlin in 1940 African anyway, so he, he helped Hitler write mine con and he was like Slavishly devoted to him in prison, this is 1925 or something like that. And so you read that and you're like, well how does he get this? Like crank wacko to basically believe he's like the second coming, help him write this book. I mean literally they lived together in the prison cell and they wake up every day and as he was composing mind confident because of the beer hall putsch and all that had this like absolute ability to gather people around him. I think his greatest skill was is he was just a very good politician truly. I mean if you look at his ability in order to read coalitional politics and then convince exactly the right people in order to follow him, I think I heard you ask this once and I've thought about it a lot, which is like who could have stopped Hitler in Germany right? It's always like the ever present question of course, like the whole baby Hitler thing really. The answer is Hindenburg. Hindenburg was the person who could have stopped and had the immense standing within the german public. The only real like war hero definitely was personally skeptical of fascism and nazism and but he was and it didn't like him and he knew he was full of ship, he was like, yeah, I think this guy is dangerous. I think this guy could do a lot of damage to the republic, but he proceeded basically to Hitler at the time and I think that he was one of the main people who could have done something about it. </s><s>[INST] And also he was able to convince the generals and military, I mean that was that was very interesting and to convince Chamberlain and just the other political leaders there, that's something I often think about, because we're just reading books about these people I think about with like Jeffrey Epstein for example, like evil people, not evil, but people have done evil things, Let's not go to the dan Carlin, what is the uh people that do evil things? I wonder what they're like in a room because I know quite a lot of intelligent people that were um did not see uh did not see the evil in Jeffrey Epstein and spend time with them and not, we're not bothered by it in the same sense, Hitler, it seems like he was able to get just even on it before he would have power because people get intoxicated by power and so on, they want to be close to power, but even before he had power, he was able to convince people and it's unclear like is there something that's more than words, It's like the way you I mean people talk tell stories about like this piercing look or whatever, all that kind of stuff. I wonder if that, if that's somehow part of it, like that has to be the base floor of any of these charismatic leaders, you have to be able to, in a room alone be able to convince anybody of anything. [/INST] So I can tell you from my personal experience, one of the best educated lessons I got was when I got to meet trump. So I interviewed trump four different times as a journalist spent like 2.5 hours with him in the oval office, not alone, but like me and one person in the press secretary and that was it. So I actually got to observe him and as a guy who reads these types of books right? And you know you think of trump obviously most people what they see on television, you know in articles and more, but being able to observe it like one on one, I was closer to him than you know, than I am right now from you. That was one of the most educational experiences I got because it's like you just said the look the leaning forward the way he talks the way he is a master at taking the question and answering exactly which party wants and then if you try and follow up, he's like excuse me, you know, like he knows, and then whenever you talk it's not that he's annoyed about getting interrupted, if he realizes he's been Miranda ring and then you interrupt him all good, but if he's striving home a point which he has to make sure appears in your transcript or whatever, it's it's like it really was fascinating for me to look at and what was also crazy with trump is I realize how much he was living in the moment. So like when I went to the oval, you know, I've read all these biographies and like, I walk in, I'm like holy sh it you're like, I'm in the oval </s><s>[INST] office, you interviewed him in the oval [/INST] in the oval every time I was in the oval office, you </s><s>[INST] scared shitless. [/INST] Well I wasn't scared. I was just look, it's the oval office, right? I mean, I'm just nerdy was like this kid, I'm so I will admit this year, like I printed out on my dad's label maker when I was like seven and I wrote like the oval office on my bedroom. So I was like, you know, a huge pull up nerd, obviously egomaniacal even from seven, but so like for this, I mean it was huge, right? I'm like this 25 year old kid and like, I walk in there and I see the couch, right? And I'm like, oh man, that's Kissinger, like, you know, I'm like, that's where like Kissinger Nixon got on their knees and you see over by the door and you're like, are the scuff marks still there from when Eisenhower used to play, You know, this is all running through my mind with trump, none of us there, none of it, right? So like even the desk I could put my phone on the desk to record and I'm like this is the fucking resolute desk like I shouldn't put my phone </s><s>[INST] on this thing [/INST] and I'm like H. M. S. Resolute, you know all the international even for him, he doesn't think about any of it. It was like amazing to me. Like he had this portrait of Andrew Jackson right next to his to the I think on the fireplace right here on the right. And the most revealing question was when I was like mr president, what are people going to remember you for 100 years? And he was like he was like I don't know like veterans choice, he has a list in front of him of his accomplishments which is stashing by the way. Yeah well I mean that's what I wanted to know and he's like veterans choice and I remember looking at him being like it's not going to be better. Like I'm like I'm looking at you donald trump the harbinger of something new, we still don't know what the hell it is. And so I realized with these guys and their charisma and more is that they don't think about themselves the way that we think about them and that was actually important to understand because a lot of people like trump is playing all this chest. I'm like I assure you he's not, he's truly one time I was interviewing him and he had a certificate that he had to sign or something on his desk, he's like it was like child almost like he got distracted by, he's like, oh, what's this? You know, it's just like picking up and I was like, wow, this this is the guy like this is what he is. </s><s>[INST] Well, I wonder if there was a different person because you were recording then offline and I can tell you [/INST] Well, here's the thing though, because that's another part of it because that two hours, I would say like half of that was not on the record. So like, whenever he's off the record, he changes completely, right? I don't want to go into too much of it or whatever, but like he uh I mean he is so mindful of when that camera is on and when the mic is hot in terms of language that he uses what he's willing to admit, what he's willing to talk about, How he's willing to even appear in front of his staff. Um I think the most revealing thing trump ever did Was there was this press conference right after a lawsuit right after the midterm elections in 2018 and one of the journalists was like, mr President, thank you for doing this press conference. And he looks at me, he goes, it's called earned media. It's worth billions just see just like had so much disdain for him cause he's like, I'm not doing this for you. He's like, I'm doing this for </s><s>[INST] me. So he's really aware of the narrative story. I mean that the people have talked about that all comes from the tabloid media of the, from new york and so on. He's a master of that. But I've also heard stories of just in private, he's really, I don't know, overuse the word charismatic, but just like, he is a really interesting, almost like, um friendly, like a good person. Like, like that's what I heard I heard actually surprising the same thing about Hillary clinton uh, and like, I can't tell you, but like the way they present themselves perhaps very different than they are as human beings. One on one that, that's something maybe that's just like a skill thing? Maybe, maybe the way they present themselves in public is actually there, I mean almost their real self and they're just Really good in private one on one to go into this mode of just being really intimate in some kind of human [/INST] way. I think that's part of it because I would notice that with trump, you know, he's like, it's almost like a tour guide. It was very like, it's very crazy, right? Because you're like, you're in the oval, I mean it's his office and he's like, he's like, do you guys want anything like, you want to diet coke because he drinks like all this diet </s><s>[INST] coke, you know, and I apologize. Yeah, he's just like, he's like, you guys want to diet [/INST] coke right? And you're sitting there and you're like the way he is able to like, like the last time I interviewed him, he he wanted to do it outside because he like he studied himself from all angles and he knows exactly how he looks on a camera and with the witch lighting and so we were supposed to interview him on camera in the oval office, which is actually rare, like you don't usually get that and they ended up moving outside at the last minute and he came out and he's like, I picked this spot for he's a great lighting Yeah, I was like, I was like you are your own like lighting </s><s>[INST] director, the [/INST] president. </s><s>[INST] It's so [/INST] funny but it's like you said, he's very charismatic and friendly. I mean you wouldn't I mean look, this is what I mean in terms of dynamism of these people that gets lost and I think even he knows that like I don't think he would want that side of him that you know that you're seeing those off the record moments and more in order to come out because he's very keen about how exactly he presents to the public, it's like, you know, even his presidential portrait, everybody usually smiles and he refused to smile. He was like, I want to look like Winston Churchill, you know, like even he knew that, do </s><s>[INST] you think he believes that he um what what he kind of implies that he is one of if not the greatest president in american history, Like people kind of laugh at this, but there's quite, I mean there's quite a lot of people, first of all that make the argument. He's the greatest president in history. Like I've heard this argument being made. Uh, and I mean, I don't know what the first of all, I don't care. Like you can't, yeah, make an argument that anyone is the greatest. That's just, that's just uh, I come from a school of like being humble and modest and so on. It's like even Michael, you can't have that conversation. Okay. Uh, so I like that he's humble enough to say like Abraham Lincoln or whatever, like he says, maybe [/INST] Lincoln remember </s><s>[INST] that maybe uh, you think he actually believes that or is that something he understands? Well, create news and also perhaps more importantly piss off a large number of people. Is he almost like a musician masterfully playing the emotions of the public or does he, or, and does he believe when he looks in the mirror, I'm one of the greatest men in history [/INST] combination of all three. Um, I do think he believes it and for the reason why I don't think he knows that much about us history. I really mean that like, and that's what I meant whenever I was in there and I realized he was just living in the moment. I don't think he knew all that much about what I mean, this is why it was elected in many ways, right? So I'm not, I'm not saying this is in orbit, like I'm not making a judgment on this, I'm just saying, I do think in his mind he does think he was one of the best presidents in american history largely because, and I encounter this, a lot of people work for him, which is that they didn't really know all that much kind of about what came before and all that. And it's not necessarily to hold it against them because for in many ways that's what they were elected to do or elected to be in many ways an </s><s>[INST] interesting question whether knowing history being a student of history is a productive or counterproductive. I tend to assume I really respect people who are deeply like, well read in history, like presidents that are almost like nerd history nerds, I admire that, but maybe that gets in the way [/INST] Well, it's </s><s>[INST] governance, I don't know, it's not, it's not, you know, I'm just sort of playing devil's advocate to my own beliefs, but it's possible that focusing on the moment and the issues and letting history, it's like first principles thinking, forget the lessons of the past and just focus on common sense reasoning through the problems [/INST] of today. Yeah, it's really hard question in terms of the modern era. I mean Obama was a student of history, like he used to have presidential biographers and people over. And I mean famously like robert a Caro one of my favorite presidential biographers. He was invited to, you know, have dinner with Obama and Obama would like pepper some of his everything. It was interesting cause he'd try and justify some of the things he didn't do by being like, well if you look at what they had to do and when I have to deal with minds much harder. So in that way I was a little piste off because I'd be like, no, that actually like you're comparing apples to oranges and all that. But if you look at Roosevelt teddy, Roosevelt in particular, this was, I mean a voracious reader, not just american history. All history he wrote is </s><s>[INST] just such a badass. She's [/INST] incredible. The only, the only president who willed himself to greatness. That's like the amazing thing about him. He wasn't tested by a crisis, right? Like it wasn't not, you don't have a civil war, didn't have World War Two. He didn't have to found the country literally or like, you know, didn't have to stave off that or he didn't buy, you know, Louisiana purchase like all, he literally came into a pretty, you know, static country and he could have just governed, you know, with me. He was the person who came before he was assassinated. Like he easily could have coasted, but he literally willed the country into something more. And that is, that's always why I focused a lot on him too because I'm like that in many ways, I wouldn't say it's easy to be great during crisis. I mean like look at trump but there it can bring out the best within you, but it's, it's a whole other level to bring out the best within yourself just for the sake of doing it. That I think is really interesting </s><s>[INST] speeches were amazing. I'm also a sucker for great speeches because I, I tend to uh see the role of the president is in part like inspirer in chief sort of to be able to, I mean that's what great leaders do, like seals the companies and so on, establish a vision, a clear vision and like like hit that hard, but the way you establish division isn't just like not to dig it joe biden but like like sleepy boring statements, you have to sell those statements and you have to, you know, you have to do it in a way where everybody is paying attention, everybody is excited and uh that teddy Roosevelt is definitely one of them. Obama was I think at least early on and I don't know uh was incredible at that. It does feel that the modern political landscape makes it more difficult to be inspirational in the sense because everything becomes bickering in division. I do want to ask you about trump. Uh so you're now a successful podcaster, I've talked to joe about trump joe Rogan and joe is not interested in talking to trump just fascinating. I tried to dig into like why uh what would you interview trump on like realignment for example? And do you think it's possible to do a 23 hour conversation with him where you will get at something like human or you get something like we were talking about the facade he puts forward, Do you think you could get past that? [/INST] No, I don't. I look, I was a White House correspondent. I observed, I observed this man very closely, I interviewed him. I think if that mike is hot, he knows what he's doing. He just he's he's done this too long. Looks, he just knows, </s><s>[INST] what do you think he's a different human now after the election. Do you think that? [/INST] Not at all? I don't, I think he's been the same person since 1976. I really do. Like basically 1976 I studied trump a lot and I think he's basically been the core of who he is and elements of that ever since he built that sent, you know, the ice rink in central Park and got that media attention, </s><s>[INST] that was it. Yeah, he's a fascinating study. I still, I feel uh there's a hope of me that there would be a podcast, like uh like a joe Rogan like a long form podcast where something could be, you know, and you're actually a really good person to do that. Well you can have a real conversation that looks back at the election and reveal something honest, but perhaps he's thinking about running again and so maybe he'll never let down that guard. But like, you know, I I just love it when uh there's this switch in people where you start start looking back at your life and wanting to tell stories like, you know, trying to extract wisdom and like realizing you're in this new phase of life for like the battles have all been fought now you're this old like former warrior and now you can tell the stories of that time and it seems like trump is still at it. Like the young warrior he is, he's not in the mode of telling stories. [/INST] You know what I got from Rogan, He's the only president who didn't age while in office. It's true, right? Like because, and this is what I mean, because he lives in the moment, like the job actually aged Obama, I mean, I mean Bush, same thing, even clinton clinton was like fat. It looked miserable by like 2000 H. W. Like Reagan famous actually. Yeah, pretty much everybody I think about um yeah, including john f Kennedy who got much sicker while in office. The job like weighs on you and makes you physically ill trump was he's the only person who just may have to do, </s><s>[INST] He almost gotten stronger and he was one of the most devices like uh the climate, there's so many people attacking him so much hatred, so much love and hatred. And it was just, it was, I mean, it was whatever it was, it was quite masterful in a fascinating study. If we, um, if we stick on Hitler for just a minute, what lessons do you take from that time, do you think it's a unique moment in human history that World War two, I mean, both Stalin and Hitler, you know, is is it something that's just uh, an outlier in all of human history in terms of the atrocities? Or is there, uh, the lessons to be learned? You mentioned, we mentioned offline that you're not just a student of the entirety of the history, but you're also fascinated by just different like policies and stuff like what's the immigration policy, what's the policy on science and [/INST] the third Reich and Power? Let me plug it by Richard Richard Evans, I think is what it was. Because that actually will tell you, like, what was it like to live under the Nazi regime without the war. Um, yeah, that's a hard question in terms of the lessons that we can learn, because there's a lot and it's actually been over. It's been over indexed almost everything comes back to Hitler in a conversation. So I kind of think of it within mao Stalin and Hitler as I don't want to say, payments for, but like The endpoint payment for the sins and the problems of the monarchical system that evolved within Europe basically like 1400 and more. I basically think that 1400 the wars between the state wars between France England the balance of power eventually World War I and then surfed them within Russia. The Russian revolution that birthed Stalin, same thing, the Kaiser and imperial Germany and this like incredibly crazy system of balance of power in World War One and then same thing within china in terms of the warring states and then the disintegration the european. You know how this is how they think of it, you know which is like the century of humiliation and they had to have something like this. I think of it. I try to think of it within the context of that. I don't want to think of I don't want to sound like an inevitable list but I think of it as I like to think about systems especially here in D. C. That's why I got into politics. Which is that you have to understand systems of power and the incentives within systems and the disincentives and the downside risk of what your of what you're creating because it that is what leads and creates the behavior within that system. I was just talking to my girlfriend about this yesterday. It's kind of funny like I read these, I'm obsessed with these books by Robert Caro, the biographies of Lyndon Johnson. He's written like 5000 pages so far and it's still not done. Okay. So like these are these are like books I based my life on. And look these are Washington and the story of the post new deal era and forward. Not much has changed. Like the Senate is the still the Senate. So many of the same problems with the Senate are still there. Um In some cases. No not not anymore but for a while some of the people who were there with johnson are still um one of them is the President of the United States just a joke. And you think about also same with the media relationship right? Like there's this media like they may have come and gone like the people who were in the media and who were cozy with the administration officials. I mean they just recreated themselves. It's like this it's like an ecosystem which doesn't change. And the that's why I'm like oh it's not that was a specific time that's just D. C. Like that is D. C. Because of the way the system is architected. It's pretty much been that way since like 19 oh eight whenever like you know teddy Roosevelt was dining with these journalists, he would yell at them and then he would go over to the society house and like in many ways that's now instead of going to Henry Adams house like the people are congregating in Kalorama um which is the richest neighborhood here at somebody else's house. like it's the same thing. So you have to think about the system and then the incentives within that system, about what the outcomes that they're producing, if you actually want to think about how can I change this from the outside. That's also why it's very difficult to change because the system is designed in order to produce actually pretty specific outcomes. That can only be changed in extraordinary times. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And sometimes hard to predict what kind of outcomes will result from the incentive the system that you create right in the case because especially when it's a novel kind of situation, what trump actually create a pretty normal situation. And a lot of the uh things that we've seen in the 20th century were very novel systems where people are very optimistic about the outcomes, right? And then it turned out to not have the results that they predicted i in terms of like things being unchanged for the past 100 years and so on. Can you, um, like Wikipedia style or maybe like in a musical form? Like I'm only a bill described to me. Uh [/INST] I still sing that to my head. So I'm just a </s><s>[INST] bill. Uh, I don't know what the rest of the song is, but let's let's uh, let's leave that to people's imagination. Uh How does this whole thing work? How does the us political system work? The three branches is how do you think about the system we have now, if you want to try to describe if aliens showed up and asked you like, they didn't have time. So this is an elevator thing. [/INST] Should we </s><s>[INST] destroy you? And as you plead to avoid destruction, How how would you describe how this thing works? [/INST] I would say we come together and we pick the people who make our laws, then we pick the guy who executes those laws and they together pick the people who determine whether they or the president is breaking the law at the most basic level. That's how I would describe it. </s><s>[INST] So the [/INST] so that the people who make the laws or Congress, the executive is, is charged with executing the laws as passed by Congress the system, the branches of government and the Supreme Court is picked by the president confirmed by the Senate, which then decides whether you or other people are breaking the law in terms of interpretation of that law. That's basically Oh, and they decide whether those laws are in, they fall within the they fall within the restrictions and the Want of the founders as expressed by the constitution of the United States, which is a set of principles that we came together in 1787. I want to make sure I get this right, um, 1787 and decided that we were going to live the rest of our lives barring a revolution and more and we've made it 200 and something years in order on under that system. </s><s>[INST] So there's a balance of power. This because you have multiple branches, there's a tension and the balance to it as designed by those original documents. Uh what, which is the most dysfunctional the branches, which is your favorite like in terms of talking about systems and like what's the greatest of concern and what is the greatest source of benefit in your view? [/INST] The presidency, obviously the presidency is my favorite to study obviously because it is the one where there's the most subject to variable change in terms of the personality involved because of so much power imbued within the executive. The Senate is actually pretty much the same. One of the things I love about reading about the Senate and histories of the Senate is, you're like, oh yeah, there were always assholes in the Senate who were doing their thing and, and you know, filibustering constantly based upon this or that. And then the, the personalities involved with the Senate haven't mattered as much since like pre civil war, right? Like pre Civil war, you had like Henry Clay and then daniel Webster and john c calhoun who even in their own way, they represented like larger constituencies and they crafted these compromises up until the outbreak of the civil war, et cetera. But like post since then, you don't think about like the titans within the Senate, most of that is because a lot of the stuff that they had power over has transferred over to the executive. So I'm most interested in really and like power where it lies, it's actually pretty, you know, throughout american history, much more used to lie with Congress. Now, it's obviously just so imbued within the executive that understanding executive power is, I think the thing I'm probably most interested in here, do </s><s>[INST] you think at this point the amount of power the president has corrupting to the to their ability to lead? Well, is this, you know, power corrupts absolute power corrupts? Absolutely. Are we uh is there too much power in the presidency? [/INST] There definitely is? And part of the problem, and I, one of the things I try to make come across to people is if you're the president, unless you have a hyper intentional view of how something must be different in government. Your view doesn't matter. So, for example, like if you were trump, let's take trump even and even in with a pretty intentional view, he was like, I'm going to end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq right? And he came in and he gets his generals and he's like, I want to end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oh, and I want to withdraw the troops from Syria and they're like, okay, we'll give us like six months. He's like, okay, and this is the thing about trump, he doesn't realize that it's bullshit. So they're like, he's like six months, he seems right. So then six months comes and he's like, he's like, so and then he will announce that he was like, and we're getting out of Syria, it's great and then the general's freak out there like whoa, we don't have a plan for that. He's like, but you guys told me six months, he's like, I don't know now we need another six months to figure this thing out by that time now your midterms. So now what are you gonna run for reelection? So more what I mean by that is if you don't have a hyper intentional view about how to change foreign policy, if you don't have a hyper intentional view about how the Department of Commerce should do its job, they are just going to go on autopilot. So there's this is part of the problem when you asked me about the presidency, it's not the presidency itself, like the president himself, which has become too powerful. It's that we have less democratic checks on the people and the systems that are on autopilot. And I would say that basically since 2008 We have voted every single time to disrupt that system Except in the case of 2020 with Joe Biden and there are a lot of different reasons around why that happened. And in every single one of those cases Obama and trump. They all failed in order to in order to radically disrupt that and that just shows you how titanic the task is. And I'm using my language precisely because I don't want to be like Deep State, but like obviously there's a deep state, </s><s>[INST] Deep state I guess has conspiratorial uh attention to it. But so you're, what you're saying is the true power currently lives with the autopilot. Okay, Deep State. [/INST] Well, but see it's not, this is the thing to I want to make it clear because I think people think conspiratorially that they're all coming together to intentionally do something. No, no, no, they are doing what they know, believe they are right and don't have real democratic checks within that. And so now they have entire generations of cultures within each of these bureaucracies where they say this is the way that we do things around here and that's the problem, which is that we have a culture of within many of these agencies and more. I think the best example for this would be during the Ukraine gate with trump and all that with the impeachment. I don't I'm not talking about the politics here, but the most revealing thing that happened was when the whistle blower guy alexander of Inman was like, here, you have the president departing from the policy of the United States and I was like, well um let me educate you, Lieutenant Colonel um the President of the United States makes american foreign policy, but it was a very revealing comment because he and met all the people with the national security bureaucracy. Do think that they're like this is the policy of the United States. It's we we have to do this. That's where things get screwy. </s><s>[INST] Well listen for me personally, but also from an engineering perspective I just talked to Jim Keller is just this is the kind of bullshit that we all hate in when you're trying to innovate and design new products. So like that's that's what first principles thinking requires is like we don't give a ship what was done before. The point is what is the best way to do it. And it seems like the current government government in general, probably bureaucracies in general are just really good at being lazy about never having those conversations. And just it becomes this momentum thing that nobody has the difficult conversations. It's become a game within a certain set of constraints and they never kind of do revolutionary task. But you did say that the presidency is power but you're saying that more power than the others. And but that power has to be coupled with like focused intentionality. Like you have to keep hammering the thing [/INST] if you want it done, it has to be done. I mean and you gotta, you gotta this is the other part two which is that it's not just that you have to get it done. You have to pick the 100 people who you can trust to pick 10 people each to actually do what you want. One of the most revealing quotes is from a guy named Tommy Corcoran, he was the top aide to FDR this. I'm getting from the carry books too. And he said, what is a government? It's not just one guy or even 10 guys. Hell it's 1000 guys. And what FDR did is he masked really picked the right people to execute his will through the federal agencies. Johnson was the same way he played these people like a fiddle. He knew exactly who to pick. He knew the system and more part of the reason that outsiders who don't have a lot of experience in Washington almost always fail is they don't know who to pick or they pick people who say one thing to their face and then when it comes time to carry out the President's policy in terms of the government, they just don't do it. And the president's to think about this, I think rahm Emanuel said this, he was like by the time it gets to the President's desk, nobody else can solve it. It's not easy. It's not like a yes or no question, it's every single thing hits the President's desk is incredibly hard to do. And Obama actually even said and this was a very revealing quote about how, how he thinks about the presidency, which is, he's like, look the presidency is like one of those super tankers. You know, he's like I can come in and I can make it two degrees left and two degrees right in 100 years, two degrees left. That's a whole different trajectory. Same thing on the right and he's like that ultimately is really all you can do. I quibble and disagree with that in terms of how he could have changed things in 2000 and eight. But there's a lot of truth to that statement. </s><s>[INST] Okay, that's really fast. You make me realize that actually both Obama and trump are probably playing victim here to the system. You're making me think that maybe you can correct me that because I'm thinking like Elon musk whose major success despite everything is, is hiring the right people. Exactly and like creating those thousands, that Structure of 1000 people. So maybe a president has power in that if they were exceptionally good at hiring the right [/INST] people personnel is policy man. That's, that's what it comes down to. </s><s>[INST] But wouldn't you be able to steer the ship way more than 2° if you hire the right people. So like it's almost like Obama was not good at hiring the right [/INST] people. Well he hired all the clinton people. That's what happened with trump. You hired all the bush people </s><s>[INST] and then we sit back and say, oh president can't, but that means you're just sucking hiring [/INST] correct Yeah, I mean look, it's funny, I'm giving you simultaneously the nationalist case against trump and the progressive case against Obama, the progressive people are like why the funk are you hiring all these clinton people in order to run the government and just recreate like why are you hiring Larry summers who was one of the people who worked at all these banks and didn't believe the bailouts are gonna be big enough and then to come in in the worst economic crisis in modern american history. That was 2000 and eight and summer's actively lobbied against larger bailouts, which had huge implications for working class people and pretty much hollowed out America sense Okay from trump same thing you're like, I'm going to drain the swamp and by doing that, I'm gonna hire Goldman Sachs is Gary Cohn and steve Mnuchin and all these other absolute bush clowns in order to run my white house. Well yeah, no ship. The only thing that you accomplished in your four years in office is passing a massive tax cut for the rich and for corporations. I wonder how that </s><s>[INST] happened. What role does money play in all of this is money huge influence in politics? Uh, super pacs, all that kind of stuff or is this is this more just kind of a narrative that we play with because from the outsider's perspective it seems to have, that seems to be one of the fundamental problems with modern politics. [/INST] So I was just having this conversation marshall and marshall cost of my coast on the realignment And it's funny because if you do enough research, we actually live in the least corrupt age in american campaign finance as in it's never been more transparent. Never been more up to the f f E C. Yeah. And all of that, if you go back and read, not even 50 years ago, we're talking about Lyndon B johnson handing people like literally as he came up in his youth paying people for votes like the boss of the, you know, the person who like had all the mexican votes, like the person and he was like giving out briefcases. This is it like within people's lifetimes who are alive in America. So that doesn't happen anymore. But I don't like to blame everything on money. Although I do think money is obviously a huge part of the problem. I actually look at it in terms of distribution. Um which is that how is money distributed with an artist's within our society? Because I firmly believe that politics, this is going to get complicated. But I think politics is mostly downstream from culture and culture. Obviously I'm using economics because there's obviously a huge interplay there, but like in terms of the equitable or lack of equitable distribution of money within our politics, what we're really piste off about is we're like our politics only seems to work for the people who have money. I think that's largely true. Um I think that the reason why things work differently in the past is because our economy was structured in different ways and there's a reason that our politics today are very analogous to the last gilded age because we had very similar levels levels of economic distribution and cultural problems too. At the same time, I don't want to erase that because I actually think that's what's driving all of our politics right now. </s><s>[INST] So that's interesting. So it's one, so in that sense, representative government is doing a pretty good job of representing the state of culture and the people and so on. Yeah, can I ask you in terms of uh, you know, the deep state and conspiracy theories, There's a lot of talk about, again from an outsider's perspective, if I was just looking at twitter, It seems that at least 90% of people in government and pedophiles 19, I'm not sure what that number is. If I were to just look at Twitter honestly or YouTube, I would think most of the world's a better file, I would almost feel like. [/INST] And if you don't fully believe that you're a pedophile, </s><s>[INST] I would start to wonder like, wait, like, what am I a pedophile to like I'm either a communist or a pedophile or both, I guess. Uh yeah, that's going to be clipped out. Thank you Internet. I look forward to your emails, but is there any kind of shadow conspiracy theories that give you pause, or so the flip side, the response to a lot of conspiracy theories. It's like, no, the reason this happened is because it's a combination of just incompetence. So where do you land on some of these conspiracy theories? [/INST] I think most conspiracy theories are wrong. Some are true and those are spectacularly true. And if that makes sense. Um I don't know which ones. I don't know which one. That's the problem. I think. Well, I mean, look, man, I listen to your podcast. I think I was a huge non believer in UFOs and now I've probably never believe more in U. F. Like I believe in UFOs. Like I'm very comfortable being like, not only do I believe in UFOs, like I think we're probably being visited by an alien civilization. Like, and if you asked me that three years ago, I would be like, you're out of your freaking mind. Like, what are you talking about? Well, listen to David flavor. That's </s><s>[INST] all I have to say. That's it. I have the sense that the government has information hasn't revealed, but it's not like they're, I don't think they're holding there's like a green guys, They're exactly, they just, they have seen things they don't know what to do with. So it's like they're confused. They're [/INST] afraid of revealing that they don't know. </s><s>[INST] That's what I think it's revealing exactly that I don't know. And then they're in the process. There's a lot of fears tied up in that first looking incompetent in the public eye, nobody wants to be look that way and the other is like in revealing it, even though they don't know, maybe china will figure it out. Exactly. So like we don't want china to figure it out first. And so that all those kinds of things result in basically secrecy. Then that damages the trust in institutions on one of the most fascinating aspects. Like one of the most fascinating mysteries of human kind of. Is there life, intelligent life out there in the universe. That's one of them. But there's other ones, like uh for me, when I first came across actually, Alex jones was 9-11, remember like because I was, I was in Chicago, I was thinking like, oh ship, are they going to hit Chicago to, That's what everybody was thinking. Yeah, everybody, everybody was thinking like, what does this mean? Let's get what scale what I mean, trying to interpret it. And I remember like looking for information, that's been like, what happened? What? And I remember not being satisfied with the quality of reporting and figuring out like rigorous like hairs exactly what happened. And so people like Alex jones stepped up and others that said like there's some shady sh it going on and it's sure that's how it looks like there's shady ship going on. Uh so like and I still stand behind the fact that it seems like there's not, there's not enough, like it was a good job of being honest and transparent, all those kinds of things [/INST] Because it would implicate the Saudis, let's be honest, right? That's my conspiracy theories. I'm like yeah, I think they covered up a lot of stuff because they wanted to cover up for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia like and I mean that is that was a conspiracy theory not that long ago, I think it's true, you never think it's 100% true. </s><s>[INST] So those kinds of conspiracy theories are interesting. I mean there's other ones for me personally that touched uh the institution that means a lot to me is mitt And uh you know Jeffrey Epstein, [/INST] I want to hear a lot, I want to hear about that, I talk about Epstein a lot, so I'm like yeah and he was going to say in terms of conspiracy theory, that one changed my outlook because I was like I was like whoa like you have this dude who convinced some of the most successful people on earth that he was like some money manager and it looks like it was totally fake, like leon black, I mean this is one of the richest men on Wall Street, $9 billion net worth. Why is he giving him over $100 million between 2015 and 2019, what's going on here lacks wax ner so yeah I want to hear because you know people who met him and the only person I know who met him was ERic Weinstein, I've heard his </s><s>[INST] right oh boy, so I listen I'm still in and eric is fascinating and like eric is full on saying that [/INST] he was a facade. </s><s>[INST] Yeah there's a fund for something uh something much much bigger um and there's uh whatever his name, robert Maxwell, all the all those stories like you could dig deeper and deeper that Jeffrey is just like the tip of the iceberg. I just think he's an exceptionally charismatic, Listen this isn't speaking from confidence or like deep understanding this situation but from my speaking with people he just seems like at least from the side of his influence and interaction with researchers, he just seems like somebody that was exceptionally charismatic and actually took interest, he was unable to speak about interesting scientific things but he took interest in them. So he knew how to stroke the egos of a lot of powerful people. Like well like in in different kinds of ways I suppose I don't know about this because I don't have like if you're really okay, this is this is weird to say, but I have an ability, okay, I think women are beautiful, I like women, but like if like a supermodel came to me or something like like I'm able to reason, it seems like some people are not able to think clearly when there's like an attractive woman in the room and I think that was one of the tools he used to manipulate people. I don't no, listen, it's like the pedophile thing, right? I don't know how many people are complete sex addicts, but like it seems like like looking out into the world, like there's a like the Me Too movement have revealed that there's a lot of like weird, like uh creepy people out there, I don't know, but I think it was just one of the many tools that he used two convince people and manipulate people, but not in some like um evil way, but more just really good at the art of conversation and just winning people over on the side and then by building through that process, building a network of other really powerful people and not explicitly, but implicitly having done shady ship with powerful people, Like building up a kind of implied power of like, like we did some shady sh it together so we're not like you're gonna help me out on this extra thing I need to do now and that builds and builds and builds to where you're able to actually control, like have quite a lot of power without explicitly having like a strategy meeting and I think a single person or yeah, I think a single person can do that can start that ball rolling and over time it becomes a group thing. Like I don't know if julie Maxwell was involved or others and yeah, over time it becomes almost like a really powerful organization that wasn't, that's not a front for something much deeper and bigger, but it's almost like maybe it's because I love sally or thomas mann, a system that starts out as a simple thing with simple rules can create incredible complexity. And so I just think that uh we're now looking in retrospect, it looks like an incredibly complex system that's operating, but like that's just because, you know, there could be a lot of other Jeffrey Epstein's in my perspective that this simple thing just was successful early on. It builds and builds and builds and builds and then there's creepy ship that like a lot of aspects of the system helped it get bigger and bigger and more powerful and so on. So the final result is, I mean, listen, I have a pretty optimistic, I have uh I tend to see the good in people and so it's been heartbreaking to me in general just to see, you know, people I look up to not have the level of integrity, I thought they would, or like the strength of character, all those kinds of things and it seems like you should be able to to see the bullshit that is Jeffrey Epstein, like when you meet them, uh we're not talking about like eric Weinstein, like one or two or three or five interactions, but like there's people that had like, like years of relationship with him and I don't know, I'm not sure even after he was [/INST] convicted after he </s><s>[INST] was convicted, that guy [/INST] always gets. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, there's, there's stories. I mean, I don't need to sort of, uh, I honestly believe. And uh, okay, here's the open question I have. I don't know how many creepy sexual people are out there. Like, I don't know if there is like, like the people I know the faculty and so on. I don't know if they have like a kink that I'm just not aware of that was being leveraged because to me, it seems like if, if, if people aren't, if not everybody is a pedophile, then it's just the art of conversation. That is just like the art of just like manipulating people by making them feel good about the exciting stuff they're doing. Listen man academics, people talk about money. I don't think academics care about money as much as people think what they care about is like somebody they want to be. It's the same thing that instagram models posted in there. But pictures is they want to be loved, they want attention and [/INST] professors, </s><s>[INST] they, they and Jeffrey Epstein, like the money is another way to show attention. It's my work matters. And and he, for [/INST] someone, he did </s><s>[INST] that for some of the weirdest, most brilliant people. I don't want to sort of drop names, but everybody knows them. It's like people that are the most interesting academics is the one he cared about. Like people are thinking about the most difficult questions of in all of science and all of engineering. So those people are, we're kind of outcasts in academia a little bit because they're doing the weird ship, there are the weirdos and he cared about the weirdos and he gave them money and that uh you know, that's I don't know if there's something more nefarious than that, I hope not, but maybe I'm surprised and in fact, half the population of the world as pedophiles. [/INST] No, I think it's what you were talking about, which is that it's the it's the implication after the initial right? Like you do some shady things together or you do something that you want out of the public eye and you're a public person and look, we probably even experiences to a limited extent, right? You're like, you know, like, I don't wanna, I don't, I almost lost my temper, you know, one time whenever a car hit me and I'm like, I can't freak out in public anymore like that, you know, like what if somebody takes a photo or something? And so I think that there's an extent to that times a billion literally when you have a billion dollars or more and you take that all together and you stack it up on itself. I saw a story about Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was with Epstein or with Ghislaine Maxwell in a private air terminal or something and she had one of their like sex, You know one of those girls who was under age had her dressed up in a literal like pilot uniform and she was under age in order to, you know, and she was just being disguised for being older and she was a masseuse, right? Because that was one of the guys is which they got in order to sexually traffic these women and she was like Bill was like complaining about his neck and she's like give Bill Clinton massage right? So now there's a photo of an underage girl giving a massage to the former President of the United States. I don't think he knew right, but like that looks bad and so this is kind of what we're getting at, which is that you're setting it all up and creating those preconditions or like Prince Andrew do I think Prince Andrew knew that Virginia Godfrey was underage? I don't know, probably knew she was pretty young, which I think is you know, skeevy enough where you're sucking Prince, you probably know better, but I don't think he knew she was underage or maybe he did and if you did and he's even more of a piece of ship than I thought, but we when we when we look at these things, the stuff I'm more interested in is like what you were talking about? I'm like Bill Gates, how do you get the richest man in the world, in your house, like under what gotten Gates is like he was talking about financing and all this. I'm like you don't have access to money or bankers like you're the richest man in the world. You can call Goldman Sachs anytime you want on a hotline. Like why do you need? That's where, that's where I start again to get more conspiratorial because I'm like Bill dude, you have the gold credit right? Like you don't need Obsidian to create some complicated financing structure or leon black like what is 2015, 2000 and I mean this is very recent stuff or and this is the part that really got me as I read the depart of, I think it's called the Department of Financial Service report are on Deutsche Bank with Epstein the news the criminal, they solicited his business explicitly knew that his business meant access to other high net worth individuals consistently doled money out from his account for hush payments to women in europe and prostitution rings. They knew all of this within the bank. It was elevated multiple times. Here is the other 11 of Epstein's associates was like, hey, how much money can we take out before we hit the, you know, automatic sensor before you have to tell the I. R. S. And that question by their own standards is supposed to result in a notification to the Feds and they never did it. And he was withdrawing like $2 million of cash in five years for tips to I'm like, okay, like something's going on here. You see </s><s>[INST] there's a lot of signs that make you think that there's a bigger thing at play than just the man that there is some, it does look like a larger organization is using this front [/INST] Again. I don't know. I I truly don't know and I'm not willing to use the certainty, which I think a lot of people online are to say like it was just 100 </s><s>[INST] percent is always the problem because that's probably why I hesitate to touch conspiracy theories because I'm allergic to certainty in all forms in politics in any kind of discourse. And people are so sure in both directions actually it's kind of hilarious either they're sure that the conspiracy theory particular, whatever the conspiracy theories is false. Like they almost dismiss it like uh like they don't even want to talk about. It's like the people like the way they dismiss that the Earth is flat. Most scientists are like, they don't even want to like hear what the what the flat earthers are saying. They don't have a zero patience for it. Which is like maybe in that case it's deserved. But everything else you really like have empathy. Like consider the you have like a this is weird to say, but I feel like you have to consider that the earth might be flat for like one minute. Like you have to be empathetic, you have to be open minded. [/INST] I don't see a lot of that there are cultural taste makers and more and that's that really is what concerns me the most because it's just another manifestation of all of our problems is that we have this completely bifurcating economy bifurcating culture literally in terms of We have the middle of the country and then we have the coast and in terms of the population, it's almost 5050. And with you know, increasing megacities in urban culture like urban monoculture of L. A. New York and Chicago and D. C. and Boston and Austin relative to how an entire other group of americans who live their lives or even the people within them who aren't rich and upwardly mobile, how they live their lives is just completely separating and all of our language and communication in mass media and more is to the top and then everybody else has forgotten. </s><s>[INST] Do you think when you go, when you dig to the core, there is a big there's a big gap between left and right. Is there is that division that that's perceived currently real or most people look center left and center [/INST] right? It's so interesting because that's such a loaded term center left. What does that mean? Like? So you I think the way you're thinking of it is I'm not like a well even this like I'm not a radical socialist, but I'm uh marginally left on cultural issues and economic issues, this is how we've traditionally understood things. Um and then when when in popular discourse like center right, like what does it mean to be sent to write? Like I am marginally right on social conservative on social issues and marginally right on economic issues. But that's just not possible. Like if you look at survey data for example, like uh stimulus checks, People who are against stimulus checks are conservative, right? Well, 80% of the population is for a stimulus check. So that means a sizable number of republicans are for stimulus checks. Same thing happens on like a wealth tax. Um The same thing happens on, okay, florida voted for trump 3.1 More than Barack Obama 2008, the same day passes a $15 minimum wage at 67%. So what's going on? So that's why what is going on? Well, that's what my career, </s><s>[INST] but it seems like so that's that's fascinating conversation is different than the policies. [/INST] Well, it's different than reality. That's what I would say. Which is that the way we have to understand american politics today. It didn't always used to be this way is it's almost entirely along basic. I would say the main divider is because even when you talk about class, this misses it in terms of socio economics, it's around culture, which is that it's basically if you went to a four year degree granting institution, you are part of one culture if you didn't, you're part of another, I don't want to erase the 20% or whatever. People who did go to college degree who are republicans or vice versa, et cetera. But I'm saying on average, in terms of the median way that you feel we're basically bifurcating along those lines because people get upset be like, oh well, you know, there are rich people who voted for trump. And I'm like, yeah, but you know, you know what they are, they're like plumbers or something. Like there are people who make $100,000 a year, but they didn't go to a four year college degree and they might live who are in a place which is not an urban metro area. And then at the same time you have like a vox writer who makes like 30 grand, but they have a lot more cultural power then like the plumber. So you have to think about where exactly that line is. And I think in general that's the way that we're trending. So that's why when I say like what's going on? Are we divided? Yeah, like but it's not left and right. I mean like, and that's why I hate these labels. So </s><s>[INST] it's more like it's more just red and blue teams, their arbitrary teams. So how arbitrary are these teams? I guess it's another completely arbitrary. So you kind of imply that there's, I don't know if you're sort of in post analyzing the patterns? Because it seems like there's a network effects of like you just pick the team red or [/INST] blue </s><s>[INST] and it might have to do with college, you might have to do all those things. But like it seems like it's more about just the people around [/INST] you correct. </s><s>[INST] So less than whether you went to college or not, I mean, it's almost like seems like it's almost like weird, like network effects that hard. There's certain strong patterns you're identifying. But I don't know, it's sad to think that it might be just teams that have nothing to do with you actually believe [/INST] Well, it is lex, look, I mean, I don't want to believe that, but the data points me to this which especially 2020, I'm one of the people chief among them. I will own up to it here. I was totally wrong about why trump was elected in 2016 I believed and based a lot of my public commentary beliefs on this trump was elected because of a rejection of Hillary clinton neoliberalism on the back of a pro worker message which was anti immigration was its pillar, but alongside of it was a rejection of free trade with china and generally of the political correctness and globalism which has been come in through the unit party and same thing here with the military industrial complex and endless war. He rejected all of that. </s><s>[INST] What's wait, what's wrong with that prediction? [/INST] What's wrong man. And the reason I know this is that it sounds right. I wish, I honestly wish it was true. But here's the truth trump actually governed largely as a neo liberal Republican who was meaner online and who departed from orthodoxy in some very important ways. Don't get me wrong, I will always support the trade war with china. I will always support not expanding the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I will support him moving the overton window on a million different things and revealing once and for all the GOP voters don't care about economic orthodoxy necessarily, but here's what they do care about trump. Got more votes in 2020 that he did in 2016 despite not delivering largely largely for all the trump people out there on that agenda. He wasn't more pro union, but he won more union votes. He wasn't necessarily more pro worker, but he actually won more votes in Ohio than he did in in 2016 and he won more hispanic votes then, despite being, you know, all the immigration agenda rhetoric, et cetera. Here's why it's about the culture, which is that the culture war is so hot that negative partisanship is at such high levels. All of the vote is geared upon what the other guy might do in office. And there's a poll actually just came out by echelon insights. Crystal and I were talking about it on rising. The number one concern amongst democratic voters is trump voters. Number one concern, not issues like Trump voters and number two is white supremacy. And so like, which is basically code for Trump </s><s>[INST] voters is the same for the other [/INST] side. Also on the right. Number one concern is illegal immigration. Um and number, I think three or four, whatever is antifa, which is code for </s><s>[INST] from the right is the policy. [/INST] Well, yeah, it's funny, I saw Ben Shapiro was talking about this, but the reason why I would functionally say it's the same is because the I mean, you can believe whether it's true or not, I think it actually largely it's true, but like a lot of GOP voters feel like a lot of illegal immigration is code for like people who are coming in, who are gonna be legalized are gonna go vote democrat. Like I can, I can just explain it from their point of view. So like what does that actually mean each other like each other, which is that the number one concern is the other person, So negative partisanship has never been higher. And I think people who had my thesis in terms of why Trump was elected in 2016, you have to grapple with this like how did he win 10 million more votes? He came 44,000 votes away from winning the presidency across three states, like I don't none of our popular discourse reflects that very stark reality, and I think so much of it is, people really hate liberals, like they just really hate them. And I was driving through rural Nevada before the election, and I was like, literally in the middle of nowhere, and there was this massive sign this guy had out in front of his house and just said trump colon, fuck your feelings, and I was like, that's it, that is why people voted for trump, and I don't want to denigrate it because they truly feel they have no cultural power in America except to raise the middle finger to the elite class by pressing the button for trump. I get that, that's actually a totally rational way to vote. It's not the way I wish you did vote, but like, you know, it's not my place to say. </s><s>[INST] So this is interesting if you could just psychoanalyze, I'm again probably naive about this, but I'm really bothered by the hatred of liberals. It's uh it's a this amorphous monster that's mocked. It's like the Shapiro liberal tears. And I'm also really bothered by uh probably more of my colleagues and friends, the hatred of trump uh the trump and and white supremacist. So apparently 70 there's 70 million white supremacist, 75 million, sorry, there's millions a white supremacist, and apparently, whatever liberal is, I mean, you know, you're literally liberal has become equivalent to white supremacists in the power of negativity it arouses. I don't even know what those I mean. Honestly, I just don't think they've become swears essentially. Uh, is that I mean, how do we get out of this? Because that that's why I just don't even say anything about politics online because it's like really like you can't, you know, here's what happens. Anything you say that's like thoughtful. Like I wonder like immigration, something like I wonder like why, you know, we have these many we allow these many immigrants in or some version of the like thinking through these difficult policies and so on that they immediately tried to find like a single word in something you say they can put you in a bit of a liberal or a white supremacist and then hammer you to death by saying you're one of the two and then everybody just piles on happily that we finally nailed this white supremacist or liberal and that is this some kind of weird like feature of online communication that we've just stumbled upon. Is there a way or is it possible to argue that this is like a feature, not a bug like this is a good thing. [/INST] Yeah. Well look, I just think it's a reflection of who we are, people like to blame social media. I think we're just incredibly divided right now. I think we've been divided like this for the last 20 years and I think that the reason I focus almost 99% of my public commentary on economics is because you asked an important question at the top, How do we fix this? What did I say about the stimulus checks? Stimulus checks have 80% approval rating. So that's the type of thing. If I was joe biden and I wanted to actually heal this country, that's the very first thing I would have done when I came into office. Same thing on when you look at anything that's going to increase wages. Um I I said on the show, I was like, look, I think Joe Biden will have an 80% approval rating if he does two things, it gives every American a $2,000 stimulus check and gives everybody who wants a vaccine, a vaccine. That's it. It's pretty simple because here's the thing I really like Greg Abbott that much. We have like very different politics. I'm from texas, but my parents got vaccinated really quickly. That means something to me. I'm like, listen, I don't really care about a lot of the other stuff he got my family vaccinated like that. Well, I will forever remember that. And that's how we will remember the checks. This isn't part of the reason why trump almost won the election and why if the republicans have been smart enough to give him a 2000 another round of checks. 100% would have one. Which is that people were like, look, I don't really like trump. But I gotta check with his name on it and that meant something to me and my family. I'm not saying for all the libertarians out there that you should go and like endlessly spend money and buy votes. What I am saying is lean into the majoritarian positions without adding your culture war bullshit on top of it. So, for example, what's the number one concern that AOC says after the first round of checks got out? Oh, the checks didn't go to illegal immigrants. I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind like, this is the most popular policy. America has probably done in 50 years, you know, since like Medicare and you're you're ruining it. And then on the right is the same thing. Which is that there'll be like, these checks are going to like, you know, low level blah blah. You know, people who are lazy and don't work. I'm like, oh, there you go. You know, like you're just playing a caricature of what you are. Like if you lean into those issues and you gotta do it clean. This is this is what everybody hates about D. C. Which is that Biden right now is doing the $1400 checks, but he's looping it in with his covid relief bill and all that, that's his prerogative. That's the democrats prerogative, they won the election, That's fine. But I'll tell you what I would've done if I was him, I would have come in and I would have said there's five United States senators who are on the record, republicans who say they will vote for $2000 check. And I would put that on the floor of the United States Senate on my first or so the first day possible. And I would have passed it and I would have forced those republican senators to live up to that vote for this bill, come to the oval office for assigning. So that the very first thing of my presidency was to say, I'm giving you all this relief check this night long. National nightmare is over. Take this money. Do with it, what you need. We've all suffered together. I think about biden is he has a portrait of FDR and his in the oval which kind of bothers me because he thinks of himself as an FDR like figure. But this is, you have to understand the majesty of FDR. We're talking about a person who passed a piece of legislation five days after he became president and he passed 15 Transformative pieces of legislation In the 1st 100 days we're on day like 34, and nothing has passed the reconciliation bill will eventually become law. But it will become law with no Republican votes. And again, that's fine if but it's not fulfilling that legacy and the urgency of the action and the mandate, which I believe that history has handed it handed it to trump and he funked it up. Right? He totally screwed it up. He could have remade America and made us into the greatest country ever coming out on the other side of this. He decided not to do that. I think biden was again handed that like aceptar almost it's like all you have to do all America wants is for you to raise it up high but he's keeping it within the realm of traditional politics. I think it's a huge mistake. </s><s>[INST] Why so this is everything is saying is perfect. Sounds like take it's like it's like again if the aliens showed up it's like the obvious thing to do is like what's the popular thing Like 80% of Americans support this. Like do that clean. Also do it like with like grace where you're able to bring people together. Not like in a political way but like obviously obvious common sense way like uh just people, the republicans and democrats is bringing together on a policy and like bowl just hammer it without the dirt without the mess. Whatever tried to compromise. Just yell with have a good twitter account like loud, Very clear. We're going to give a $2,000 or a stimulus check. Anyone who wants a vaccine gets the vaccine at scale. What makes America let's make America great again by manufacturing like we are manufacturing most of the world's vaccine because we're bad motherfucker's and without maybe uh with with more eloquent than that. And and just do that. Why haven't we seen that for many, for several presidencies [/INST] because of coalitional politics and they owe something to somebody else. For example, biden has got a lot of the democratic constituency has to satisfy within this bill. So there's going to be a lot of ship that goes in their state and local aid. Um although again, I'm not even saying this is bad, but he's like, his theory is, and this isn't wrong, is like we're going to take the really popular stuff and use it as cover for the more downwardly less popular. And so the dems could face the accusation, the people who are on this side, this is their push back to me. They're like, why would we give away the most popular thing in the bill and then we would never be able to pass state and local aid, right? Why would we do? And the republicans do the same thing, right? Like mitch McConnell because fucking idiot decided to say we're going to pair these $2000 stimulus checks with like section 2 30 repeal. It was like, oh, it's obviously dead right. Like it's not going to happen together. That's largely why I believe trump lost the election and why those races down in Georgia went the way that they did obviously trump had something to do with it. But the reason why is they have longstanding things that they've wanted to get done. And in the words of rahm Emanuel never let a good crisis go to waste and try and get as much as you possibly can done within a single bill. My counter would be this things have worked this way for too long, which is that the reconciliation bill is almost certainly going to be the only large signature uh legislative accomplishment of the biden presidency. That's just how american politics works. Maybe he gets one more, maybe one, he gets a second reconciliation bill, then you're running through mid terms. It's over. I believe that by trying to change the paradigm of our politics leaning into exactly what I'm talking here, you could possibly transcend that to a new one. And I'm not naive. I think people respond to political pressures and the way that we found this out was David Perdue who was just a total corporate, you know, dollars or dollar general ceo guy, he was against the original $1200 stimulus checks. But then trump came out, who is the single most popular figure in the Republican Party. He's like, I want $2000 checks and all of a sudden Purdue running in Georgia. It's like, yeah, I'm with president trump. I wanted $2000 stimulus check. That was if you're an astute observer of politics to say, you can see there, that you can force people to do the right thing because it's the popular thing and that if it's clean. If you don't give them any other excuse, they have to do it. So this is this is what we've been. Gasol it into our culture war framework of politics. And the reason it feels so broken and awful is because it is but there is a way out. It's just that nobody wants to be, it's a game of chicken, right? Because maybe it is true. Maybe we would never be able to get your other democratic priorities are Republican priorities. But I think that the country understands that this is fucking terrible and would be willing to support somebody who does it differently. There's just a lot of disincentives to not stay without. There's a lot of incentives to not stray from the traditional path. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Is it also possible that the a students are not participating? Like we drove all the superstars away from politics. So like you just had this argument before. I mean, everything you're saying sort of rings true. Like this is the obvious thing to do as a student of history. You can always like tell like if you look at great people in history, this is what great leaders in history, this is what they did. It's like uh clean bold action sometimes facing crisis, but we're facing a crisis [/INST] were so </s><s>[INST] we've been so why don't we uh uh why don't we see those leaders step up? That's I mean you say that's kind of like it makes sense. There's a lot of different interests of play, You don't want to risk too many things on and so forth. But that's what, like, that sounds like the c students. [/INST] I don't think it's that, I think it's the pipeline of politician creation is just totally broken from beginning to end. So it's not that a students don't want to be uh politicians, it's basically the way that our current primary system is constructed is what is the greatest threat to you as a member of Congress. It's not losing your reelection, it's losing your primary, right? So that means especially in a safe district, you're most concerned about being hit if you're a Republican from the right, and if you're a democrat from the left for not being a good enough one, that's actually what stops people heterodox people in particular from winning primaries, because the people who vote in our primaries are the party faithful. That's how you get the production, the production, it's important to understand the production pipeline, which is that All right? I'm from texas. So that's what I know best. So it's like if you think in texas, if you're more heterodox like state legislature or something who's really works with the left on this and does that, you're gonna get your ass beat in a Republican primary because they're gonna be like, he worked with the left to do this bob taken out of context and you're screwed. And then that means you never ascend up the next level of the ladder and then so on and so forth all the way, but I do think trump changed everything. This is why I have some hope, which is that he showed me that all the people I listened to were totally wrong about politics and that's the most valuable lesson you could ever change me, which was, I was like, wait, I don't have to listen to these people. They don't know anything actually, you know, that's powerful man. Like he did it </s><s>[INST] that successfully this guy, even if he didn't do anything with it, [/INST] it doesn't matter. He </s><s>[INST] showed that it's possible. Exactly. And that that means uh that means a lot. That means you're absolutely right. There's young people right now that kind of look turn around and like [/INST] you're like, wait, I don't have to comb my hair a certain way and go to law school being asshole. Who everybody knows is an asshole and and then get elected to state legislature. I mean, look, who's the number one person in the new york primary, new york city primary right now. Andrew yang. He's polling higher than everybody else in the race. Look, maybe the polls are totally fucked and maybe he'll lose because of ranked choice voting and all that. But I consider Andrew, I mean, I know him a little bit and you know, follow his candidacy from the very beginning. I consider him an inspiration. He's the new generation of politics. Like if I see who's gonna be president 20 years from now, it's going to be, I'm not saying it's going to Andrew yang, I think it'd be somebody like Andrew yang outside the political system who talks in a totally different way, right? Just a completely one of my favorite things that he said on the debate stage, he's like look at us, we're all wearing makeup, it's you know, Yeah, he like he like brought that, he brought that and he's right like yeah why are there all wearing </s><s>[INST] me? He probably arguably hasn't gone far enough almost. Yes, but he showed that as possible and then you see other like AOC is a good example of somebody at least in my opinion is doing the same kind of thing but going too far in like well I don't know she's doing the trump thing but on the other side so I don't know what's too [/INST] far in normative judgment of it. I will tell you the future of politics appreciate the art of it. No, I do look, I don't, I'm not a big AOC fan but she's a genius. Media genius once in a generation talent the way that she uses social media instagram and everybody on the right is like trying to copy her like matt gates like I want to be the conservative AOC and like it's just not gonna happen like you just don't have it like what she has, it's like it's electric and trump had that like I've been to a trump rally like to cover as a journalist. There's nothing like it. And american yang yang is similar. It's the same way where you're like there is something going on here which is just like I've been doing Obama rally. I've been to a clinton rally, I've been to um several normal politics that's fine you know with trump and with yang it was </s><s>[INST] it's another world. It's another world. Yeah because there's there's probably thousands of people is here right now we're just like doing a slow yeah uh yang gang forever. Okay. But uh yeah I mean my worst fear I prefer yeah. Uh Andrew yang kind of free uh improvisational idea, exchange all that vs. AOC. Who I think no matter what she stands for is a drama machine creates drama just like trump does I would say my worst fear would be in 2024 is the O. C. Old enough to be a O. C. Versus trump. [/INST] I don't think she's old enough I think you have to be I think she's 30 so she needs five more years so probably </s><s>[INST] not. Okay but that kind of that's or trump Jr [/INST] well AOC probably wouldn't win a democratic primary. So I mean look joe biden is you know </s><s>[INST] that's pretty much showed that that's exactly what you're saying this process grooms you over time. You see the same thing in academia actually which is very interesting is the process of getting tenure there is this, it's like you're being taught without explicitly being taught to behave in the way that everybody's behaved before. I've heard this. It was funny, I've had a few conversations that were deeply disappointing which which are which involves statements like this is what's good for your career. This kind of conversation almost like mentor to mentee conversation or it's you know, it's like there's a grooming process in the same way, I guess you're saying the primary process does the same kind of thing. So I mean that's what people have talked about with Andrew Yang was uh it was being suppressed by a bunch of different forces the mainstream media, you know, just a democratic, just that whole process didn't like the honesty that he was showing right [/INST] now, but here's my question to you. People got to see, look Jordan Peterson is one of the most famous people in America right? Like you have a massive podcast, you're more famous than half the 99% of the people at M. I. T. So like from that perspective, everything has changed and somewhere out there there's a student who is taking notice and I've noticed that with my own career, everybody thought I was crazy for doing this show with Crystal the Hill. They thought I was nuts. They're like what are you doing? You're a White house correspondent you've got a job forever. The other job offer I had was being a white house correspondent and people thought I was nuts for not just sticking there and you know, aging out within Washington pining for appearances on Fox news and CNN and MSNBC, but I hated it, I just hated doing it and I did not want to be a company man, like a Washington man who is one of those guys who like, brags to his friends about how many times you been on Fox or whatever. Mostly because I just have a rebellious streak and I hate being at the subject of other people, great, something new, which a lot of people watch to get their news and I notice that younger people who are almost all my audience, they don't really look up to any of the people in traditional right? They don't they don't go and they're not coming up and being like, how do I be like, jim Acosta, you know, they're like, they're like, hey, how did you do what you do? And the way you did it is by bucking the system. So I think that we are at a total split point and look, there will always be a path for people because like, I don't want people to over learn this lesson, I have people who are like, I'm not going to go to college and I'm like, well just wait, yeah, like, I'm just </s><s>[INST] starting to like [/INST] stuff just like, just hold on a second, but there will always be a path for the institutional, that will always be there for you. But now there's something else now, there's another game in town and that's more appealing to millions and millions and millions and millions of people who feel unserved by the corporate media CNN and these people possibly who feel unserved um in the, you know, the faculty, like if you are an up and comer who wants to teach as many young people as possible, I think you should be on Youtube. Look at the khan academy, God that God created a huge business. So I just think we can be cynical and upset about what that system is, but we should also have hope. Like I have a lot of hope for what can be in the future. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, there's a, there's a guy people should check out my story is a little bit different because I basically uh stepped aside with the dream of being an entrepreneur earlier in the pipeline than like a, like a legitimate, like senior faculty would, there's an example of somebody that people should check Andrew Huberman from stanford who's a neuroscientist Who's as world class as it gets in terms of like 10ured faculty, just a really world class researcher and now he's doing youtube [/INST] instagram </s><s>[INST] and so he switched. So he not just does instagram, he now has a podcast and he's doing, he's changing the nature of like I believe that Andrew might be the future of stanford and for a lot. It's funny, like he's basically joe Rogan is an inspiration to Andrew And and to me as well, and those ripple effects and Andrew is an inspiration probably just like you're saying to these young, like 25 year olds who are soon to become faculty, if we're just talking about academia and the same is probably happening with government is funny enough, trump probably is inspiring a huge number of people who are saying, wait a minute, I don't have to play by the rules. And I have to I can think outside the box here and you're right, and the institutions we're seeing are just probably lagging behind. So the optimistic view is the future is going to be full of exciting new ideas. So Andrew Young is just kind of the beginning of the iceberg and I hope that iceberg doesn't, it's not this influencer. One of the things that really bothers me, I've gotten a chance, not should be careful here, I don't wanna I love everybody, but you know, these people who talk about like, you know how to make your first million or how to succeed and and they're so, I mean, yeah, that that makes me a little bit cynical about uh I'm worried that the people that win the game of Politics will be ones that want to when the game of politics and like we mentioned a L. C. Is I hope they optimize for the 80% populist thing, right? Like they optimize for that badass thing that history will remember you as the great man or woman that did this thing versus how do I maximize engagement today? And keep growing those numbers? The influencers are so, I'm so allergic to this man. They keep saying how many followers they have and the different accounts and it's like, I don't think they understand, maybe I don't understand, I don't really care. I think it has destructive psychological effects. One, like thinking about the number like getting excited. Your number went from 100 to 101 and being like, and today went out to 105, whoa, That's a big jump that maybe like thinking in this way, like I wonder what I did, I'll do that again in this way. One, it uh it creates anxiety, almost psychological effects. Whatever the more important thing is, it prevents you from truly thinking boldly in the long arc of history and creatively thinking outside the box, doing huge actions. And I actually, my optimism is in the sense that that kind of action will beat out all the influencers. [/INST] Well, I don't know, lex this is my cynicism comes in. So there's a guy Madison cawthorn, the youngest member of congress. Um, and he, I don't want to say got caught, but there was like an email where he was like, my staff is only oriented around coms. Like he was basically saying he got basically constant, like my staff is only centered on communications and that's the right play. If you do want to get the benefits of our current electoral political and engagement system, which is that what's the best way to be known within the right as a, as a right wing politician. It's to be a culture warrior. Go on Ben Shapiro's podcast, be one of the people on Fox News, go on sean Hannity's show, go on tucker's show and all of that because you become a mini celebrity within that world Left unsaid, is that, that world is increasingly shrinking portion of the American population and they barely, they can't even win the popular vote election, um, let alone barely win. Eke out an electoral college victory in 2016. Well, but the incentives are all aligned within that and it's the same thing really on the left, but you're right, which is that ultimately, this is, this is why geniuses are geniuses because they buck the short term incentives, they focus on the long term, they bet big and they usually fail. But then when they get big, they, they succeeds spectacularly. The people I know who have done this the best are like a lot of the crypto folks that I've spoken to, like some of the stuff they say, I'm like, I don't know if that's gonna happen, but look, they're like billionaires, right? You're like, so they were right. So it's the way I've heard it expressed is you can be wrong a lot, but when you're right, you get right big. And I mean, I've seen this thing on my career, I mean he took spectacular risk, like spectacular risk and just double down, double down, double down, double down, double down and you can kind of tell to him, I mean, you know better than I do, but like from my observation, I don't think the money matters as right. I just like when I see him, I'm like, I don't, it's nobody works as hard as you do and builds a way that you build, if it's just about the money, it's just, it just doesn't happen. Like nobody wills SpaceX into existence just for the money. It's not worth it, frankly, right? Like he probably destroyed years of his life and like mental sanity, </s><s>[INST] money or attention or fame. None of that. That's not the primary prey. [/INST] Well, that's what's so appealing to me To me in particular about him, just like and how he built. Like I read a biography of him and just like the way that he constructed his life and like we're able to hyper focus in meeting after meeting and drill down and also hire all the right people who execute each one of his tasks discreetly to his perfection is amazing. Like that's actually the mark of a good leader, but I mean if you think about his career, the reason he's a renegade because probably he was told to like put it in an index fund or whatever whenever he made his 29 million and from Paypal, I don't know how much you made and then just go along that and he's like no, you know succeeds spectacularly. So you have to have somebody who is willing to come in and buck that system. So for for for now I think our politics are generally frozen. I think that that model is going to be most generally appealing to the mean person, but somebody will come along and we'll change everything. </s><s>[INST] I'm just surprised. It's not more of them on that topic. It's now 20, what is it? 21? Yes, let's let's make some predictions. You can be wrong about what major political people are you Thinking will run in 2024 including Trump Junior Senior or Ivanka, I don't know any trump trump. Ah And who do you think wins? [/INST] I think Joe Biden will run again in 2024 and I think he will run against someone with the last name Trump. I do not know whether that is Trump or Trump jr but I think one of those people will probably be the GOP nominee in 2024. Who </s><s>[INST] is it? Some prominent political figure. Was that Romney. Somebody like that said that trump will win the primary few runs again. [/INST] Of course that's not even a question trump is the single most popular figure in the republican party by orders of magnitude. I mean probably more honestly, there was a actually, I can tell you because I saw the data which is that pre january 6th, it was like 54% of republicans wanted him to run again. Then it went down eight points after january 6th two days later and then after impeachment and went right back up to 54%. So the exact same number is in february at post impeachment vote as it was after november. Now look yeah, again surveys bullshit etcetera. But like that's all the data we have that striking pointing to If Trump runs, he will be the nominee and he will be he will be the 2024 nominee. I just don't know if he wants to. It really depends like </s><s>[INST] do you think he wins after the trump vaccine heals all of us? Do you think trump wins? [/INST] It depends on how popular culture functions over the next four years. And I can tell you that they are because I don't think biden has that much to do with it because again, trump is not a manifestation of an affirmative policy action. It is a defensive bulwark wall against cultural liberalism at its best. So it's like this is why it doesn't matter what biden does. If there are more riots, if there is a more sense of persecution amongst people who are more lean towards Conservative or like, hey, I don't know about that. That's crazy, then he very well could win. Let's, okay, let's say joe biden doesn't run and they put up like Kamala Harris. I think I think he would beat her. And I don't think there's a question that trump would be Kamala Harris in 2024 </s><s>[INST] and you don't think anybody else, I don't know how the process works. You don't think anybody else on the Democratic side can take the, [/INST] Well, how could you run against the sitting vice president? You know, it's like if Joe Joe Biden is a 98% approval rating in the Democratic Party, if he says she is my air, I think enough people will listen to him in a competitive primary or a non competitive primary. And then there's all these things about how primary systems themselves are rigged. The DNC could make it known that they'll blacklist anybody who does try and primary, Kamala Harris. Um and look, I mean, progressives aren't necessarily all that popular amongst actual democrats. Like we found that out. Um during the election, there's an entire constituency which loves joe biden and joe biden level politics and so if he tells them to vote for Kamala. I think, I think she would probably get it. But again, there's a lot of game theory obviously happening. </s><s>[INST] But I think you're talking about Everything you're saying is correct about Mediocre candidates, it feels like if there's somebody like a really strong, I don't want to use this term incorrectly, but populist, somebody that speaks to the 80% that's is able to provide bold, eloquently described solutions that are popular. I think that breaks through all of this [/INST] nonsense. How do they break through the primary system? Because the problem is the primary system is not populism, its primary. So it's like, </s><s>[INST] but you don't think they can tweet, they're way too [/INST] well, you have to be willing to win a GOP primary. You basically have to be whoever wins the GOP primary, in my opinion will be the person most hated by the left. One of the people things that people forget is, you know, who came in second to trump Ted Cruz and the reason why, because Ted Cruz was the second most hated guy by liberals in America a second to trump, they have nothing in policy in common. But </s><s>[INST] don't you think this kind of brilliantly described system of hate being dip the main mechanism of our electoral choices, don't you think that just has to do with mediocre candidates? Like, like it's basically the field of candidates, including trump including everybody was just like didn't make anyone feel great. It's like really this is what we got to choose from. [/INST] Maybe a Mark Cuban or like Mark Cuban is a democrat or it would have to be somebody like that, somebody who, because here's the thing about trump, it's not just that it was trump. He was so fucking famous. Like, people don't realize he was so famous. Like I, even when I first met trump, I met a couple of other presidents, but when I met trump, even I felt like kind of starstruck because I was like, yo this is the guy from the apprentice, I'm like this is the dude, </s><s>[INST] like, [/INST] yeah, because I'm like, my dad and I used to sit and watch the apprentice when I was in high school. And then one of the guys from college station where I grew up and were like, oh my God, like the guys on the apprentice, like, it was a phenomenon, there's like that level. It's kind of like when I met joe Rogan, I'm like, holy ship, that's joe, I don't feel that way when I meet mitt Romney or tom cotton or Joshua and I met all of them. Um </s><s>[INST] but there's a lot of celebrities, right? Do you think there's some celebrities, we're not even thinking about that could step in the [/INST] raft. So that was about to say, I think the rock could do it, but does he want to do it? I mean, it's terrible. It's terrible gig. It's very hard to do. I don't know if the rock necessarily has like the formed policy agenda because then here's the other problem, what if we set ourselves up for a system where like these people keep winning? But like, with trump, they have no idea how to run a government, it's actually really hard, right? And you have to have the know how and the trust to find the right people. This is this is where the genius element comes in is you have to understand that front and you have to understand how to execute discrete tasks. Like this is the FDR, this is why it's so hard. Like FDR Lincoln tr they were who they were and they live in history and their name rings like for a reason. And yeah, I mean one of the most depressing lessons I got from 2020 is at almost, it seems like in my opinion that we over learned the lesson of our success and not of our failures. For example, like we have this narrative in our head that we always have the right person at the right time during crisis. And in some cases it was true. We didn't deserve Lincoln, we didn't deserve FDR. We didn't deserve um we didn't deserve a lot of presidents at times of crisis. But then you're like, okay, George W Bush 9 11, that was terrible. Um, Reconstruction Andrew johnson awful right? Like we had several periods in our history where the crisis was there, they were, they were called and they did not show up and I really hadn't happened in my lifetime except for 9 11. And even then you could kind of see that as an opportunity for somebody like Obama to come in and fix it. But then he didn't do it and then trump didn't do it. And you realize, I feel like our politics our most analogous to like the 1910s. Like all in terms of the gilded age, in terms of that, remember those long period of presidents between um between like Lincoln and teddy Roosevelt, we were like wait, like who's president or or even even tr was like an exception where you have like Calvin Coolidge silent </s><s>[INST] cows. So we're living through [/INST] Grover Cleveland. That's kind of how uh if I think of us within history, I feel like we're in one of those times were just waiting. </s><s>[INST] It feels really important to us right now. Like this is the most important moment in history, but it might be, [/INST] It could just be a blip, 2030 year blip. Like when you think about who was president between 1890 and 19 before, I mean between like 1888 and 1910, like nobody really thinks about that period of America, but like that was an entire lifetime for people like what did, they how did they feel about the country that they were </s><s>[INST] hilarious? [/INST] That's how I kind of think about where we </s><s>[INST] are funny to think, I mean I don't want to minimize it, but like we haven't really gone through uh a World War Two style crisis. So like say that there is a crisis in like several decades of that level, right, existential risks to a large portion of the world, then what will be remembered as World War Two, maybe a little bit about Vietnam and then whatever that crisis is and this whole period that we see as dramatic, even coronavirus, even 9 11, it's like, because you can look at how many people died and all those kinds of things, all the drama, the war on terror and all those kinds of things. Maybe Obama will be remembered for being the first african american president. But then like that's, yeah, that's fascinating to think about man. Even trump will be like, oh, okay. [/INST] Yeah, </s><s>[INST] maybe he will be remembered as the first uh celebrity. I mean Reagan was already a governor, right? Yeah. So, so like the first a political celebrity that was, so maybe if there's more celebrities in the future, they'll say that trump was the first person to pave um the way for celebrities to win. Oh man. Yeah. And uh yeah, I still, I still hold that this this era will probably remembered the, you know, people say I talk about Ellen way too much, but the reality is like there's not many people that are doing the kind of things he's doing is why I talk about is I think this era, it's not necessarily Elon and SpaceX, but this terribly remembered by the new, the like of the space exploration of the commercial, of companies getting into space exploration of Space travel and perhaps perhaps like artificial intelligence around social media, all those kinds of things. This might be remembered for that. But all the political bickering, all that nonsense that might we might might be very well forgotten. [/INST] one way to think about it is that the internet is so young, I think about um so Jeff Jarvis, he's a media scholar I respect, he's not the only person to say this, but many others have. Which is that look this is kind of like the printing press. There was a whole 30 years war because of the printing press. It took a long time for ship to sort out. I think that's where we're at with the Internet, like at a certain level it disrupts everything and that's a good thing. It can be very tumultuous. Um I never felt like I was living through history until coronavirus. Like you know like until we were all locked down. I was like I'm living through history like this. There's this very overused cliche in D. C. Where every com staffer wants you to think that what their boss just did is history. And I've always been like this isn't history, this is some like stupid fucking bill, you know, whatever. But like that was the first time I was like this is history like </s><s>[INST] this right here. Well I was hoping uh tragedy aside that this I wish the primaries happened during coronavirus so that we because like then we can see. So okay, here's a bunch of people facing crisis it's an opportunity for leaders to step up. Like I still believe the optimistic view is uh the game theory of like influencers will always be defeated by actual great leaders. So like maybe the great leaders are rare, but I think they're sufficiently out there that they will step up especially in moments of crisis. And coronavirus is obviously a crisis where like, you know, mass manufacture of tests, Uh all all kinds of infrastructure building they could have done in 2020. There's so many possibilities for just like bold action. Yeah, none of that. Even just forget actually doing the action, advocating for just saying like this, we need we need to do this and none of that. Like the speeches that biden made, I don't even remember a single speech that biden made because there's zero bold. I mean their strategy was to be quiet and let donald trump polarized polarized electorate and hope that results in in uh them winning because of the high unemployment numbers and all those kinds of things as opposed to like let's go big, let's go with a big speech. You know that uh yeah, it's a lost lost opportunity in some sense. So we talked a bunch about politics. But one of the other interesting things is that you're involved with is uh or involved with defining the future of his journalism. I suppose you can think of podcast as a kind of journalism but but also just writing in general. And just whatever the hell the future of this thing looks like uh is up to be defined by people like you. So what do you think is broken about journalism? And what do you think is the future of journalism? [/INST] I think the future of journalism looks much more like what were you and I are doing here right now and journalism is going to be downstream from culture. That can be a good and a bad thing depending on how you look at it. We're going to look at our media, our media is going to look much more like it did pre mass media and the way that I mean that is that back in the 18 in the 18 hundreds in particular, especially after the invention of the Telegraph when information itself was known. So for example, like you and I don't need to, let's say you and I are competing journalists, you and I are no longer competing, quote unquote to tell the public X event happened. All journalism today is largely explaining why did X happen. And part of the problem with that is that that means that it's all up for partisan interpretation. Now you can say that that's a bad thing. I think it's a great thing because the highest level of literacy and news viewership in America was during the time of yellow journalism was during the time of partisan journalism. Not a surprise. People like to read the news from people that they agree with. You could say that's bad echo chambers etcetera. That's the downside of it. The upside is more people are more educated, more people are interested in the news. So I think the proliferation of mass media I mean sorry of this format of long form teaching of not just long form dude I do I do updates on instagram which are five minutes. Are </s><s>[INST] you consider like instagram almost even twitter [/INST] of course twitter twitter is where I get my news from. I don't read the paper. I have literally twitter is my news aggregator. It's called My wire where I find out about hard events like the president has departed the White House but </s><s>[INST] not only that I don't know about you but I also looked at twitter to the exact thing you're saying which is the response to the news like the thoughtful sounds ridiculous but you can be pretty thoughtful in a single tweet if [/INST] you fire if you follow the right people you can get that. And so that is the future of media which is that the future of media is it will be much smaller amount. It's much larger amounts of people which are famous to smaller groups. So walter Cronkite is never going to happen again at least are probably within our lifetimes where everybody in America. No who's this guy is that that age is over. I think that's a good thing because now people are going to get the news from the people that they trust. Yes. Some of it will be opinionated. I'm going to my my program. I'm crystal and I are like we are this she's coming from this like view. I'm coming from this view that's our bias when we talk about information and we're gonna talk about the information that we think is important and it has garnered a large audience. I think that's very much where the future is going to be. And the reason why I think that's a good thing is because people will be engaged more within it rather than the current system where news is highly concentrated, highly consolidated. Has Groupthink has the same elite production pipeline problem of everybody knows journalists all come from the same socioeconomic background and they all party together here in D. C. Or in new york or in L. A. Or wherever. And there's part of the same monoculture and that affects what they uh that affects what they report. This will cause a total dispersion of all of that. The a the battle of our age is going to be the guild versus the non guild. So like what we see right now with the new york times and clubhouse. This is a very very very very very intentional thing that is happening. Which is that the times talking about unfettered conversations that's happening on clubhouse for people who aren't aware this is important because they need to be the Federer's of conversation. They need to be the inter agent that's where they get their power. They get their power from convincing facebook that they are the ones who can fact check stuff. They are the ones who can tell you whether something is right or wrong, that battle over unimpeded conversation and the explosion of a format that you and I are doing really well in and then this more consolidated one which holds cultural power and elite power and more importantly, money right over you and I, that's the battle that we're </s><s>[INST] all gonna do. You think unfettered conversations have a chance to win this battle? [/INST] Yes, I do. In the long run. In the long run, the internet is simply too powerful, but here's the mistake everybody makes. The new york Times will never lose, it will just become one of us see. So they already are, they are the largest daily, the daily. Look at the daily. Not even that, I think about it, not in podcasting, The Times is not a mass media product. It is a subscription product for upper middle class, largely white liberals who live the same circumstances across the United States and in europe, there's nothing wrong with that. But here's the thing, you can't be the paper of record. When you're actually the paper of upper middle class white America. Your job is to report on the news from that angle and deliver them the product that they want. There's nothing wrong with that, their stock prices higher than ever. They're making 10 times more money than they did 10 years ago. But it comes at the cost of not having a mass application audience. So like when people, I think people in our space are always like the new york times gonna be destroyed. No, it's actually even better. They will just become one of us. They already are their subscription platform. </s><s>[INST] Well, yes, in terms of the actual mechanism, but you know, uh new york times is still, and I don't think I'm speaking about a particular sector. I think it as a brand. It is, it does have the level of credibility assigned to it still, you know, there's politicization of it. But if there's a credibility, like it has much more credibility than forgive me, then I think you and I have in terms of uh your podcast, like people are not going to be like uh they're going to cite the new york times versus what you said on the podcast for uh for an opinion that I wonder in the sense of battles, whether on federal conversations, whether joe Rogan, whether your podcast can become the have the same level of legitimacy or the flip side, New york times loses legitimacy to be at the same level of uh in terms of how we talk [/INST] about it, it's got a long, it's a long battle, Right? It's going to take a long time. And I'm saying this is where I think the end state is going and look at what the times is doing. They're leaning into podcasting for a reason, but not just podcasting as in NPR level. Like here's what's happening. Michael Barbaro is a fucking celebrity, right? The guy who does the daily, that guy's famous amongst these people because they're like, oh my God, I love Michael. Like I love the way he does this stuff again, that's fine. More people are listening to the news. I think that's a good thing. And then who else do they hire as recline from Vox Kara swisher also from Vox who does pivot, which is an amazing podcast um, or jane Austen same thing. It's personalities who are becoming bundled together within this brand </s><s>[INST] right here. Yeah, maybe I'm just a hater because I love podcasting from the beginning. I love Green Day before the report man, but I am bothered by like, why doesn't care swish her. She's done successfully. I think, oh no, she was always a part of some kind of institution. I'm not sure, [/INST] but she started her own thing. I </s><s>[INST] think it would require very cold. I don't know if that's her own thing. Yeah. So she, she was very successful there. Why the hell did she join the new york times with the new podcast. Why is Michael barbaro not do his own thing [/INST] because he gets paid and because he has, he wants the elite cachet that you just referenced within his social circle in new york, which is that I think the biggest mistake that some of the venture people make is if we give everybody the tools that those people are all going to leave to go subs that can go independent within their social circle, sacrificing some money from being independent is worth it to be a part of the new york times. </s><s>[INST] That's sad to me because it propagates old thinking like, you know, it propagates old institutions and you could say that new york times is going to evolve quickly and so on. But I would love it if there was a mechanism for reestablishing, like for building new new york times in terms of public legitimacy. And I suppose that's wishful thinking because it takes time to build trust in institutions and it takes time to build new institutions. [/INST] My main thing, I would say is public legitimacy as a concept is not going to be there in mass media anymore because of the balkanization of audiences. I mean, think about it right? Like um this is like lesion, you know, the classic stuff around 1000 true fans or no, sorry, like 100 true fans even now, like you can make a living on the internet just talking to 100 people if as long as they're all high frequency traders? Some of the highest people pies paid people on substack, they don't have that many subs, it's just that they're Wall Street guys, right? So people pay a lot of money again, that's great. So what you will have is an increasing balkanization of the internet, of audiences and of niches, people will become increasingly famous within, you will become astoundingly famous. I'm sure you've noticed this for your fan base, I certainly have with mine, like 99% of people have no idea who I am, but what somebody means, they're like, oh my God, I watch your show every day, right? That's the only thing to watch for news, right? Like, instead of casually famous, if that makes sense, like, oh yeah, that's like alec baldwin, you know, whoa ship, that's alan ball, but you're not like, oh sh it, I love you alec baldwin, it's this is a Ben smith of the new york Times actually wrote this column, he's like, the future is, everybody will be famous, but only to a small group of people and I think that is true. But again, I don't decry it, I think it's great because I think that the more that that happens, the more engaged people will be and it empowers different voices to be able to come in and then possibly, I wouldn't say destroy, but compete against, I mean look at jo jo is more powerful than CNN and MSNBC and Fox all put together, that gives me like immense inspiration. Like he created the space for me to succeed and I told him that when I met him, I was like, dude, like I listen to this podcast and I was like young and like I remember when I got to meet him and all that and I told him this on the spot, I was like, I didn't know people were millions were willing to listen to a guy talk about chimps for three straight hours including me, I didn't </s><s>[INST] know that one of those people. Yeah, me too. I learned something about myself for the show. Yeah. [/INST] And so by creating that space would be like, wait, there's a hunger here. Like he showed us all the way and none of us will ever again be as famous as Rogue because he was the first and that's fine because he created the umbrella ecosystem for assault to thrive. That is where I see like a great amount of hope within that story </s><s>[INST] and the cool thing, He also supports that ecosystem. He's such a so, so generous. One of the things he paved the way on for me is to show that you can just be honest, publicly honest and not jealous of other people's success, but instead of being supportive and and all those kinds of things just like loving towards others. He's been an inspiration. I mean to the comics community, I think they're a bunch of uh before that I think they were all a bunch of competitive haters towards each other [/INST] and now he's like just injected love. Yeah. You know, </s><s>[INST] they're like, they're still like many are still resistant, but they're like, they can't help it because he's such a huge voice. You know, like forces them to be like a loving towards each other and the same. I tried to, one of the reasons I wanted to start this podcast was to try to, I wanted to be like a do what joe Rogan did. But for the scientific community, like my little circle of scientific community of like, like let's support each other. [/INST] Yeah, Well like Avi Loeb, I would have no idea who he was if it wasn't for you. I mean, I assume you put him in touch with joe. You want to go show I had him on my show like millions of people would have no idea who he was. If it wasn't </s><s>[INST] just by the way, in terms of deep state shadow government. Avi Loeb has to do with aliens. You better believe joe [/INST] do. The last thing I said to him was the american Airlines audio. Did you see that </s><s>[INST] uh, the [/INST] pilots who were, Oh my God, this is amazing. So like I can't get excited. This american Airlines flight crew was over New Mexico. This happened five or six days ago and the guy comes and goes, hey, do you have any targets up here a large cylindrical object just flew over me. So this happened. So this happens then a guy like a radio catcher records this and posted online. American Airlines confirms that this is authentic audio and they go all further questions should be referred to the FBI. So then, okay, american airline just confirmed as the legitimate transmission. FBI. Then the FAA comes out and says we were tracking no objects in the vicinity of this plane at the time of the transmission. So the only plausible explanation that online sleuths have been able to say is maybe he saw a Lear jet which was using like open source data. FAA rules that out. So what was it? He saw a large cylindrical object while he was mid flight American Airlines. But you can go online listening to the audio yourself. This is 100% no shit transmission confirmed by American Airlines of a commercial pilot over New Mexico. Seeing a quote, unquote large cylindrical object in the air. Like I said, um when you first start talking, I've never believed, I've never believed more in Ufo and aliens. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, this is awesome. I just wish both american Airlines FBI and government would be more transparently. There will be voices and it sounds ridiculous but the kind of transparency that you see. Maybe not joe Rogan. He's like overly transparent. Just a comic. Really? But just uh I don't know like a podcast from the F. B. I just like being honest like excited confused. I'm sure the they're being overly cautious about the release information. I'm sure there's a lot of information that would inspire the public that inspired trust in institutions that will not damage national security. Like it seems to me obvious and the reason they're not sharing it is because of this momentum of bureaucracy of caution and so on. But there's probably so much cool information that the government has the way [/INST] I almost I wouldn't say it confirmed it's real but trump didn't didn't declassify it like you know that if there was ever president that actually wanted to get to the bottom of it, it was him. I mean he didn't declassify it man and people begged him to I know for a fact because I pushed to try and make this happen that some people did speak to him about it and he was like no I'm not going to do it so he might be </s><s>[INST] afraid. That's [/INST] what I mean though they were probably all telling him like sir you can't do this, you know all this like wow and I got that and there's this legislation written. Covid that like they have six months to release </s><s>[INST] is that really what is that? That was a bunch of bullsh it. I think [/INST] it's both there's so many different levels of classification that people you need to understand. I mean look I read john podesta he was the chief of staff to Bill Clinton. He's a big Ufo guy. He tried like him and Clinton tried to get some of this information and they could not get any of it. And they were talking about the president and the White House chief of staff. </s><s>[INST] Well, there's a whole bureaucracy built just like you're saying with intent, you have to be like, that has to be your focus because there's a whole bureaucracy built around secrecy for probably for a good reason. So to get through to the information, there's a whole like paperwork process, all that kind of stuff. You can't just walk in and get unless again with intention that becomes your thing. Like let's revolutionize this thing and then you get only so many things. It's, it's sad that the bureaucracy has gotten so bulky. Um, but I think the hopeful messages from earlier in our conversation, it seems like a single person can't fix it. But if you hire the right team, it feels like you [/INST] can can't fix everything. I don't want to, I don't want to give people unrealistic expectations. You can fix a lot, especially in crisis. You can remake America and the reason I know that because it's already happened twice. FDR or in modern history. FDR and JFK uh, sorry FDR and JFK assassination LBJ to hyper competent men who understood government who understood personnel and coincidentally we're friends. I love this. I don't think actually people understand this. FDR met johnson three days after he won the Congress, his election to Congress. Special election was only 29 years old and he left that meeting and called somebody and said this young man is going to be President, United States someday. Like even then, like what was within him to understand and to recognize that and sometimes johnson is a young member of Congress would come and have breakfast with FDR like just to the great political minds of the 20th century, just sitting there talking like I would give anything to know what that was happening. </s><s>[INST] I hope they were real with each other and it was like a genuine human connection, right? That that seemed johnson wasn't [/INST] a genuine guys. It wasn't well, </s><s>[INST] I need to, I need to read those thousands of pages. Uh, I've been way too focused on [/INST] Hitler. I was gonna say one of my goals in coming to this. It was like, I gotta get lex into two things because I know he'll love it. I know he'll love LBJ if he's as it takes the time to read the book, 100%, he's the most of all the presidents. I didn't say you love him, but you love the books about him because the books are a story of America, the story of politics, the story of power. This is the guy who wrote the power broker. These books are up there with decline and fall of the roman empire by Edward Gibbon in terms of how power </s><s>[INST] works. Study of power [/INST] Exactly. That's why Carole wrote the books and that's why the books are not really about LBJ. They're about power in Washington and about the consolidation of power post new deal. The consolidation then, or they're using the levers of power. Like johnson knew in order to change the House of Representatives, the Senate of the United States and ultimately the presidency of the United States, which ended in failure and disaster with Vietnam. Don't get me wrong. But he's overlooked for so many of the incredible things that he did with civil rights. Nobody else could have done it. No, no one else could have gotten it done. And the second thing is we've got to get you into World War One, we gotta get you more into World War One because I think that's a rabbit hole, which I know you're dan Carlin fan. So blueprint for </s><s>[INST] Armageddon [/INST] guaranteed. But </s><s>[INST] there's fewer evil people there. [/INST] Yes, but but that's what actually There's a banality of that evil of the Kaiser and of the Austro Hungarians. And uh see I like World War I more because it was unresolved. It's one of those periods I was talking to about about like sometimes you're called and you fail. Like that's what happened. I mean, 50 million people were killed in the most horrific way. Like, people literally drowned in the mud. Like, like an entire generation. Uh One stat I love is that, You know, Britain didn't need a draft until 1916, like they went two years of throwing people into barbed wire voluntarily and because people love their country and they love the king and they thought they were going against the Kaiser. It's just like that conflict to me. I just can't read enough about it. Also just like births Russian revolution, you know? Yeah, I mean, Hitler, you can't </s><s>[INST] talk about World War Two without World War [/INST] One and I'm obsessed with the conflict. I've read way too many books about it for this reason is it's unresolved and like the roots of so much of even our current problems are happened in verse. I write like Vietnam because of the treaty of Versailles. Um many ways the Middle Eastern problems and the division of the states there, the treaty of Versailles in terms of the penalties against Germany, but also they fallout from those wars on the french and the german popular are the french and the british populations and their reluctance for war in 1939 or 1938. When neville chamberlain goes right, like that's one of the things people don't understand is the actual appetite of the british public at that time. They didn't want to go to war. Only Churchill, he was the only one in the, you know, in the gathering storm, right? Like being like, hey, this is really bad and all of that. And then even in the United States, our streak of isolationism which swept. I mean things were because of that conflict, we were convinced as a country that we wanted nothing to do with europe and its problems and in many ways that contributed to the proliferation of Hitler and more so like I'm obsessed with World War One for this reason, which is that it's just like the root. It's like the culmination of the monarchies then the fall and then just all the ships spills out from there for like 100 </s><s>[INST] years. So World War One is like the most important shift in human history. World War two is like a consequence of that. [/INST] Yeah. So I have a degree in security studies from Georgetown and one of the thing is that we would focus a lot on that is like war and but also like the complexity around war. And it's funny we never spent that much time on World War Two because there's actually quite a clean war. It's a very atypical war as in the war object, which we learned from World War One is we must inflict suffering on the german people and invade the borders of Germany and destroy Hitler. Like the center of gravity is the Nazi regime and Hitler. So it had a very basic, began an end, began liberate France, invade Germany, destroy Hitler reoccupy rebuild World War One, What are you fighting for? Like are you, I mean, nobody even knew the german general staff, they're like, even in 1917, they're like the war was worth it because now we have Luxembourg, I'm like really? Like you killed two million of your citizens for fucking Luxembourg and like half of Belgium which is now like a pond and same thing. The french are like, well the french more so they're defending their borders, but like what are the british fighting for? Why did hundreds of thousands of british people die in order to preserve the balance of power in europe and prevent the Kaiser from having a portrait on the english channel? Like really? That's why these that's more what wars are, is they become these like a typical, they become these protracted conflicts with the necessary diplomatic resolution. It's not clean, it's very dirty, It usually leads in the outbreak of another war in another war and another one a slow burn of ethnic conflict which bubbles up. So that's why I look at that one even because it's it's more typical of warfare. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's how it works. Exactly. It it's kind of interesting you making me realize that uh World War Two is one of the rare war is where you can make a strong case for it's a fight of good versus [/INST] evil war theory, obviously, like they're literally slaughtering jews, like, you know, we have to kill them </s><s>[INST] and there's one person doing it, I mean there's one person to court, there's it's uh yeah, that's fascinating and it's short and there's a clear aggression. Mhm It's interesting that dan Carlin has been avoiding Hitler as well. [/INST] Probably for this reason, </s><s>[INST] probably for this reason, I mean, but it's complicated too because there's a pressure. That guy has his demons. I love this. So this is the, I don't know if you feel this pressure, but as a creative, he feels the pressure of being maybe not necessarily correct, but maybe correct in the sense that his understanding he gets to the bottom of, of why something happened of what really happened did get to the bottom of it before he can say something publicly about it and he is tortured by that burden. [/INST] I know, you know, he takes so much ship from historical community for no reason. I think he's the greatest popularizer quote unquote of history and I wish more people in history understood it that way. He was an inspiration to me. I mean I do some videos sometimes on my instagram. Now we're all like, I'll do like a book tour. I'll be like, here's my bookshelf of these presidents and here's what I learned from this book and this book and this and that was very much like a skill I learned from him of being like, you know, as a historian writes. Yeah, I just love the way he talks, he's like in the mud, you know, he'll be like quote, he inspires me man. He really does to learn more and I've read, I bought a lot of books because of dan Carlin here, because of this guy, because of that guy. Um in terms of, you know, another thing he does, which nobody else and I'm probably guilty of this. He focuses on the actual people involved, like he would tell the story of actual british soldiers in World War One and I probably, and maybe you're guilty of this too. We over focus on what was happening in the german general staff, what was happening in the british general staff and he doesn't make that mistake. That's what he tells real history. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And and make it gives it a feeling the result is that there is a feeling you get the feeling of what it was like to be there, you know, you're becoming quickly becoming more and more popular speaking about political issues in part, do you feel a burden like almost like uh the prison of your prior convictions of having to being popular with a certain kind of audience and thereby unable to really think outside the box. [/INST] I have, I've really struggled with this. I came up in right wing media, I came up a much more doctrinaire conservative in my professional life. It wasn't always conservative, we can get to that later. Um if you want and I did feel an immense pressure after after the election by people to say wanted me to say the election was stolen and I knew I had a sizable part of my audience. Well, here's the benefit. Most people know me from rising, which is with crystal and me that is inherently a left right program. So it's a large audience. So I felt comfortable and I knew that I could still be fine in terms of my numbers, whatever because of many people knew me who were on the left. And if you know, my bright listeners abandoned me, so be it, I had the luxury of able to take that choice. But I still felt an immense amount of pressure to say the election was stolen to give credence to a lot of stuff that trump was doing to downplay january 6th to downplay many of the republican senators or justify many of the republican senators, some of whom I know who objected to the electoral college certification and who stoked some of the flames, um, that have eaten the republican base and I just wouldn't do it. And that was hard man. Like I feel more politically homeless right now than I ever have. But I have realized in the last couple of months is the best thing that ever happened to me freedom. It's true freedom. I now say, I say exactly what I think and it's not that I wasn't doing that before. It's maybe, um, I would avoid certain topics or like I would think about things more from a team perspective of like am I making sure that it's, it's, I'm not saying I didn't fight and I still, I criticize the right plenty and trump plenty before the election and more. It's more just like I no longer feel as if I even have the illusion of a stake within the game. I'm like, I only look at myself as an outside observer and I will only call it as I see it truly. And I was aspiring to that before, but I I had to have, in a way, trump stop the steal thing. It like took my shackles off 100% because I was like, no, this is bullsh it. And I'm going to say it's bullshit and I think it's bad and I think it's bad for the Republican party and if people in the Republican Party don't agree with me on that, that's fine. I'm just not going to be necessarily associated with you anymore. </s><s>[INST] This is probably one of the first political related politics related conversations we've had. I mean, unless you count Michael malice who [/INST] was great. He's </s><s>[INST] a funny guy. He's not so much political as he is, like burning down man. [/INST] He leans too far in anarchy for me. </s><s>[INST] I think he's, uh, there's a place for that. It's almost, well, first of all, he's, uh, he's working on a new book, which I really appreciate outside of that. He's working on like a big book for a while, which is white pill? There's also working on this like short little thing which is uh like anarchists um handbook or something like that? It's like anarchy for idiots or something like that, which I think is really well me being an idiot and being curious about anarchy, it seems useful. So I like those kinds of books [/INST] that's Russian heritage, man, they're anarchists one on one. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] I mean it's a I find those kinds of things useful. Thought experiment because uh that's why it's frustrating to me when people talk about communism or socialism or even capitalism where they can't enjoy the thought experiment of like why did communism fail? And maybe ask the question of like, are there is it possible to make communism succeed or are there good ideas and communism? Like, I enjoy the thought experiment, like the discourse of it, like the reasoning and like devil's advocate, all that people have like seem to not have patience for that. They're like communism bad red, [/INST] I was obsessed with the question and still I am, I will never be, I will never quench my thirst for Russian history. I love that period of 1892, it's just like, it's so fucking crazy. Like the autocracy embodied in Czar Alexander and then you get this like weird fail son Nicholas who is kind of a good guy, but also terrible and also Russian autocracy itself is terrible and then I just became obsessed with the question of like why did the bolshevik revolution succeed because like people in Russia didn't necessarily want bolshevism, people suffered a lot under bolshevism and it led to stalinism, how did Vladimir Lenin do it? Right, like and I became obsessed with that question and it's still, I find it so interesting, which is that a series of accidents of history, incredible boldness by Lenin, incredible real politik smart, unpopular decisions made by Trotsky and Stalin and just like the arrogance of the czars and of the of the Russian like autocracy and just but at the same time there's all these like cultural implications of this, right in terms of like how it became hollowed out post Catherine the Great and all that I was obsessed with auto because Russia was an actual autocracy and like actually, and I'm like it was there like they didn't even remove serfdom to like the civil war in America like that's crazy like, you know, and nobody really talks about it and I just yeah, I was like was bolshevism a natural reaction to the excesses of czar ism there is a convenient explanation where that is true, but there were also a series of decisions made by Lenin and Stalin to kill many of the people in the center left and marginalize them and also not to associate with the more quote unquote, like uh like amenable communists in order to make sure that they're pure strain of bolshevism was the only thing and the reason I like that is because it comes back to a point I made earlier, it's all about intentionality, which is that you actually can will something into existence, even if people don't want it. That was the craziest thing, like, nobody wanted this, but it's still ruled for half a century or more, actually, I mean, almost, you </s><s>[INST] know, that's fascinating to think that there could have been a history of uh the soviet union that was dramatically different than leninism, stalinism, that was completely different. Like, almost would be the american story. [/INST] Yeah, easily, I mean, there's a world where and I don't have all the characters, there's like Kerensky, and then there was like, whoever Lenin's number two Stalin's chief rival, and even, I mean, look, even a soviet union led by Trotsky, that's a whole other world, right? Like, literally a whole other world. And yeah, it's just, I don't know, I find it so interesting, I will never not be fascinated by Russia. I always well, it's funny that I got to talk to you because it's like, I read this book, I forget what it's called. It one, I think one of paul's surprise, and it was like, the story, I try to understand Russia post Crimea because I came up amongst people who are much more like neo conservative, and they were like, Russia, Russia bad by, And I was like, okay, like, what do these people think? And we have this narrative of like, the fall of the soviet union. And then I read this book from the perspective of Russians who lived through the fall and they were like this, I was like this is terrible. Like actually the introduction of capitalism was awful and like the rise of all these crazy oligarchs. That's why Putin was came to power to restore um restore order to the oligarchy. </s><s>[INST] And he still talks to this day, do you guys, I mean that's always the threat of like, do you want to return to the 90s? Do you want to return to Yeltsin? [/INST] And like, but the thing is in the west we have this like our own propaganda of like no, Yeltsin was great. That was the golden age. What could have been with Russia? And I was like, well what do actual Russians think? And so that yeah, I'll always be fascinated by it. And then just like to understand the idea of feeling encircled by NATO and all of that. You have to understand like Russian defense theory all the way of going back to the SARS has always been defense in depth in terms of having Estonia Lithuania and more is like protection of the Heartland. I'm not justifying in this. So NATO shells like please don't come after me, but look Estonians, Estonians like NATO, they want to be in NATO. So I don't want to minimize that. I'm more just saying like I understand him and Russia much better having done that and we are very incapable in America. I think that's probably because my parents are immigrants. I've traveled a lot of just putting yourself in the mind of people who aren't western and haven't lived history, especially our lives of americans. Forking awesome. We're the number one country in the world like like we're literally better than you like in many ways and they can't empathize with people who have suffered so much and I just yeah, it's just so interesting to me. </s><s>[INST] What about if we could talk for just a brief moment about the human of Putin and power, you are clearly fascinated by power. Do you think power changed Putin, do you think power changes leaders? If you look at the great leaders in history, whether it's LBJ F D r do you think power really changes people? Like is there truth to that kind of old proverb? [/INST] It reveals? I think that's what it is, it reveals. So Putin was a much more deft politician, much more amenable to the West. If you think back to 2001 and more right, when he came because he was still, Because at that time his biggest problem was intra Russian politics right? Like it was all consolidating power within the oligarchy. Once he did that by around like 2007, there's that famous time when he spoke out against the west at the Munich Security Conference. I forget what it was and that's when everybody in the audience was like whoa. And he was talking about like NATO encirclement and like we will not be beaten back by the west very shortly afterwards. Like the Georgia invasion happens and that was like a big wake up call of like we will not be pushed around anymore. He said before publicly like the worst thing that ever happened was the following. What did he say? He was like the fall of the soviet union was a tragedy right? Of course people in the west like what I'm like I get it right. Like they were super power now there population is declining like it's like a petro state. It sucks like I understand um I understand how somebody could feel about that. I think it revealed his character um which is that He, I think he thinks of himself probably as he always has since 2001 as like this benevolent almost as a benevolent dictator. He's like without me the whole system would collapse. I'm the only guy is keeping these people and I'm the only guy keeping all these people in check. Most Russians probably do support Putin because they feel like they support some form of functional government and the abilities like a check against that, which is a long, you know, has a long history within Russia to so I don't know if it changed him, I think it just revealed him because it's not like he I mean, he has a bill, you know, Navalny has put that billion dollar palace and all that. I don't know, sometimes I feel like Putin does that for show he doesn't seem like somebody who indulges and all that stuff. Or maybe we just don't see it like I don't </s><s>[INST] know. Well, I don't know, it's very difficult for me to understand. I've been hanging out thanks to club. Uh, a lot of I've gotten to learn a lot about the Navalny folks and it's been very educational. Made me ask a lot of important questions about what, you know, question a lot of my assumptions about what I do and don't know. But I'll just say that I do believe, you know, there's a lot of the Navalny folks say that Putin is incompetent and as a as a bad executive like is bad basically running government. But to me, [/INST] why do Russians not think </s><s>[INST] that? Well, they would take the press? Yeah, they would say the control there is a strong either control or pressure on the press. But I think there is a legitimate support and love of Putin and Russia that is not grounded in just misinformation and propaganda. There's there's legitimacy there. Mostly I tried to remain a political and actually genuinely remain a political, I'm legitimately not interested in the politics of Russia of today. I feel I have some responsibility and I'll take it that responsibility on as I need to. But my fascination as it is perhaps with you in part Is in the historical figure of Putin. I know he is currently president, but I'm almost looking like as if I was a kid in 30 years from now, reading about him studying the human being, the games of power that are played that got them to gain power to maintain power. What that says about his human nature, the nature of the bureaucracy that's around him. The nature of Russia, the people, all those kinds of things as opposed to the politics and the manipulation and the corruption and the control of the media that results in misinformation. You know, those are those are the bickering of the day. Just like we were saying, what will actually be remembered about this moment in history [/INST] totally. He's a transformational figure in Russian history really like the bridge between the follow the soviet union and the chaos of Yeltsin. That will be how he's remembered. The only question is what comes next and what he wants to come next. That's I'm always fat. I'm like he's getting up, how old is he was 60 something </s><s>[INST] 60. So he would be, I think he would be 80. So with the change of the constitution, he cannot be president until uh 6 2034, I think it is. So he would be like 80 something and he would be in power for over 30 years, which is longer than Stalin. So, but he's still he still seems to be, seems fit, I [/INST] think he's going to be around for a long </s><s>[INST] time. But this is a fascinating question that you ask, which is like, what does he want? [/INST] I don't know. Yeah, that's quite, I don't I and this is where I think given all of his behavior and more, I don't know if it's about money, I don't know if it's about enriching himself. Obviously he did to the tune of billions and billions and billions of dollars, but I think he probably, he says close to like an actual Russian nationalist, like at the top who really does believe in Russia as its rightful superpower. Everything he does seems to stem from that opposition to NATO intro to syria, wanting to play a large role in affairs deeply distrustful and yet coveting of the european powers. Like look, I could describe every czar, you know, in those same language, like every czar falls into the exact same category. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder what looking at some of the biggest leaders in human history to ask the question of, What was the motivation? What was the motivation for even just the revolutionaries? Like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, what was the motivation? Because as sure as hell, seems like the motivation was at least in part the driven by the idea by ideas, not self interest of like [/INST] power for Lenin, it was, I think he was a true believer and an actual narcissist who thought he was the only one who could do it Stalin. I do think just wanted power and realized, well, I don't know, look, he wrote very passionately when he was young. </s><s>[INST] He was, he really believed [/INST] in communist in the beginning. He did. I'm always, I'm always fascinated and I'm like Around 1920, what happened? Right, post revolution, you crush the whites now. It's all about consolidation. That's where the game's really began. And I'm like, I don't think that was about communism. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, yeah, maybe it became a useful propaganda tool, but it still seemed like he believed in it. Whether it was of course this is a question. I mean, this is a problem with conspiracy theories for me and this is legitimate criticism towards me about conspiracy theories, which is, uh, you know, just because you're not like this doesn't mean others aren't like this. So like I can't believe that somebody be Like deeply two faced, [/INST] you're welcome to Washington. But </s><s>[INST] like I think that I would be able to detect like, no, well my question is, [/INST] well, </s><s>[INST] so this difference, this, this to face like, uh, there's different levels of to face. Like what I mean is to be killing people and it's like house of cards style, right? And, and still present a front. Like you're and you're like, you're not killing people. I don't know if I guess it's possible, but I just don't see that at scale. Like there's a lot of people like that and I don't I have trouble imagining um some, you know, that's such a compelling narrative that people like to say like people that's the conspiratorial mindset. I think that skepticism was really powerful and important to have because it's true a lot of powerful people abuse their power. But saying that that bottle, I feel like people over assume that it's like I see that with the use of steroids often in sports, people seem to make that claim about like everybody who's successful and I want to be very I don't know something about me wants to be cautious because I want to give people a chance. Being [/INST] purely cynical isn't helpful people say. I mean, he's always saying this to </s><s>[INST] do this, but at the same time, being naively optimistic about everything is also kind of pathetic because people are gonna funk you over, and more importantly, that doesn't bother me. More importantly, you're not gonna be able to reason about how to create systems, they're going to be robust corruption to uh malevolent uh like parties. So, so in order to create, Yeah, you have to have a healthy balance of both, I suppose, especially if you want to actually engineer things that that that work in this world that has evil in it. I can't believe there's a book of Hitler on the desk. Uh we've mentioned a lot of books throughout this conversation, I wonder, and this makes me really curious to explore in a lot of depth, the kind of books that you're interested in. I think you mentioned your show that you uh you provide recommendations in the form of spoken word. Can you be on what we've already recommended mentioned books, whether it is historical nonfiction or whether it's more like philosophical or even fiction that had a big impact on your life. Is there a few that you can mention [/INST] already talked about the johnson books? I'll leave that alone robert A Caro, He's still alive, thank God, he's finishing glass book. I hope he makes it so that those johnson books. Second, </s><s>[INST] can I ask you a question about those books? Yes. What the hell do you fit into so many pages? [/INST] Everything Man, </s><s>[INST] Let me tell you [/INST] this. So, I'll just give an anecdote. This is why I love these books. The beginning, the first book is about Lyndon johnson his life too, when he gets elected to congress, the book begins with a history of texas and its weather patterns and then of his great great grandfather moving to texas. Then the story of that. About 100 or so pages in. You get to Lyndon johnson? Yes, that's uh that's how you do it. Which is like a Tolstoy </s><s>[INST] style. This [/INST] is the thing, it's not a biography, it's a story of the times. That's what great biography. So another one. This isn't part of my list. So don't uh is Grant Ron Chernow, Ron Chernow's grant. It's 1000 pages. And the reason I tell everybody to read it is it's not just the story of Grant, it is the story of pre Civil War America. The mexican american war, the Civil War and Reconstruction, all told in the life of one person who was involved in all three. Most people don't know anything about the mexican american war. It's fascinating. Most people don't know anything about Reconstruction now. More so because people are talking it's hot topic now, I've been reading about it for years. That is another thing people need to learn a lot more about in terms of non history books. The book that probably had the most impact on me, which is also a historical nonfiction, is I am obsessed with antarctic exploration. And it all began with a book called Shackleton's incredible journey, which is the collection of diaries of everybody who was on Shackleton's journey. For those who don't know. Um Shackleton was the last explorer of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. He led a ship called the endurance, which froze in the ice um off the coast of Antarctica in 1914. And they didn't have radios over the last exploration, the last one without the age of radio and he happens to freeze in the ice. And then the ship collapses after a year frozen in the ice and this man leads his entire crew from that ship onto the ice with a team of dogs, survives out on the ice for another year with three little lifeboats and is able to get all of his men, every single one of them alive to an island hundreds of miles away called Elephant Island. And when they got there, he had to leave everybody behind except for six people and him and two other guys, I'm forgetting their names, navigated by the stars 800 miles through the Drake passage with seas of hundreds of feet to Prince. I think it's called Prince George's Island. And then when they got to Prince George's island, they landed on the wrong side and they had to hike from one side to the other to go and meet the whalers and every single one of those things was supposed to be impossible. Nobody was ever, nobody was ever supposed to hike that island. It wasn't done again until like the 1980s With professional equipment. He did it after two years of starvation. Nobody was ever supposed to make it from Elephant Island to Prince, the guy, they had to hold him steady his legs so that he could chart the stars. And if they miss this island there into open sea, they're dead. And then before that, how do you survive for a year on the ice on seals. And before that He kept his crew from depression frozen one year in the ice. It's just an amazing story and it made me obsessed with Antarctic exploration. So I've read like 15 books on </s><s>[INST] the hell is that about the human spirit? That's that's [/INST] that's the thing about Antarctica is it brings it out of you. For example, I read another one recently called Moss ins will Douglas Mawson. He was an Australian. He was on the, one of the first shackled frost robert frost expeditions. He leads an expedition down to the south. Him and a partner there, leading explorations 19 oh eight, something like that. They're going around Antarctica um with dog teams. And one of the, what happens is they keep going over these snow bridges where there's a crevice, but it's covered in snow. And so one of the lead driver, the dogs go over and they plummet and that sled takes with it. So the guy survives, but that sled takes all their food, half the dogs, their stove, the camping tent, the tent specifically designed for the snow, everything. And there are hundreds of miles away from base camp. He and this guy, I have to make it back there in time before the ship comes to come get them on an agreed upon date. And he makes it. But the guy he was with, he dies and it's a crazy story. They first of all, we have to eat the dogs, A really creepy part of antarctic exploration as everyone ends up eating dogs at different points. Um and part of the theory, which is so crazy is that the guy he was with was dying because they were eating dog liver and dog liver has a lot of vitamin E, which if you eat too much of it can give you like a poisoning. And so uh Mawson by trying to help his friend was giving him more, </s><s>[INST] all the things that kills, you know, [/INST] his dog liver, his friend ends up dying, have a horrific heart attack. All of that, Mawson crawls back hundreds of miles away, makes it back to base camp hours after the ship leaves. And two guys are, a couple of guys stayed behind for him and he basically has to recuperate for like six months before you can even walk again. But it's like you were saying about the human spirit, it's like Antarctica brings that out of people or almonds on. The guy who made it to the South Pole robert Ahmanson, oh my God, like this guy trained his whole life in the ice from Norway to make it to the South Pole and he beat robert Frost, the british guy with all this money and all these. I could go on this forever. I'm </s><s>[INST] obsessed with. Well, first of all, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this part of the podcast. I'm gonna set it to music. Gonna listen to it because I've been whining and bitching about running 48 miles of Goggins this next weekend and this, this is gonna be so easy. I'm just gonna listen to this over and over in my head, you're going [/INST] to be one. He was obsessed with Shackleton. He talks about, he </s><s>[INST] uses, I was going to ask you about the use as an example of that is as an example of what mars colonization would be like. He's [/INST] right. No, that Antarctica is as close to, you can simulate that. Um the antarctic goes as close to what you can simulate what it would get. That that nat geo series on mars, I'm not sure if you watched it. It's incredible. Ellen is actually in it. Um and it's kind of, and it's like they get there, everything goes wrong, somebody dies like it's horrible. They can't find any water, it's not working. So what </s><s>[INST] is it? Is it like simulating the experience of what it be [/INST] like? So it's like a dock, you series where the fictionalized part is the astronauts on mars, but then they're interviewing people like Elon musk and others who were the ones who paved the way to get to MArs. This is a really interesting concept. I think it's on netflix And yeah, I agree with him 100%. Which is that the first guys to make like for example, Robert Frost who uh went to Australia. Well, sorry to Antarctica. The british explorer who was beaten to the South Pole three weeks by robert ahmanson, he died on the way back and the reason why because he wasn't well prepared. He was arrogant, he didn't have the proper amounts of supplies. His team had terrible morale. Antarctica was a brutal place if you funk up one time you die and it's like you and this is what you read a lot about, which is the reason why such heroic characters like Shackleton Shine is a lot of people died. Like there were some people who got frozen in the eye. I mean man, this again also came to the north Exploration. I read a lot about like the exploration of the North Pole and the same thing. These un extraordinary men Take people out into the ice and get frozen out there for years and ship goes so bad. They end up eating each other. They all die. There's a famous I want, I'm forgetting his name. The British Franklin expedition where they went searching for them for like 20 years and they eventually came across a group of Inuit who were like, oh yeah, we saw some weird white men here like 15 years ago and they find their bones and there's like saw marks which show that they were eating each other. </s><s>[INST] So history remembers the ones who didn't eat each other. [/INST] We were well yeah, we remember the ones who made it, but there are </s><s>[INST] and that would be the story of mars will be the story of our so, but nevertheless, that's the interesting thing about Antarctica. Nevertheless, something about human nature drives us to explore it and that seems to be like, you know, a lot of people have this kind of, to me frustrating conversations like, well Earth is Great Man, why do we need to colonize Mars? You just don't get it? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. It's the same people that say like, why are you running, like why are you running a marathon? What are you running from man? I don't know. It's pushing the limits of the of the human mind, of the of what's possible. It's [/INST] George Mallory because it's there. Yeah, it's </s><s>[INST] simple and that and that somehow actually the result of that. If you want to be pragmatic about it, there's something about pushing that limit that has side effects that you don't expect that will create a better world back home for the people, not necessarily on Earth, but like just in general, it raises the quality of life for everybody, even though the initial endeavor doesn't make any sense. The very fact of pushing the limits of what's possible then has side effects of benefiting everybody. And it's difficult to predict ahead of time what those benefits will be staying with colonizing mars, it's unclear what the benefits will be for Earth or in general what struggling [/INST] and from the moon, what did we get from Apollo right, technically, and there were a lot of socialists at the time making this argument all this money going, you know what? We went to the fucking moon 1969. That was amazing. The greatest feat in human history period. What did we learn from it? We learned and we learned about interstellar or Interplanetary Travel. We learned that we could do something off of a device less powerful than the computer in my pocket. Like the amount of potential locked within my pocket and your pocket. I mean this is if you were to define my politics in one way it's greatness like national quest for national greatness. There is no greatness without fulfilling the ultimate calling of the human spirit, which is more. It's not enough. And why should it be? It wasn't enough. Our ancestors could have been content to sit. Actually, many of them were were content to sit and say these berries will be here for a long time and they got eaten and they died. And it's the ones who got out and went to the next place in the next place and went across the Siberian land bridge and went across more and it just did extraordinary things. The craziest ones, We are their offspring and we fail them. If we don't go into space, that's how I would put it. </s><s>[INST] He should run for [/INST] president. Just broke space man. I love face. </s><s>[INST] No, you're doing difficult things and pushing exploring the world in all of its forms. I hope that kind of spirit premieres politics to that same kind of uh [/INST] can well </s><s>[INST] It can and I hope so. I don't know if you want to stay on it, but I think that was book # one [/INST] or two ship. </s><s>[INST] All right. Um, well [/INST] this one is second. This actually is a Corollary to that, which is sapiens and I know that's a very normal normie answer. Um, one of the best selling, but I think there's a reason for that. You've all know Harari. Okay, look, yes, he didn't do any new research. I get that All he did was aggregate. I'm sure he's very controversial in the scientific community. But guess what? He wrote a great book. It's a very easy to read general explanation of the rise of human history and it helps challenge a lot of preconceptions Are we special? Are we an accident? Are we more like a parasite? Are we not? What is there a destiny to all of us? I don't know. You know, if anything is like what I just described which is more move move out. Um, the evolution of money. Like I know he gets a lot of hate, but I think that he writes it so clearly and well that for your average person to be able to read that you will come away with a more clear understanding of the human race than before. And I think that that's why it's worth it. </s><s>[INST] I agree with you. 100%. I am ashamed to. I usually don't bring up sapiens because it's like [/INST] yeah, it's like every uncles rented but it's it's that's a good thing. </s><s>[INST] It's one yeah, it is one of the I think you'll be remembered as one of the great books of this particular era. Yeah, because it's it's so clearly it's like the selfish gene with doctors. I mean it just aggregates so many ideas together and puts language to it that's makes it very useful to talk about. So it is one of the great books, [/INST] 100%. Another one is definitely born to run for the same reason by Christopher McDougall, which is that I'm just gonna </s><s>[INST] listen this whole podcast next week. You [/INST] should because it you are inheriting our most basic skill which is running and reimagining human history or re imagining like what we were as to opposed to what we are is very useful because it helps you understand how to tap into primal aspects of your brain which just drive you. And the reason I love Mcdougal's writing is because I love anybody who writes like this Malcolm Gladwell, who else, Michael Lewis, people who find characters to tell a bigger story. Michael Lewis finds characters to tell us the story of the financial crisis. Um Malcolm Gladwell writes finds characters to tell us the story of learning new skills and outliers and you know and whatever his latest book is uh forget what it's called and but McDougall tells the vignettes and a tiny story of a single person in the history of running and like how it's baked into your D. N. A. And I think there was just something very useful to that for me for being like I don't need to go to the gym or like I'm not saying you should still go to the gym, I'll be clear. I'm saying like in order to fulfill like who you are, you can actually tap into something that's the most basic. Um I don't know if I'm sure if you listen to the david choe episode with joe Rogan um </s><s>[INST] or he's the animal with [/INST] the baboon when he goes and there's something to that man, there's something that we're just like they are living the way that we were supposed to not supposed, I don't wanna put a normative judgment on it. They're living the way that we used to. There's something </s><s>[INST] very fun. It's somehow to to our true nature. There's [/INST] a guy I follow on instagram come from paul Saladino carnivore MD. He just went over there to the HASA um to live with them. And I was watching his stuff just like I was like man there's something in you that wants to go like I'm like I want to do that. I'm not I wouldn't be very good at it. But like I want to, </s><s>[INST] I'm so glad that somebody who thinks deeply about politics is so fascinated with exploration and with the very basic nature, like human nature nature of our existence. I love that there's something in you and still you're stuck in D. C. [/INST] For now for now, </s><s>[INST] speaking of which uh the you're from texas, what do you make of the future of texas politically, culturally, economically? I am in part moving while I'm moving to [/INST] Austin but </s><s>[INST] I'm also doing the eric weinstein advice which is like dude, you're not married, you don't have kids, there's no such thing as moving. What are you moving? [/INST] You're like you're like </s><s>[INST] like your three suits and some shirts and underwear. What exactly is the move entail? So I have nothing. So I'm basically, you know, it's very just remain mobile but there's a promise. There's a hope to Austin outside of I mean my outside of just like friendships I have. No it's a very different culture that joe Rogan is creating. I'm mostly interested in the what the next Silicon Valley will be with the next hub of technological innovation and there's a promise uh maybe a dream for Austin being that next place that doesn't have the baggage of some of the political things. Maybe some of the sort of um things that hold back the beauty of that makes capitalism that makes innovation so powerful, which is like a meritocracy which is excellence, diversity is exceptionally important but not it should not be the only priority. It has to be something that uh it coexists with a like insatiable drive towards excellence and uh it seems like texas is a nice place like having a austin which is like a kind of uh this weird, I hope it stays weird man, I love weird people, but it there's this uh hope is it remains this weird place of brilliant innovation amidst the uh state that's like more conservative. Like there's a nice balance of everything. What are your thoughts about the future of texas? [/INST] I think it's so fascinating to me because I never thought I would want to move back, but now I'm beginning to be convinced. </s><s>[INST] So I [/INST] am, I'm being honest and many Texans will hate me for this texas was not a place that was kind to me quote unquote. And this is because of my Own parent, like I was raised in college station Texas, which is a town of 50,000, it's a university town, it exists only for the university, so it was a very strong. I did not get the full Texas experiences purely speaking from a college station experience but growing up first, you know, first generation or I forget what it is, whatever. I'm the first american I was born and raised in college station. My parents are from India being raised in a town where the dominant culture was predominantly like white evangelical christian was hard, like he was just difficult and I think of </s><s>[INST] it in [/INST] The beginning, I would say like ages like zero to like eight. It was like cultural ignorance as in like they just don't know how to interact with you. Um and there was a level of always there was like the evangelical kind of antipathy towards like you being not christian, you know my parents are hindu like that's how I was raised and so like there was that but 9 11 was very difficult. Like 9 11 happened when I was in third or fourth grade and that changed everything man. Like I mean our temple had to print out t shirts and I'm not saying this is a sob story to be clear. I'm still actually largely for my adult life, identified on the political right. So don't take this as some like race manifesto, I'm just telling it like this is what happened, which is that like we had, it was just hard to be brown frankly and to have some of the fallout from 9 11 and during Iraq and the reason I am political is because I realize in myself I have a strong rebellious nature against systems and structures of power and the first people I have rebelled against. We're all of the people telling me to shut up and not question the Iraq war. So the reason I am in politics is because I hated George W Bush with a passion and I hated the war and I was so again, my entire background is largely a national security for this reason which is I was obsessed with the idea of like how do we get people, we're not going to get us into this quagmire situations in positions of power. That's how I became fascinated by power in the first place. Was all a question of how do this happen? How did this catastrophe happened? I realized it's not as bad as like previous conflicts, but this one was mine and to see how it changed our domestic politics forever. And so That was my rebellion. But it's funny because I identified as a left on the left when I was growing up up until I was 18. I had also a funny two year stint. This is where everything kind of changed for me when I was 16. Actually I moved to Qatar to Doha Qatar because my dad was a dean or associate dean of texas A and M. University at Doha. So my last two years of high school were at this. I went from this small town in texas and I love my parents because they red could recognize that I had within me that I was not a small town kid. So they took me out of this country every chance they got. I traveled everywhere and constantly let me go. And so I was, I went from school and college station to like this ritzy private school american school, the best thing that ever happened to me because first of all it got me out of college station. Second at that time, I had this annoying streak of, I wouldn't call it being anti America, but you don't appreciate America. Let me tell everybody out there listening, leave for a while, you </s><s>[INST] will miss it so [/INST] much. You do not know what is like to not have freedom of speech until you don't have it. And I was going to, I was going to high school with these guys in the Qatari royal family and all I wanted to do was speak out of how they were pieces of ship for the way that they treated indian citizens in that country who are basically used as slave labor. And I could not say one word because I knew I would be deported and I don't know my dad would lose his job and my mom would lose her job and that we would be forced out of the country. You don't know what it's like to live like that or to be in a society where like, you know, you have like a high school girlfriend or something and you can't even touch in public or your lectured for public decency. Like listen, I've lived under gulf monarchy now and I have, that turned me into the most pro America ever. Like I came back. So like America like that's, I still, I am frankly because of that experience living living abroad, like that will do it to you live in a non democracy. You have even in europe, I would say you guys aren't living as free as we are here, it's awesome. </s><s>[INST] You're ultimately another human being than the one who left texas. Yeah. So I mean, have you actually considered moving to texas and broadly just outside of your own story? What do you think is the future of texas? What is the future of boston? There's so much transformation seemingly happening now related to Silicon Valley live in California. [/INST] Part to me which is that since I left has changed dramatically, which is that it used to be like this conservative state where the main money to be made was oil and everybody knew that petro was a petro state Houston, all of that. Austin was always weird but it was more of a music town and a university town. It was not a tech town, But in the 10 years or so since I left, I have begun to realize, I'm like well the texas I grew up in is over, it is not a deep red state in any sense in any sense of the term the number one u haul route in the country. Pre pandemic already with san Francisco to Austin. Okay, so like you have this massive influx of people from California and new york and the state and the composition of it is changed dramatically. The intra composition and the outre. Yeah, so the intra composition, it's become way more urban from when I grew when I grew up in texas are much more rural state. It's politics were much more static. It looked much more like rick perry like that. He was a very accurate representation of who we were Now. I don't think that that's the case. Texas is now a dynamic economy, not just 100% reliant on oil because of its kind of like I would call it like regulatory arbitrage relative to California and new york offers a large incentive to people who are more, I wouldn't say culturally liberal, but they're not necessarily like culturally conservative. Like the people who I grew up with that's changed the whole state's politics. Beto came two points away from beating ted Cruz, I'm not saying the state's gonna go blue, I think the republican party will just change and we'll have to readjust. But the re urbanization of texas has made it, I'll put it in this way, much more uh, much, much more attractive to me than the place that I grew </s><s>[INST] up from my perspective. Well, first of all, I love some of the, the cowboy things that texas stands for more practically from my perspective, the injection of the uh, [/INST] tech innovation </s><s>[INST] that's moving to texas has made it very exciting to me. It seems like outside of all that maybe you can speak to the weird in Austin, it seems like I know that joe Rogan is uh a rich sort of almost like mainstream at this point, but he's also attracting a lot of weirdos. And so's Ellen and a lot of those Weirdos and my friends and they're like like Michael malice like those weirdos, it's like I have a hope for Austin that all kinds of different flavors of weirdos will get injected, [/INST] it's possible. You know, I I actually think the most significant thing that happened were Tesla moving there. The reason why is I love joe obviously, but like he can only attract x amount of people. Ellen actually employs thousands of people and then you will also oracle oracle's decision to move to Austin is just as important because those two men, Larry was Ellison, Ellison and Ellen, they actually employ tens of thousands of people collectively. That can change the nature of the city. So you combine that with joe bringing this entire new entertainment complex with the bodies of people who will appreciate set entertainment complex, </s><s>[INST] the entertainment exactly, [/INST] you just remade the entire city and and that's that's why I'm fast and obviously there's network effects which is now that all those people are down there. I mean if I were Elon musk I would donate a ship ton of money to the University of texas and I would turn it into my stanford for Silicon Valley. Let's introduce some competition and let U. T Austin hire the best software developers, engineers, professors and more and turn texas into a true like Austin revolving door hub where people come to ut Austin to get an internship at Tesla and then become an executive there and then create their own company in their own garage in Austin which is the next facebook twitter. That's how it happens. This is why I'm much more skeptical of Miami. There's a whole like tech Miami crew. I'm like, yeah like there's no university, it's very organic. Um look, I think Miami is awesome. I just like, I don't know if the same building blocks are there and also know multibillion dollar companies which employ thousands of people are coming there. That's the ingredient. It's not just joe Rogan. It's not just even Elon musk. If you still operated in California, it's all the people he employs. I think that is where I think texas is going to dramatically change within the next 10 years alternative are, it's already become a more urbanized state that's moved away from oil and gas. Um in terms of like its emphasis, not necessarily in terms of his real economics and 10 years from now. I don't think it will be necessarily the name prop like of the of the town. The only question to me is how that manifests politically because it's very possible though because a lot of these workers themselves are California culturally liberal. You can see a Gavin Newsom type person getting elected governor of texas or like the mayor of Austin, I mean look, mayor of boston is already a democrat right? Like I mean a joke as his own problems with Austin. It's funny. I remember him leaving L. A. And I'm like, have you been awesome? </s><s>[INST] Like, [/INST] you know, it's not everything. It's cracked up to be, you know necessarily. </s><s>[INST] But no matter what, you know, a new place allows the possibility for new ideas. Even if they're somehow left leaning and all those kinds of things. I do think the only two things missing from Austin and texas are two dudes in a suit that sometimes have a podcast talking much nonsense and mike. So let's let's bring the best suit game to texas. I hope you do make it to texas at some point. Thanks so much for talking to me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sagarin Jetty and thank you to our sponsors Jordan's Harvard's show, Graham, early grammar assistant eight, sleep, self cooling bed and magic spoon, low carb cereal, click the sponsored links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from martin Luther king Jr about the idea that what is just and what is legal. I'm not always the same thing. He said, never forget that. What Hitler did in Germany was legal. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] And that in many ways is the ultimate question that underlies this whole effort of science. So, you've made significant contributions in both the science of intelligence and the engineering of intelligence in a hypothetical way, let me ask how far do you think we can get in creating intelligence systems without understanding the biological, the understanding how the human brain creates intelligence. Put another way, do you think we can build a strong as system without really getting at the core the function on the understanding the function they share the brain? [/INST] Well this is a real difficult question. You know we did um solve problems like flying without really using too much or knowledge about how birds fly. It was important I guess to know that you could have thinks heavier than air being able to fly like birds. But beyond that probably we did not learn very much you know some you know the brothers Wright did learn a lot of observation about birds and in designing their their aircraft. But you can argue we did not use much of biology in that particular case. Now in the case of intelligence I think that um it's a bit of a bet right now if you are if you ask okay we all agree we'll get at some point maybe soon, maybe later to a machine that is indistinguishable from my secretary. Say in terms of what I can ask the machine to do, I think we'll get there. And now the question is and you can ask people do you think we'll get there without any knowledge about the human brain or but the best way to get there is to understand better the human brain. Okay this is I think an educated bet that different people with different backgrounds will decide in different ways. The recent history of the progress in the eye in the last outside five years or 10 years has been the the main breakthroughs. The main recent breakthroughs really start from neuroscience. I can mention reinforcement learning as one he's one of the algorithms at the core of Alphago which is the system that beat the kind of an official world champion of goal Lissy Doll & 2, 3 years ago in school um that's one and that started really with the work of Pavlov um 1900 Marvin Minsky in the 60s and many other neuroscientists later on. Um and deep learning started which is at the core again of Alphago and systems like autonomous driving systems for cars like the systems that mobile, which is a company started by one of my ex post dot com. No Joshua. Um so that is the core of those things and deep learning really the initial ideas in terms of the architecture of this layered Iraq Ical networks Started with work of Tor Stone visible and David Hubble at Harvard up the river in the 60s. So recent history suggests the neuroscience played a big role in these breakthroughs. My personal bet is that there is a good chance they continue to play a big role. Maybe not in all the future breakthroughs, but in some of them </s><s>[INST] at least an inspiration. So at [/INST] least in spirit. Absolutely, yes. </s><s>[INST] So you so you studied both artificial and biological neural networks, who said these uh mechanisms that underlie deep learning deep uh and reinforcement learning but there is nevertheless uh significant differences between biological and artificial neural networks as they stand now. So between the two. what do you find is the most interesting, mysterious, maybe even beautiful difference as it currently stands in our understanding? [/INST] I must confess that until recently I found that the artificial networks too simplistic relative to real neuron networks. But recently I've been started to think that yes, there are a very big simplification of what you find in the brain. But on the other hand, are much closer in terms of the architecture to the brain than other models that we had that computer science used as model of thinking, which were mathematical logics, list prologue and those kinds of things. So in comparison to those are much closer to the brain and you have networks of neurons which is what the brain is about. And the the artificial neurons in the models. As I said, caricature of the biological neurons but they're still neurons, single units communicating with other units, something that is absent in, you know, the traditional computer type models of mathematics reasoning and so on. </s><s>[INST] So what aspect do you would you like to see in artificial neural networks added over time as we try to figure out ways to improve them. [/INST] So one of the main differences and problems in terms of deep learning today. And it's not only deep learning and the brain is the need for deep learning techniques to have a lot of labeled examples, you know, for instance, for image night you have like a training site which is one million images each one labeled by some human in terms of which object is there? And it's it's clear that in biology a baby but may be able to see millions of images in the first years of life but will not have millions of labels given to him or her by parents or take take care takers. So how do you solve that? You know, I think there is this interesting challenge that today deep learning and related techniques are all about big data, big data, meaning a lot of examples labeled by humans. Um, whereas in nature you have so that this big data is and going to infinity that's the best, you know, and meaning label data. But I think the biological world is more and going to one a child can learn. It's a beautiful, very small number of, you know, labeled examples like you tell a child this is a car. You don't need to say like an imagine that, you know, this is a car, this is a car, this is not a car. This is not a car one million times. </s> |
<s>[INST] for this? [/INST] Where does our taste come from adaptations to chemical molecules that we are used to seeing. So we don't have a case box for things we don't even know about. So we want yeah we want to be able to know that this chemical taste funny but </s><s>[INST] you think it won't be it's likely not to be dangerous. Like it won't know how to even do you think our immune system will well even detect that something weird is [/INST] probably and will be very easy to detect because it will be very different from very weird but it won't be able to sort of attack. I mean the scene from I don't know Independence Day where like they're communicating with the alien computer that I grew them in. I mean it's hilarious because like Macs and Pcs have trouble communicating. I mean let alone an alien technology or even alien D. N. A. </s><s>[INST] So okay uh now I was talking about you being a scientist on earth but say you were a scientist. They were shipped over to Europa to investigate if there's life, what would you look for in terms of signs of life. Mhm. [/INST] Life is unmistakable. I would say the way that life transforms a planet surrounding it is not the kind of thing that you would expect from the physical laws alone. So it's I would say that as soon as life arises it creates this compartmentalization, it starts pushing things away, it starts sort of keeping things inside that are self. And there's a whole signature that you can see from that. So when I was organizing my meaning of life symposium, my my my friend who is an astrophysicist, um basically uh we were deciding on what would be the themes for the for the symposium. And then uh I said well we're gonna have biology, we're gonna have physics. And she's like uh come on biology, just a small part of physics. Everything is a small part of physics. And uh I mean in many ways it is, but my immediate answer was not in a way life challenges physics. It supersedes physics. It sort of fight against physics and that's what I would look for in europe. I would basically look for this fight against physics for anything that sort of signatures of not just entropy at work. Not just things diffusing away not just gravitational pools, but clear signatures of remember when I was talking earlier about this whole selection for environment, selection for bios, fears for ecosystems for these multi organism form of life. And I think that's sort of the first thing that you can look for chemical signatures that are not simply predicted from the reaction you would get randomly such a beautiful </s><s>[INST] way to look at life. So you're basically leveraging some energy source to enable you to resist the physics of the [/INST] universe. Fighting against physics. But that's that's the first transformation. If you look at humans, we're way past that. What do you mean by transformation? So so basically there's layers I sort of see life, you know, when we when we talk about the meaning of life, life can be construed at many levels. We talked about life in the simplest form of sort of the ignition of evolution and that sort of the basic definition that you can check off. Yes, it's alive. But when alexander the Great was asked to whom do you owe your life to your teachers or to your parents? And alexander the Great uh answered, I owe to my parents the zine, the life itself and I owe to my teachers the F zeen like you, funny F means good. The opposite of cacophony, which means, you know, bad. So F Zeen in his words was basically living human life a proper life. So basically we can go from the scene to the F scene and that transformation has taken several additional leaps. So basically, you know, life on Europa, I'm pretty sure has gotten to the stage of a makes be make C. Makes a. Again. But getting to the F zeen is a whole other um level. And that level requires cooperation. That level requires altruism. That level requires specialization. Remember how we were talking about the RNA, specializing into DNA for storage proteins and then compartmentalization. And if you look at pro periodic life, there's no nucleus. It's all one soup of things intermingling. If you look at eukaryotic life again, you for true good. You know, so you carry out basically has a nucleus and that's where you compartmentalize further the organization of the information storage from all of the daily activities. If you look at a human body plan or any animal, you have a compartmentalization of the germline. You basically have one lineage that will basically be saved for the future generations and everything outside that lineage is almost superfluous. If you think about it the rest of your body, all he does is ensure that that lineage will make it to the next generation. That these germ lines will make it to the next generation of the rest is packaging. I'm sorry to be so blunt. And if you look at nutrition, You know where dangerous storms, what does the star mean? Dentro means? two where this is the second mouth, The first mouth is actually down here is the esophagus, so deter stones have evolved a second layer of eating kind of like alien with the two months. You can think of us as alien where the first mouth is up here and then the second mouth is down there </s><s>[INST] is of course is the first model just the physical manipulation of the food to make it more incredible, [/INST] correct. And basically, again, you know, if you look at if you look at a worm, it's an extremely simple life form basically has a mouth, it has an illness and it has you know, just some organs in between that consume the food and just spit out poof humans are basically a fancy form of that. So you basically have the mouth, you have the digestive track and then you have limbs to get better at getting food, you have eyesight hearing etcetera to get better at getting food. And then you have of course the Germ line and all of this food part. It's just auxiliary to the Germline. So you basically have layers of addition of compartmentalization of specialization on top of this zine to get all the way to the limousine. </s> |
<s>[INST] Actually pulled almost a full Almighty yesterday working, doing a pretty cool thing. But the sleep I got when I finally got a chance to lay down was incredible. And a big part of that is thanks to a sleep. So go to a sleep dot com slash legs to get a special savings. That's eight sleep dot com slash lex. I feel like I have to stop doing this and read because the security guards are starting to get really nervous. This is the lex Fridman podcast and here is my conversation with frank Wilczek. What is the most beautiful idea in physics? [/INST] The most beautiful idea in physics is that we can get a compact description of the world. That's very precise and very full at the level of the operating system of the world. Um That's an extraordinary gift and we get, we get worried when we have find discrepancies between our description of the world and what's actually observed at the level even of a part in a billion. </s><s>[INST] You actually have this quote from Einstein that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is is is that it is comprehensible or something like [/INST] that. That's so, that's the most beautiful surprise that I think uh That that really was the, to me, the most profound results of the scientific revolution of this, of the 17th century with uh the shining example of Newtonian physics that you could aspire to complete this precision and a concise description of the world of the operating system and it's gotten better and better over the years to and that's the continuing miracle. Now there are a lot of beautiful sub miracles to the form of the equations is governed by high degrees of symmetry and and they have very surprising kind of mind expanding structure, especially in quantum mechanics. But if we have, I have to say that the single most beautiful revelation is that in fact the world is comprehensible. </s><s>[INST] Would you say that's a factor. Hope [/INST] it's a fact. We can do, we, you can point to things like the rise of gross gross national product per capita around the world as a result of the scientific revolution. You can see it all around you uh in recent developments with exponent, So exponential production of wealth, control of nature at a very profound level where we do things like since tiny, tiny tiny tiny vibrations to tell that there are black holes colliding far away. Or we test laws as I alluded to a part in a billion and two things and what appear on the service to be entirely different conceptual universes. I mean on the one hand, pencil and paper or nowadays computers that calculate abstractions and on the other hand, magnets and accelerators and detectors that look at the behavior of fundamental particles and and these different universes have to agree or else we get very upset. And that's uh, that's an amazing thing if you think about it. So, and it's telling us that we do understand a lot about nature at a very profound level and there are still things we don't understand of course, but as we get better and better answers and better and better ability to address difficult questions, we can ask more and more ambitious questions. </s><s>[INST] Well, I guess the hope part of that is because we are surrounded by mystery. So we've one way to say it, if you look at the growth of GDP over time that we figured out quite a lot and we're able to improve the quality of life because of that and we've figured out some fundamental things about this universe, but we still don't know how much mystery there is. And it's also possible that there's some things that are in fact incomprehensible to both our minds and the tools of science, like the sad thing is we may not no, it because in fact they are incomprehensible. And that's the open question is how much of the universe is comprehensible. If we figured out the the everything uh what's inside the black hole and everything that happened at the moment of the Big Bang? Does that still give us the key to understanding the human mind and the emergence of all the beautiful complexity we see around us? That's not uh like when I when I see these objects, like, I don't know if you've seen them like Celera Tamara, uh all these kinds of objects were the from simple rules emerges complexity. It makes you wonder maybe it's not reducible to simple beautiful equations. The whole thing, only parts of it. That's the tension I was getting out with the hope. [/INST] Well, when we say the universe is comprehensible, we have to kind of draw careful distinctions about or uh definitions about what we mean by that both the </s><s>[INST] university and the kind of and the comprehensive. [/INST] Exactly right. So the so in certain areas of understanding reality, we've made extraordinary progress, I would say in understanding fundamental physical processes in getting very precise equations that really work and allow us to do uh profound sculpting of matter, you know, to make computers and Iphones and everything else and they really work and their extraordinary productions uh on the other but and that's all based on the laws of quantum mechanics and you know, they really, and they really work and then uh, and they give us tremendous control of nature. On the other hand, as as, as we get better answers, we can also ask more ambitious questions. And there are certainly things that have been observed even in the, in what would be usually called the realm of physics that aren't understood. For instance, there seems to be another source of mass in the universe, the so called dark matter that we don't know what it is. And it's a very interesting question, what it is uh, then, uh, but also as you were alluding to there, there's, it's one thing to know the basic equations. It's another thing to be able to solve them in in important cases. So we run, we run up against the limits of that in things like chemistry where we'd like to be able to design molecules and predict their behavior from the equations. We think the equations could do that in principle. But in practice, it's very challenging to solve them in all, but very simple cases. Uh, and then there's the other thing which is that a lot of what we're interested in is historically conditioned. It's not, it's not a matter of the fundamental equations, but about what has evolved or come out of, of the early universe and formed into people and frogs and societies and things and the laws of physics, The basic laws of physics only take you so far in that it kind of provides a foundation, but doesn't really that you need entirely different concepts to deal with those kind of systems and all. We was one thing I can say about that is that the laws themselves point out their limitations, that they kind of, their laws for dynamical evolution. So they tell you what happens if you have a certain starting point, but they don't tell you what the starting point should be at least. Uh and uh the other, the other thing that emerges from the equations themselves is the phenomenon of chaos and uh sensitivity to initial conditions, which tells us that you have that there are intrinsic limitations on how well we can spell out the consequences of the laws if we try to apply them </s> |
<s>[INST] okay so that's that's a brilliant synergy but I was also thinking in terms of the automated expansion of the knowledge base you mentioned nl you this is very early days in the machine learning space of this, but self supervised learning methods, you know, you have these language models GPT three and so on. They just read the internet and they form representations that can then be mapped to something useful. The question is, what is the useful thing? Uh like, they're now playing with a pretty cool thing called opening a codex, which is generating programs from documentation. Okay, That's kind of useful. It's cool. But my question is, can it be used to generate um in part, maybe with some human supervision, a psych like assertions help feed psych more assertions from this giant body of internet data. [/INST] Yes, that that is in fact, one of our goals is how can we harness machine learning, How can we harness natural language processing? Um to increasingly automate the knowledge acquisition process, the growth of psych and that's what I meant by priming the pump that um you know, if you you sort of learn things at the fringe of what you'll know already you learn this new thing is similar to what, you know, already and here are the differences and the new things you have to learn about it and so on. So the more, you know, the more and more easily you can learn new things, but unfortunately, inversely if you don't really know anything and it's really hard to learn anything. and so If you're not careful if you start out with two small um uh sort of a court to start this process um it never really takes off. And so that's why I view this as a pump priming exercise to get a big enough manually produced, even though that's kind of ugly duckling technique put in the elbow grease to produce a large enough core um that you will be able to do all the kinds of things you're imagining um Without without sort of ending up with the kind of wacky brittleness is that we see for example in um GPT three um where um it uh you know you're telling a story about um um you know someone uh putting poison um you know plotting to poison someone and so on. And then the you know the you know GPT three says what you say, what's the very next sentence in the next sentence is oh yeah, that person then drank the poison they just put together. It's like that's probably not what happened or someone or um if you go to Siri and um um you know I think I have uh you know where can I go for help with my um alcohol problem or something, It will come back and say I found seven liquor stores near you, you know and you know so on. So you know it's one of these things where um yes, it may be helpful um Most of the time, it may even be correct most of the time, but if it doesn't really understand what it's saying and if it doesn't really understand why things are true and doesn't really understand how the world world works, then some fraction of the time it's going to be wrong now, if your only goal is to sort of find relevant information, like search engines do Um then being right 90% of the time, it's fantastic. That's unbelievably great. Okay. However, if your goal is to like um you know, save the life of your child who has some medical problem or your goal is to be able to drive. You know, for the next 10,000 hours of driving without getting into a fatal accident, and so on. then, you know, um Ever rates down at the 10% level or even the 1% level not really acceptable. </s><s>[INST] I like the model of what that learning happens at the edge and then you kind of think of knowledge as this fear. So uh if you want a large fear because the learning is happening on the surface [/INST] Exactly. So you have the, what you can learn next increases quadratic lee as the diameter of that sphere because </s><s>[INST] it's nice because you think when you know nothing, it's like you can learn anything but the reality not really [/INST] right. If you know, if you know nothing, you can really learn nothing you can appear to learn. So I'll also um one of the anecdotes I could go back and um give you about why Why I feel so strongly about this personally um was um in um 1980-81 um my daughter Nicole was born and she's actually doing fine now but when she was a baby she was diagnosed as having meningitis and um doctors wanted to do all these scary things. Um And uh my wife and I were very um worried and we could not get a meaningful answer from her doctors about exactly why they believed this, what the alternatives were and so on. And fortunately a friend of mine ted short left was another assistant professor in computer science at stanford at the time. And he had been building a program called Mason which was a medical diagnosis program that happened to specialists in um blood infections like meningitis. And so he had privileges at Stanford hospital because he was also an MD. Um and so we got hold of her chart and we put in her case and it came up with exactly the same diagnoses and exactly the same therapy recommendations. But the difference was because it was a knowledge based system, a rule based system it was able to tell us step by step by step um why um this was the diagnosis and step by step why this was the best um on therapy, the best procedure to um um to do for her and so on. And there was a real epiphany because that made all the difference in the world. Instead of blindly having to trust in authority, we were able to understand what was actually going on and um so at that at that time I realized that that really is what was missing in computer programs. Was that even if they got things right because they didn't really understand um the way the world works and why things are the way they are, they weren't able to give explanations of their answer. Um you know, and you know, it's one thing to to use a machine learning system that says this is what you should, you know, I I think you should get this operation and you say why? And it says You know .83 and you say no in more detail why? And it says .831, you know, that's not really very compelling and that's not really very helpful. </s> |
<s>[INST] they're using the death of an individual. Yeah sure the media are not the jewish media the media and that's the media is fucked up. That machine does takes whatever tragedy and pushes it towards whatever narrative that gets more clicks and views and so on. Sure and then politicians do the same. They use the media to influence the media to tell a story. And [/INST] this is a simple thing. I put I believe that the idea of anti Semitism and the closeness of the holocaust is used by certain individuals in media to not take accountability for the bad things that are happening and what's happening is there's a new frontier right meaning? Like it used to be okay for somebody to be a billion. We thought about a billion a billionaire right? A lot of times you think I'm actually kind of being out of shape and you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like Onassis or something like you thought about a different now, you think about it, you think about Ellen, think kim think you think it's a new counter billionaire, You know, it's not just Soros is a billionaire, it's a new form of billionaire will right now, what I'm calling for the industry is I'm calling, I'm calling the industry out and saying like, hey, it just so happens that there's been times where I had, my lawyer was jewish, my regulator was jewish, but like, like eight people that basically would collude and talk without me were in groups saying, okay, this is what the tour is gonna be, this is this next house and they were making all these decisions and they're making all this money and at the end I was like, I ended my tour and I don't have the money and it just so happens that that's the case that what they were. But what I'm saying is if everyone can say, hey, you can't point out this fact or we're gonna say you're anti Semitic and we're going to call you Hitler, I feel that there has to be at least 1% of safeguarding the ability to screw the artists based on saying it's anti Semitic by pointing out that they just so happen to all be uh jewish and I don't think that's anti Semitism. I just think that, hey, this is another thing like, okay, the Kardashians, when you hear that, do you think male or do you think female, you think female? You know what I'm saying? You think this is the reality is this is why rap works right? They're gonna make an anti women thing in a, in a second, right? And it's gonna say, well, if you point out that these five women, six women are having a meeting on where the christmas party is and none of the ballplayers are rappers that they have babies with have any say so. So that christmas happened at Courtney's house all eight years when I was there and it never happened at anyone else's black family house, right. If I'm the one that pointed out, they just don't have, they don't have their or your anti Semitic word to say, shut the up. Yeah, because this is the way it runs and that's the way we want to </s><s>[INST] do. If you say that though, that women are silencing the black voice, yes, you're gonna get the same response. But especially historically [/INST] resonant the fact that it's true </s><s>[INST] when you talk in groups that breeds hate when you talk about individuals, it solves problems and your engineering. [/INST] Okay. But this is something I pointed out on pierce. I said if a black person gets pulled over with a car and it's three other people in the car, they're also going to jail, they're not going to single them out, they're gonna say you guys are all in collusion. I just described collusion five times in this interview And you keep on going back to this is like 1930, this is like this, this is like that. What I'm saying is, look, I want to work with you as an engineer to free my people. Can we start as a being with engineer opportunities right here. I am sorry to the people who had to be hurt and affected by that. Now we are here and I'm looking to solve it. But what happens is every time if I talked to any of these business people one by one, because mind you, I didn't get to the tweet by not having a conversation. I had the conversations beforehand before I got to the tweet. Now we're gonna take it to the stage, now we're on the world stage, right? And you saw Ari Emanuel do exactly the kind of thing that I was saying have been done behind closed doors. Now he's doing it and open doors, they told Candace Owens I couldn't be on the daily wire, like you can't even explain yourself and we don't care how how you got to that point either. And that's fucked up. </s><s>[INST] They told [/INST] that even about Yes, she did. That's what they said and you know what and you can have my voice raised or lowered, I'm gonna do it lower, right? Because what's happening to me by I put it in your words, the media is saying, not only </s><s>[INST] can [/INST] you not explain yourself. We don't care how you got to that point. You need to apologize and you can't explain. And that's the end of the story. So, just apologize. So we can have mel Gibson do some more films. Is exactly what Ari Emanuel is saying. No one is looking to change the problem that led so many people to that same level of frustration. And I just so happen to be the one that's not going to back up on it until this changes because you know what? I'm sorry. I had a sleepy text. I'm sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I put uh, that I was uh, 5 12 5 11 on uh tender. Okay. My cock is not 14 inches. I lied. Okay, It's only 13. So, I'm sorry. Right? So, the </s> |
<s>[INST] Well, that fills me with hope that I tend to think of us humans in the very early days of whatever the heck we are. So that makes me think thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years from now that we'll be reaching. Whatever we become, we'll be traveling out there to explore more and more and more. No. [/INST] So what you're doing is the early days of exploration with the tools we have. No, yes, the early seafarers looking at the sky for navigation. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, coming up with different theories of what's on the other side, that the earth is starting to gain an intuition that the earth may be around. And then we might be able to navigate all the way around to get to the financial benefits of getting spices from India, whatever the reason, whatever the grant funding process is all about. But ultimately actually results in a deep understanding of the mystery that's all around us. And I mean, just to travel out there. I mean, to me, the discovery of life in the solar system. I really hope to see that in my lifetime. Some kind of life, bacteria, something may be dead. [/INST] Because that means there's life everywhere. </s><s>[INST] And that's just the kind of stuff that might be out there. All the different environmental conditions, chemically speaking, that are out there. And it just seems like when you look at Earth, life finds a way to survive, to thrive in whatever conditions. And so maybe that process just kind of humbles you as it's super exciting to know that there is life out there of different forms. And of course, that raises the question of what is life even? We tend to have a very human-centric perspective of what is a living organism and what is intelligence and all this kinds of stuff. And all the work in artificial intelligence now is trying to challenge our ideas of what makes human beings special. I think we're doing that through all kinds of ways. And I think you're working some part doing that as well. Like the unity you feel is realizing we're part of this big mechanism of nature, whatever that is, that's creating all kinds of cool stuff. From the humble, pristine origins to today. So if you could just kind of linger on the process of the data, what does the data look like? And how does the raw data lead to a discovery of an ancient star? [/INST] Well, as a spectroscopist, we have to, I guess, talk for a brief moment about what a spectrum is. Everyone, I hope, has seen a rainbow in the sky. That is basically what we're doing. We don't send the starlight through a raindrop that then gets bounced around and splits up the light into the rainbow colors. We do it with a spectrograph, so basically a prism. So we send the starlight through a prism of sorts, and that splits it up. And then we record exactly that. So it's a little 2D picture, actually, of a spectrum. Now, it's not going to look colorful, it's just black and white. Different colors have, of course, different energies. That's what we record. More specifically, we record it as wavelengths, so wavelengths and frequency and energies all the same at the end of the day. We process that little image in the sense that we do a crosscut and then sum up a few columns so that we get all the data that we recorded. And what we see is a, it's a bit funny to describe just with words, but a wiggly line with lots of dips. So the 2D process spectrum, we call it continuum, so it's just a flat line, basically, and then there are dips. So the interesting things are the dips. If you think back of the rainbow, what we actually see in our stars is not just a rainbow, but it would be a rainbow with lots of black lines in it, which means certain little pieces of color have been eaten away by a certain amount. And so we can no longer see it as well, or not at all. Why is that happening? So if we come back to our stars, what we're observing, we're observing the stellar surface. We can actually never peer with our telescopes inside. We only ever can go after the surface. And the surface contains, or the surface layer contains different kinds of elements. Every one of those types of atoms, so elements are just different types of atoms, they absorb different photons that are coming from the hot core where the fusion is occurring. And so that means that if you were the observer with a spectrograph or without, you will see the starlight, but certain frequencies, certain energies of that light will have been absorbed by all the different atoms in the gas. So you see less of them. And so those are the dips. And the strength of the dips tell us which element was it and how much of that element was or is in the star. So we have many, many, many dips. The solar spectrum, for reference, all the dips are overlapping because the abundance of all the elements is so high, it's actually a very complicated spectrum. My spectra really looked like a straight line, and then there's a dip here, and then the straight line again is dip there. The sun doesn't have straight lines. I mean, that's just all absorbed in some form or another. But the old stars have so little of all the elements. That there are only occasionally these dips that then indicate, okay, that one at that wavelength was iron, and here we have carbon, and there's magnesium and sodium, and oh, there's a little strontium line here. So we have a much easier way to map out this barcode that the spectrum pretty much is at the end of the day, and to then measure the strength of these, we call it absorption lines, to then calculate with existing codes that mimic the physics of the stellar atmospheres, like how much was absorbed, how many, what kind of elements were present in the stellar atmosphere. And so this is how we get to our abundance measurements, and then all together that gives us the chemical composition and that particular signature in that star. </s> |
<s>[INST] That's another 10x. So it adds up, if you reference counting every single thing you create, that adds up. [/INST] That adds up. Yeah, and if you look at people complain about the Python GIL, this is one of the things that hurts the parallelism, that's because of the reference counting, right, so the GIL and reference counting are very tightly intertwined in Python, it's not the only thing, but it's very tightly intertwined. And so then you lean into this and you say, OK, cool, well, modern computers, they can do more than one operation at a time. So they have vectors. What is a vector? Well, a vector allows you to take one, instead of taking one piece of data, doing an add or a multiply and then picking up the next one. You can now do 4, or 8, or 16, or 32 at a time. Well, Python doesn't expose that because of reasons. And so now you can say, OK, well, you can adopt that. And now you have threads. Now you have additional things, like you can control memory hierarchy. And so Moda allows you to do, is it allows you to start taking advantage of all these powerful things that have been built into the hardware over time and it gives, the library gives very nice features so you can say just parallelize this, do this in parallel, right? So it's very powerful weapons against slowness which is why people have been I think having fun like just taking code and making it go fast because it's just kind of an adrenaline </s><s>[INST] rush to see like how fast you can get things. Before I talk about some of the interesting stuff with parallelization and all that, let's first talk about like the basics. We talked to indentation, right? So this thing looks like Python. It's sexy and beautiful like Python as I mentioned. Is it a typed language? So what's the role of types? Yeah, good question. [/INST] So yeah, good question. So Python has types, it has strings, it has integers, it has dictionaries and like all that stuff but they all live at runtime, right? And so because all those types live at runtime in Python you never, you don't have to spell them. Python also has like this whole typing thing going on now and a lot of people use it. I'm not talking about that. That's kind of a different thing. We can go back to that if you want. But typically the, you know, you just say I take, I have a def and my def takes two parameters and I'm gonna call them a and b and I don't have to write a type, okay? So that is great but what that does is that forces what's called a consistent representation. So these things have to be a pointer to an object with the object header and they all have to look the same. And then when you dispatch a method, when you go through all the same different paths no matter what the receiver, whatever that type is. So what Mojo does is it allows you to have more than one kind of type. And so what it does is allows you to say okay, cool. I have an object and objects behave like Python does, and so it's fully dynamic and that's all great. And for many things, classes like that's all very powerful and very important. But if you want to say hey it's an integer and it's 32 bits, or 64 bits, or whatever it is. Or it's a floating point value. It's 64 bits. Well then the compiler can take that and it can use that to do way better optimization. It turns out, again, getting rid of the indirection, that's huge, means you can get better code completion because compiler knows what the type is and so it knows what operations work on it. That's actually pretty huge. What Mojo does is it allows you to progressively adopt types into your program. You can start, again, it's compatible with Python. Then you can add however many types you want wherever you want them. And if you don't wanna deal with it you don't have to deal with it, right? And so one of our opinions on this is that it's not that types are the right thing </s><s>[INST] or the wrong thing, it's that they're a useful thing. Which was kind of optional, it's not strict typing and you don't have to specify type. Exactly. Okay, so starting from the thing that Python is kind of reaching towards right now with trying to inject types into it, [/INST] what it's doing. Yeah, with a very different approach but yes. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, so. What's the different approach, I'm actually one of the people that have not been using types very much in Python. So I haven't. Why did you say? It just, well, because I know the importance. It's like adults use strict typing. And so I refuse to grow up in that sense. It's a kind of rebellion. But I just know that. [/INST] That's okay. Why did you say? </s><s>[INST] But it probably reduces the amount of errors, even just for forget about performance improvements. [/INST] It probably reduces errors when you do strict typing. Yeah. So I mean, I think it's interesting if you look at that, right? The reason I'm giving you a hard time, is that there's this cultural norm, this pressure, there has to be a right way to do things. Growing up is only do it one way. And if you don't do that, you should feel bad. Some people feel like Python's a guilty pleasure or something. And that's like, when it gets serious, I need to go rewrite it. I mean, cool, I understand history and I understand kind of where this comes from, but I don't think it has to be a guilty pleasure. So if you look at that, you say, why do you have to rewrite it? Well, we have to rewrite to deploy. Well, why do you want to deploy? Well, you care about performance, or you care about perfectability or you want, a tiny thing on the server that has no dependencies or you know, you have objectives that you're trying to attain. So what if Python can achieve those objectives? So if you want types, well, maybe you want types because you want to make sure you're passing the right thing. Sure, you can add a type. If you don't care, you're prototyping some stuff, you're hacking some things out, you're like pulling some ram code off the internet, it should just work. And you shouldn't be pressured, you shouldn't feel bad about doing the right thing or the thing that feels good. Now, if you're in a team, you're working at some massive internet company and you have 400 million lines of Python code, well, they may have a house rule that you use types because it makes it easier for different humans to talk to each other and understand what's going on and bugs at scale. And so there are lots of good reasons why you might want to use types, but that doesn't mean that everybody should use them all the time. So what Mojo does is it says, cool, well, allow people to use types. And if you use types, you get nice things out of it, right? You get better performance and things like this, right? But Mojo is a full, compatible super set of Python, right? And so that means that has to work without types. It has to support all the dynamic things, has to support all the packages, it has to support list comprehensions and things like this, right? And so that that starting point, I think, is really important. And I think that, again, you can look at why I care so much about this, and there's many different aspects of that, one of which is the world went through a very challenging migration from Python 2 to Python 3, right? And this migration took many years, and it was very painful for many teams, right? And there's a lot of things that went on in that. I'm not an expert in all the details, and I honestly don't want to be. I don't want the world to have to go through that, right? And people can ignore Mojo, and if it's not their thing, that's cool. But if they want to use Mojo, I don't want them to have to rewrite all their code. </s> |
<s>[INST] in that [/INST] direction. But it was the timing that really cinched things for me. I was very lucky that the region that I grew up county Durham despite the massive decline, deindustrialization and the complete collapse of the local government system around the still maintained money for education. And they also paid for exchanges and we have exchange programs with uh cities in Germany and France also in Russia, in Kostroma near Yaroslavl, for example, an old textile town similar, you know, down in its kind of region, but quite historic and the Russian context. In fact the original birthplace of the romanov dynasty. Um in customer, just as county Durham, it was quite a distinguished historic area in the, in the british context. And so it was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages, I studied german, I studied french And then in 1983 there was the Oscar basically provoked by the euro missile crisis. So the station of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western europe and in eastern europe during the height of the Cold War And the Syrian missile crisis over SS 20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977. So when I was about 11 or 12, you know, all the way through into the later part of the 1980s. And in 1983 we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict. It was very much another rerun of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. So 20 years on the same kind of thing, the Soviets misread, Although I didn't know this at the time, I know a lot of this, you know, after the fact, but the tension was palpable. But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises operation able archer that the United States was conducting. And actually thought that the United States might be preparing for first nuclear strike and that then set up a whole set of literal chain reactions in the soviet union Eventually it was recognized that, you know, all of this was really based on misperceptions. And of course, you know, that later led to negotiations between Gorbachev and Reagan for the intermediate nuclear forces, the INF Treaty. But in 1983, that tension was just a cute. And for as a teenager, we were basically being prepped the whole time for um the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon. There were Tv series, films in the United States and the UK threads the day after we had all these public service announcements telling us to seek sanctuary or cover in the inevitability of a nuclear blast. And my house was so small, they said, look for a room without a window, there were no rooms without windows. My put on these really thick curtains over the window, you know, instead if there was a nuclear flash, you know, we'd have to, you know, get down on the floor, not look up, but the curtains would help like this is ridiculous, dad. And we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs are covered under the stairs like harry potter and it's all just, you know, totally nuts or go or you have to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside. And I thought, well this this isn't gonna work. And one of my great uncles who had fought in World War Two said, well look, you're good at languages Fiona, why don't you go and study Russian trying to figure it out, figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us </s><s>[INST] up, because, [/INST] you know, during the exactly during World War Two, the United Kingdom, the United States and the soviet Union had all been wartime allies, and my uncle charlie thought well there's something gone wrong here, Maybe you can figure it out and as you said, go talk to them. So I thought, okay, I'll study Russian, so that's really how this came about. I thought well it's applying education, I'll just do my very best to understand everything I possibly can about the Russian language and the soviet union, and I'll see what I can do, and I thought well maybe I could become a translator. So I had visions of myself sitting around, you know, listening to things in a big headset and you know, basically translating perhaps at some future arms control summit. </s><s>[INST] So how did the journey continue with learning Russian, I mean, this early dream of being a translator and thinking how can I actually help understand and maybe help even deeper way with this conflict that threatens the existence of the human species. Um how did it actually continue? [/INST] Well, I mean, I read everything else actually possibly could about, you know nuclear weapons and nuclear war and you know, I started to try to teach myself, you know, Russian a little bit, it </s><s>[INST] was always in context of nuclear war. [/INST] It was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point, but also in historical context because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the soviet union in wartime allies in World War Two. So we try to understand all of that. And also um you know, I like many other people I read, you know, Russian literature in translation, I'd read war and peace and you know, I love the book actually. I mean particularly the, you know, the story parts of it. I wasn't one really at that at that time when I was a teenager, I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, you know, in terms of his series of the gray man in history and you know, kind of social change though now I appreciate it more. But when I was about 14 I was like this man needed an editor, could have just got on with the story of an amazing story when incredible. You know, kind of book, this is, </s> |
<s>[INST] it's interesting because my mind went to personal robotics robots in the home. It seems like there's much more market opportunity there. I think it's very difficult to achieve. I mean this this this might speak to something important which is I understand self driving much better than understand robotics in the home. So I understand how difficult it is to actually solve self driving to uh to a level not just the actual computer vision and a control problem and just the basic problem self driving, but creating a product that would undeniably be um that will cost less money. It will save you a lot of money, like orders of magnitude, less money that could replace Uber drivers for example. So car sharing its autonomous, that creates a similar or better experience in terms of how quickly you get from A to B. Or just whatever the pleasantness of the experience, the efficiency of the experience, the value of the experience and at the same time the car itself costs cheaper. I think that's very difficult to achieve. I I think there's a lot more um low hanging fruit in the home [/INST] that could be. I also want to give you perspective on like how challenging it would be at home or like maybe kind of depends on the exact problem that you're dissolving. Like if we're speaking about these robotic arms And hence these things, they cost tens of thousands of dollars or maybe 100K. And you know maybe obviously maybe there would be economy of scale, These things would be cheaper. But actually for any household to bite the price would have to go down to 90,000 bucks. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I personally think that uh so self driving car, it provides a clear service. I don't think robots in the home there will be a trillion dollar company will just be all about service, meaning it will not necessarily be about like a robotic arm that helps you, I don't know, open a bottle or wash the dishes or uh any of that kind of stuff, it has to be able to take care of that whole the therapist thing you mentioned, I think that's of course there's a line between what is a robot and what is not like doesn't really need a body. But you know some uh ai system with some embodiment. I think [/INST] so the tricky part when you think actually what's the difficult part is um when the robot has like when there is a diversity of the environment with which the robot has to interact, that becomes hard. So, you know, on one spectrum you have industrial robots as they are doing over and over the same thing. It is possible to some extent to prescribe the movements and with very small amount of intelligence. The movement can be repeated millions of times. Uh The it also, you know, various species of industrial robots where it becomes harder and harder. Like for instance, in case of Tesla might be a matter of putting a rock inside of a car and you know, because the rock kind of moves around, it's it's not that easy. It's not exactly the same every time. That being the case that you need actually humans to do it. Uh Well, you know, welding cars together. It's a very repetitive process. Um Then in case of self driving itself, the difficulty has to do with the diversity of the environment, but still the car itself and the problem that we are solving is you try to avoid even interacting with things, you're not touching anything around because touching itself is hard and then if you would have in the home uh robot that you know has to touch things and like if these things they change the shape, if there is a huge variety of things to be touched then that's difficult. If you are speaking about the robot which there is you know head that is smiling in some way with cameras that it doesn't even know touch things that's relatively simple. </s><s>[INST] Okay so to both agree and to push back. So you're referring to touch like soft robotics like the actual touch. But I would argue that you could formulate just basic interaction between um like non contact interaction is also a kind of touch and that might be very difficult to solve. That's the basic this knot disagreement but that's the basic open question to me with self driving cars and disagreement with Ellen which is how much interaction is required to solve self driving cars, how much touch is required. You said that in your intuition touch is not required and my intuition to create a product that's compelling to use, you're going to have to uh interact with pedestrians not just avoid pedestrians but interact with them when we drive around in major cities were constantly threatening everybody's life with our movements. Uh and that's how they respect us. There's a game theoretic going out with pedestrians and I am afraid you can't just formulate autonomous driving as a collision avoidance problem. [/INST] So I think it goes beyond like a coalition of evidence is the first order approximation. Uh, but then at least in case of testa they are gathering data from people driving their cars and I believe that's an example of supervised learning data that they can train their models on and they are doing it, which you know, can give model this like another level of uh, a behavior that is needed to actually interact </s> |
<s>[INST] Before I go onto that thread, let me return to our friend Gpt. Let me ask you another ridiculously big question. Can you give an overview of what gpt three is? Or like you say in your Twitter bio gpt and plus one how it works and why it works. [/INST] So gpt three is a human goes neural network. Let's assume that we know what is neural network by the definition and it is trained on the entire internet and just to predict next word. So let's say it is part of the article and it the only task that it has at hand it is to say what would be the next word, what would be the next word and it becomes uh really exceptional at the task of figuring out what's the next word? So you might ask why would this be an important task, why would it be important to predict what's the next word? And it turns out that a lot of problems can be formulated uh as a text completion problems. So GPT is purely learning to complete the text. As you could imagine. For instance, if you are asking a question, who is the president of the United States, then Gpt can give you an answer to it. It turns out that many more things can be formulated this way. You can format text the way that you have sent us in english. You make it even look like some content of a website uh elsewhere, which would be teaching people how to translate things between languages. So it would be E and call on tax in english, F. R colon. And then you uh and then you ask people and then you ask model to continue. And it turns out that the such a model is predicting translation from english to french. The crazy thing is that this model can be used for way more sophisticated tasks. So you can form a text such that it looks like a conversation between two people and that might be a conversation between you and Elon musk. And because the model read all the text about Elon musk, it will be able to predict Elon mask words as it would be on mask, it will speak about colonization of mars about sustainable future and so on. And it's also possible to to even give arbitrary personality to the model, you can say here is a conversation with a friendly a ipod and the model uh will complete the text as a friendly I was </s><s>[INST] so, I mean, how do I express how amazing this is? So just to clarify a conversation generating a conversation between me and Elon musk, it wouldn't just generate good examples of what Ellen would say. It would get the syntax all correct. So like interview style, it would say like Ellen cohen and lexical, like it's not just like uh inklings of uh semantic correctness, it's like the whole thing, grammatical syntactic semantic, it's just really, really impressive a generalization. [/INST] Yeah, I mean, I also want to, you know, provide some caveats so it can generate a few paragraphs. Of course you're in text. But as you go to a longer pieces, it actually goes off the rails. If you try to write a book, it won't work out this way. </s><s>[INST] What way does it go off the rails? By the way is they're interesting ways in which it goes off the rails what falls apart first. [/INST] So the model is trained on the old existing data that is out there, which means that it is not trained on its own mistakes. So for instance, if it would make a mistake then I kept. So to give you an example, so let's say I have a conversation with a model pretending that is even mask and then I start putting some, I'm start actually making up things which are not factual. Um I would say like twitter but </s><s>[INST] I got you. Sorry. [/INST] Yeah, I don't know. I would say that Ellen is my wife and the model will just keep on carrying it on. And as if it's true. Yes. And in some sense if you would have a normal conversation with Alan he would be what the fuck? </s><s>[INST] Yeah there will be some feedback between. So the model is trained on things that humans have written but through the generation process there's no human in the loop feedback correct? That's fascinating. [/INST] Makes sense. So </s><s>[INST] it's magnified like the errors get magnified and magnified and it's also interesting. I mean first of all humans have the same problem is just that we uh will make fewer errors and magnify the errors [/INST] slower. I think that actually what happens with humans is if you have a strong belief about the world as a kid, then very quickly we'll learn that is not correct because they are grounded in reality and they are learning from your new experience. </s><s>[INST] But do you think the model can correct itself to won't it through the power of the representation. And so the absence of Elon musk being your wife, information on the internet won't to correct itself, [/INST] There won't be examples like that. </s><s>[INST] So the areas will be subtle at first [/INST] subtle at first and in some sense you can also say that the data that is not out there is a data which would represent how the human learns. That's and and and maybe model will be trained on such a data, then it would be better off </s><s>[INST] How intelligent is gpt three. Do you think? Like when you think about the nature of intelligence, it seems exceptionally impressive. But then if you think about the big G. I. Problem is this foot steps along the way to A G. I. [/INST] So um let's see. It seems that intelligence itself is there's multiple access of it. And I would expect that the the systems that we are building, they may end up being superhuman on some access and subhuman or some other access. It would be surprising to me on all access simultaneous. They would become superhuman. Um Of course people ask this question is gpt spaceship that that would take us to the moon or are we putting a building a ladder to heaven? That we're just building a bigger and bigger ladder And we don't know in some sense uh which one of these two </s> |
<s>[INST] Are there lessons ideas to be learned from theories like that from the releases from Eriks? [/INST] I don't know. It depends. I have to confess, I haven't looked that closely at a at Terex. I mean, he explained to this to me personally a few times and I looked a bit at his paper, but it's um again, we're back to the problem of a limited amount of time in life. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting effect, right? Yeah. Why don't more physicists look at it there. I mean, I'm in this position that somehow, you know, uh, uh, people write me emails for whatever reason and I had worked in the space of A I. And so there's a lot of people perhaps they eyes even way more accessible than physics in a certain sense. It's a lot of people write to me with different theories about they have for how to create general intelligence. And it's again, a little bit of an excuse, I say to myself, like, well, I only have a limited amount of time. So that's why I'm not investigating it. But I wonder if, um, there's ideas out there that are still powerful, They're still fascinating and that I'm missing because I'm because I'm dismissing them because there are outside of the sort of the usual process of academic research. [/INST] Yeah, well, I mean the same thing. And pretty much every day in my email, there's a somebody's got a theory of everything about why all of what physicists are doing. Perhaps the most disturbing thing I should say about my critique, being a critic of string theory is is that when you realize who your fans are, um, that every day I hear from somebody said, oh, well, since you don't like string theory, you must of course agree with me that this is the right way to think about everything. Oh, no, Oh, no. And you know, most of these are you, quickly, you can see this is a person doesn't know very much and doesn't know what they're doing, you know, But there's a whole continuum too, you know, people who are quite serious physicists and mathematicians who are making a fairly serious attempt to try to do something and like like yogurt and uh erIC and then then your problem is you know, you spent you you do want to try to spend more time looking at it and try to figure out what they're really doing, but and at some point you just realize wait a minute, you know, for me to really, really understand exactly what's going on here would just take time. I just don't have </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it takes a long time. Which is the nice thing about ai is unlike the kind of physics we're talking about. If your idea is good, that should quite naturally lead to you being able to build a system that's intelligent. So you don't need to get approval from somebody that's saying you have a good idea here. You can just utilize that idea and engineer system like naturally leads to engineering with physics here. If you have a a perfect theory that explains everything that still doesn't obviously lead one to um to scientific experiments that can validate that theory and to to like trinkets you can build and sell [/INST] It at a store for $5, can't make money off of it. </s><s>[INST] So that that makes it much much more challenging. Um Well let me also ask you about something that you found especially recently appealing, which is roger Penrose twister theory, um what is it, what kind of questions money to allow us to answer? What will the answers look like? [/INST] It's only in the last couple years I really, really kind of come to really, I think to appreciate it and to see how to really what I believe to see how to really do something with it. And I got very excited about that the last year or two In one way of saying one idea, twister theory, is that what it's it's a different way of thinking about what space and time are and about what points in space and time are, but which only which is very interesting that it only really works in four dimensions. So four dimensions behaves very, very, especially unlike other dimensions and in four dimensions of certain there is a way of thinking about space and time geometry where you know as well as just thinking about points in space and time, you can also um think about different objects that so called twisters. And and then when you do that, you end up with a kind of a really interesting insight that the that you can formulate a theory and you can formulate a very take a standard theory that we formulate in terms of points of space and time. And you can reformulate in this twister language and in this twister language it's b um the fundamental objects are actually are more kind of the Are actually spheres in some sense, kind of the light cone. So maybe one way to say it, which which actually I think is really is quite amazing if you ask yourself, you know, what do we know about, about the world? We have this idea that the world out there is this all these different points and these points of them. Well that's kind of a derived quantity. What really don't really know about the world is when we we open our eyes, what do you see, you see a sphere and and what you're looking at is you're looking at the you know, a sphere is worth of light rays coming into your into your eyes. And what Penrose says is that well, what what a point in space time is, is that sphere that sphere of all the light rays coming in? And and he says, and you should formulate your instead of thinking about points, you should think about the space of those fears if you like, and formulate the degrees of freedom as physics, as living on those fears living on. So you're kind of you're kind of living on your degrees of freedom, are living on light rays, not on points. And it's a very different way of thinking about about physics and you know, he and others working with him developed a mhm you know, a beautiful mathematical, this beautiful mathematical formalism and a way to go back from fourth between our kind of some aspects of our standard way we write these things down and work on the so called twister space and you know, they Certain things worked out very well, but they ended up, you know, I think kind of stuck by the 80s or 90s that they weren't a little bit like string theory, that they, by using these ideas about twisters, they could develop them in different directions and find all sorts of other interesting things. But they were they were getting they weren't finding any way of doing that, brought them back to kind of new insights into physics and my own. I mean the most kind of got me excited really, is what I think I have an idea about that, I think does actually does actually work that goes more in that direction and I can go on about that endlessly or talk a little bit about it, but that's the I think that that's the one kind of easy to explain insight about twister theory. There are some more technical ones, I should mean, I think it's also very convincing what it tells you about spinners for instance, but that's a more technical. </s> |
<s>[INST] So what are the aspects of the operating systems that lead to Singapore and and to south Korea and all that kind of stuff? So can you speak to different elements that enable the toolkit for entrepreneurs? [/INST] Sure, sure. And maybe here let me just maybe illustrate it with my own story and then I can take you back to </s><s>[INST] tell us your story. [/INST] You know, it's just because it started with me coming here, you shouldn't even robot everything. And now it looks like we need and then you're like tell people and no, no, no. But so this is where this question, even when you asked me, how are some, some countries, how do some countries become prosperous? That question lex I had it when I was seven or so. That's when my family moved me to from Senegal for the first time of my life, I left my country, I left my continent and I was headed to europe to go join my people, my family, my parents who were there as economic migrants, my parents had migrated for a better life as so many people have to, so many people have to coming from poorer places coming for low income countries. </s><s>[INST] You saw the difference between the two places, [/INST] how else would you call it? Here you are in Senegal, minding your own business, causing tons of trouble everywhere, You know, just being a, being a happy free range kid, but I was so </s><s>[INST] you were always a troublemaker, not just [/INST] now, </s><s>[INST] okay, life [/INST] wouldn't be fun without it. </s><s>[INST] And of course I agree. [/INST] So because even you, you know like when you're like all put together like front I know there's a lot of trouble making behind you, </s><s>[INST] desperately trying to keep it together, I know [/INST] you are, but with me I'm going to totally bring it out. So just so </s><s>[INST] you saw the difference, [/INST] right? Different, I'm walking in here back home and I tell people this story because to me it's a defining story back home to take a shower. It's a, it takes time grandma has to, you know, make the short cold catch on a little stove like you use at, you know when you go camping and then she puts a pot of water on it, it boils, she takes it, puts it in a bigger bucket, mixes it with some colder water, then we put a little pot in it and a stronger member of the family has to drag it to the shower and then they're finally, I can proceed to take my shower here. I'm in Germany in the middle of the winter and my mom's like, I got time for your shower. I'm like, I'm not getting naked, where is about? So I just told whoever wins is a bucket of hot water and she's like, oh you silly, come on, just jump in and I jump in the shower and the buttons of water is coming down temperature playing, Are you kidding </s><s>[INST] me? I've [/INST] been cheated out of life my whole life. So that's what happened. And then I then, and then I'm like, oh and all of these roads were paved roads unlike back home, everything is like sandy and you know, my feet are always actually always have to wash off when I, when I go back home and your shoes get ruined most of the time. And it started and I had this question and it was just like, wow, how come they have this and we don't. So I was not being like, oh, you know how come they have all this money? I was not, it was just like how come? And I think what I was alluding to was how come life is so easy here and it's not </s><s>[INST] an easy, not in a negative sense, in a beautiful sense. Sometimes I get uh, you know, just having traveled through the war zone just to come back traveling through europe, back to America. It just, I'll just get emotional, just looking at the efficiency of things like how, how easy it is, how we can um, first of all, in Ukraine currently can't fly right. It's a war zone. Just even the transportation, you said roads. Yeah. The quality of roads in the United States is amazing. Just not, you know, many of the places that drive in Ukraine you're talking about. I mean uh really bad conditions of roads and I'm sure in many parts of Africa in many parts of the world is the world's even worse. [/INST] Right, Right. </s><s>[INST] And outdoor, you know, having a toy, indoor toilet is a Fascinatingly awesome luxury. [/INST] It is, it is. And don't take me wrong lex do we have some great roads now in many parts of Africa? Yes, main arteries, great roads were like, whoa, this is moving. Yes, we do. But definitely more today than in my time growing up. Um do we have, you know, a country like Nigeria that just birthed um six unicorns last year alone. Yes. Do we have the African youth out there being so amazing and you know, living their lives. Yes, we have all of that. But it is still, unfortunately just like we're scratching the surface and those people still are getting all of that accomplished literally swimming through molasses. This is some of the most, most gross immoral, unfair waste of human capital. </s><s>[INST] And so that is the, started with you as a seven year old asking, wait a minute, how do amazing people in europe do this and the amazing people in africa don't [/INST] and that's a cute word amazing because that's when I that's what I realized later because and I was not always like that for me, amazing and amazing, right? I knew instinctively that of course we are amazing too. But so this and so eventually the question became how so I went from how come they have this and we don't to the country as I'm growing up and researching because it stayed with me when I tell you I'm obsessed, I'm haunted, I am haunted. So you can laugh all you want. But it's so the question became the question became, how come some countries like um the United States Singapore are rich and some others like mine and many others in Africa are poor. That became the question. And along the line lacks along the road, I continued on living my life wondering about this question and I've heard all types of reasons as to supposedly why that might be the case. Some people with a very straight face are still peddling the fury according to which come on darling, it's not your fault. You know, your skin color goes with a gene sequence that just doesn't allow you to be as smart as white people are and it's not your fault but just accepted that stuff is still out there. It's very real and I have to hear it and others would say to me it's just because you know you guys don't have adequate level of education and I say you know maybe you gotta go say that to most of the street sellers you go see in Senegal you go up to any of these too many of these street sellers in Senegal they are wading through cars and moving cars under the hot sun fumes thrown at their face trying to sell you anything and any that you think you might be able to use whoever we're talking about an ironing board to an umbrella to q tips to um you know to to fix selling you whatever you need from from your car Visa street sellers and you ask them dear do you do you have any degree? Yeah I have this credit degree in math or in literature or whatever. Some very very educated people yet there right there this is what they're doing. So </s> |
<s>[INST] 100 and 50,000 investors use it. It takes just a few minutes to get started at fun dries dot com slash lex that's F U N D E R I S E dot com slash lex. This is the lex Fridman podcast and here is my conversation with Cristiano Amon mhm. You are originally from brazil. So let me ask the most important question. The most profound question. The biggest question, Who's the greatest [/INST] football soccer </s><s>[INST] player of all time? Look, everybody's gonna say pele. [/INST] And actually uh I was </s><s>[INST] born at the during the game [/INST] of brazil </s><s>[INST] and Italy the pele gave brazil [/INST] the championship. Actually </s><s>[INST] it was, my [/INST] dad tells me that the doctor </s><s>[INST] had a tv on at the delivery room. But so everybody will [/INST] say pele but I really </s><s>[INST] like Ronaldo, [/INST] the first, </s><s>[INST] the first [/INST] Ronaldo. I </s><s>[INST] really like him. That's my favorite player by the way. Not [/INST] everybody would say </s><s>[INST] pele, but we should we should leave that on the table and agree to disagree, [/INST] Brazilians will say </s><s>[INST] yes, there's other countries around that region. Absolutely [/INST] disagree. A little very </s><s>[INST] aware Qualcomm is largely responsible for [/INST] five G </s><s>[INST] and [/INST] some of the greatest </s><s>[INST] processors in our smartphones [/INST] ever built. </s><s>[INST] So we got communication and computation [/INST] tech </s><s>[INST] that impacts probably [/INST] billions of people. </s><s>[INST] So if you zoom out you as a human, we look at humans on earth in general, [/INST] does it blow your mind </s><s>[INST] that [/INST] we have these </s><s>[INST] billions of smartphones communicating and each of them have the computational power. [/INST] You know, you talk </s><s>[INST] about 10 billion [/INST] transistors, </s><s>[INST] that's a million [/INST] times more than </s><s>[INST] 50 years [/INST] ago in the best computers </s><s>[INST] in the world. Like if you just zoom out as a, as a human does that [/INST] blow your mind. Absolutely. Look, </s><s>[INST] one of the reasons I [/INST] think I love this company </s><s>[INST] is that we [/INST] know that the </s><s>[INST] technology would develop can change the world. [/INST] And I'll tell one more thing beyond </s><s>[INST] the amount of processing power that you have now in the palm of your hands [/INST] and being everyone </s><s>[INST] in the world that's [/INST] connected with broadband </s><s>[INST] technology. The smartphone is also mankind largest development platform. [/INST] There's nothing like </s><s>[INST] it. So you [/INST] respect both the hardware </s><s>[INST] and the software. Both [/INST] both if aliens </s><s>[INST] were observing [/INST] Earth over the past 50 to 70 years, how </s><s>[INST] do you think they would describe [/INST] this particular, </s><s>[INST] uh, [/INST] turmoil, </s><s>[INST] fun things going on on the [/INST] surface of this particular </s><s>[INST] little planet [/INST] we live in interesting </s><s>[INST] times. [/INST] Uh, in </s><s>[INST] one time we [/INST] see incredible </s><s>[INST] development of technology for mankind. Just what happened in the last century, uh, [/INST] You know, the nine from 1900 to the two </s><s>[INST] 1000. It was incredible development. [/INST] Just look, two </s><s>[INST] 1022 [/INST] years ago, how far we're coming and where </s><s>[INST] we're going with technology. It's incredible. What do you think they would notice? [/INST] So there's </s><s>[INST] road networks, there's all kinds of networks, [/INST] there's, uh, there's lights </s><s>[INST] that keep popping [/INST] up cities springing up. Like from an alien perspective, </s><s>[INST] you're observing, what I'm going to tell you [/INST] is you have this </s><s>[INST] contrast of incredible [/INST] development of </s><s>[INST] technology. But then you see [/INST] some of the things that are happening right now, which </s><s>[INST] is probably would [/INST] not expect them to </s><s>[INST] happen on [/INST] The 21st century </s><s>[INST] just will happen. And [/INST] in Ukraine. So I think that that will be a more </s><s>[INST] puzzling question for the aliens. I would imagine the new technology is kind of impressive actually. That might not be so puzzling [/INST] because that's just human nature, </s><s>[INST] revealing itself as it has throughout human history. Let's talk about [/INST] wireless communication. </s><s>[INST] So, Qualcomm was instrumental [/INST] in developing five </s><s>[INST] G. Now you were with Qualcomm since the early [/INST] days, the good old </s><s>[INST] 90s with the two G. But what is 5G, including [/INST] sub six gigahertz, </s><s>[INST] five G and [/INST] Millimeter Wave five G. </s><s>[INST] How does it work? And [/INST] maybe the most important question is how will it change the world in the </s><s>[INST] coming years When [/INST] we set ourselves to </s><s>[INST] develop five [/INST] G. And you know, </s><s>[INST] we look at this [/INST] every generation of technology </s><s>[INST] had a problem to be solved. Right? So you mentioned to G two G challenge, The challenge of C. D. M. A. Was [/INST] can we give every person </s><s>[INST] on earth a cell phone [/INST] that was, can you get to a </s><s>[INST] technology that you can basically allow everyone to have a mobile phone. 3G was about the ability [/INST] to connect that to the internet. </s><s>[INST] I think 4G was [/INST] Broadband. And with four </s><s>[INST] G was about have [/INST] the ability for you to have a computer in the </s><s>[INST] palm of your hand? [/INST] We just talk about that </s><s>[INST] five G. [/INST] The challenge was a little bit different </s><s>[INST] is [/INST] how do we build a </s><s>[INST] technology for a society that is going to [/INST] Be 100% connected to the cloud? </s><s>[INST] How do we provide [/INST] a technology that is going to be </s><s>[INST] the last [/INST] mile connectivity for everything? </s><s>[INST] So five G [/INST] has, has basically </s><s>[INST] been designed [/INST] eliminate all issues with data </s><s>[INST] congestion, whether you are [/INST] in in uh </s><s>[INST] stadium, we talk about [/INST] soccer, you were in a </s><s>[INST] stadium and everyone should be [/INST] ability to have </s><s>[INST] access to broadband. [/INST] So deal with congestion, </s><s>[INST] deal with the [/INST] fact that not only people, </s><s>[INST] but billions of [/INST] things need to be connected, create </s><s>[INST] a technology that for the first time in war [/INST] liss, you </s><s>[INST] could deliver mission [/INST] critical services. </s><s>[INST] Wireless used to Up to four G [/INST] is his best effort in </s><s>[INST] five G. It [/INST] can guarantee </s><s>[INST] that you are connected [/INST] with the cloud. And </s><s>[INST] in the last point [/INST] of that </s><s>[INST] is provide [/INST] this fabric that </s><s>[INST] will allow us as a [/INST] society </s><s>[INST] to look at things that are not [/INST] connected and say </s><s>[INST] that's the exception. That's [/INST] why we </s><s>[INST] made a comparison [/INST] In the early days of five </s><s>[INST] G. That that's going to be like [/INST] electricity right now, you don't have a discussion about </s><s>[INST] what's the use cases for electricity. You don't [/INST] talk about that anymore. </s><s>[INST] You just assume it's there [/INST] and that's how we think about everything </s> |
<s>[INST] this is fascinated by the way, instrumental perspective on liberty. That's gonna give me a lot to think about. Let me ask a personal question. Uh, was there ever a time that you had a crisis of faith where you question your belief in God? [/INST] Sure. And I would let's call it a crisis of faith and an ongoing question of faith, which I think is I hope most religious people and the word Israel right in in hebrew means to struggle with God. That's that's the that's literally the word means. And so the idea of struggling with God, right? Where if you're jewish or right, The idea of struggling with God, I think is endemic to the human condition. If you understand what God is doing, then I think you're wrong. And if you think that that question doesn't matter, then I think you're also wrong. I think that God is very necessary hypothesis. So </s><s>[INST] struggle. The struggle with God is life That is the process of life. [/INST] That's right, because you're never gonna get to that answer otherwise you're God and you aren't. So </s><s>[INST] why does God allow cruelty and suffering in the world one of the tough questions. [/INST] So we're going deep here, there there's two types of cruelty and suffering. So if we're talking about human cruelty and suffering because God does not intervene to prevent people from exercising their free will, because to do so would be to deprive human beings of the choice that makes them human. And this is the sin of the Garden of Eden, basically is that God could make you an angel, in which case you wouldn't have the choice to do the wrong thing. But so long as we're going to allow for cause and effect in the universe shaped by your choice, cruelty and evil are going to exist. And then there's the question of just the natural cruelty and vicissitudes of life. And the answer there is, I think that God obscures himself. I think that if God were to appear in all of his glory to people on a regular basis, I think that would make faith and you wouldn't need it. There'd be no such thing as faith, right. It would just be reality right? Nobody has to prove to you that the sun rises every day. But if if God is to allow us the choice to believe in him, which is the ultimate choice from a religious point of view, then he's gonna have to obscure himself behind tragedy and horror and and all those other things. I mean, this is a fairly well known capitalistic concept called sims. Um, in in Judaism, which is the idea that when God created the university, sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these things to happen. </s><s>[INST] So God doesn't have instrumental perspective on [/INST] liberty. </s><s>[INST] Uh, [/INST] in a, in a chief sense, he he does because the best use of liberty is going to be belief in him and you can misuse your liberty right? Hope there will be consequences if you believe in an afterlife or if you believe in sort of a generalized better version of life led by faith, uh, then liberty does have a purpose, but he also believes that you have to give people from a cosmic perspective the liberty to do wrong without threatening all the institutions of society. I mean, that's that's why it does say in the bible that if man sheds blood by man, shall his blood be shed right? There are punishments that are, that are in biblical thought for doing things that are wrong. </s><s>[INST] So for a human being who lacks the faith in God. So if you're an atheist, can you still be a good person? Of [/INST] Course 100%. And there's a lot of religious people who are crappy people, </s><s>[INST] how do we understand that tension? [/INST] Well, from a religious perspective, what you would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live In accordance with a set of rules that don't damage other people without believing in God, you just might be understanding the reason for doing that wrong is what a religious person would say. Um, there's the conversation again that I had with him. And basically as you and I agree, I said, this is him. You and I agree on nearly everything when it comes to morality, like we probably disagree on 15-20% of things. The other 80% is because you grew up in a Judeo christian society and so do I. And we grew up 10 miles from each other, you know, around the turn of the millennium. So there's that um so you can perfectly well be an atheist living a good moral decent life because you can live a good moral decent life with regard to other people without believing in God. I don't think you build a society on that because I think that you know that relies on the sort of goodness of mankind, natural goodness of mankind. I don't believe in the natural goodness of mankind. No, I believe in, I believe that man has created both sinful and with the capacity for sin in the capacity for good, </s><s>[INST] but if you let them be on their own isn't doesn't [/INST] social institutions to shape them. I think that that's very likely to go poorly </s><s>[INST] interesting. Well, we came to something we disagree on, but that may be uh that might reflect itself in our approach to twitter as well. I think if humans are left on their own uh they they tend towards good, they definitely have the capacity for good and evil, but I left on their own there. Um I I tend to believe they're good, I [/INST] think they might be good with limits. What I mean by that, is that what the evidence I think tends to show is that human beings are quite tribal, so what you'll end up with is people who are good with their immediate family and maybe their immediate neighbors, and then when they're threatened by an outside tribe, then they kill everyone, which is sort of the history of civilization in the pre civilisational era, which was a very violent time. Pre civilization leader was quite violent. </s> |
<s>[INST] If somehow you like this podcast, please subscribe on Youtube. Review it with five stars on apple podcast. Follow on Spotify. Support on Patreon connect with me on twitter at lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting but I give you time stamps So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Graham Early, a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure and readability. It's like a second pair of eyes that helps make sure that my writing sounds more like Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, one of my favorite books. [/INST] And less like </s><s>[INST] James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is a novel of attempted to read several times in college and failed miserably on every occasion. Graham early is doing a couple of tests, reads with this podcast and they will judge whether they want to sign a long term contract based on how many people sign up to Graham early premium, which I've been using and enjoying for many years now. So I think you know what to do, especially if you enjoy this podcast. I want your writing to not be a chaotic stream of consciousness like the precursor to the GPT three language model. That is the post ulysses writing of Mr James Joyce. Get 20% off graham early premium by signing up at graham early dot com slash lex. That's 20% off grandma lee premium at Graham early dot com slash flex. Now here's the tricky part. You have to sign up on a desktop, not your smartphone, otherwise it doesn't count as support for this podcast, so please use your desktop or laptop. I hope you'll be up for this challenge. This show is also sponsored by sun basket. Some basket delivers fresh, healthy delicious meals straight to your door. As you may know. My dad is pretty minimalist, so it's nice to get some healthy variety into the mix. They make it easy and convenient with everything pre portioned and ready to prep and cook. You can enjoy delicious healthy dinner in as little as 15 minutes. I've enjoyed a lot of meals from their menus that fit my, what they call carb conscious ways the items on the menu are always delicious. Like today it's black angus rib eye steak with broccoli and radishes, italian sausages and vegetable skewers with two romesco sauce, mediterranean lemon chicken with baby broccoli, artichokes and olives. What the heck is baby broccoli, I don't know right now some basket is offering 35 bucks off your order when you go right now to some basket dot com slash lex and enter promo code lex at checkout again, visit some basket dot com slash lex and use code lex to get $35 off your order. This show is sponsored by ECM Rush, which if you look around seems to be one of if not the most respected digital marketing tool out there. It does a lot of stuff including S SEO optimization of keywords, back links, content creation, social media posts and so on. They have over 45 tools and a trusted by over six million marketers worldwide. I don't like numbers but that's because I'm an idiot with that stuff and in general I speak from the heart and data be damned. But somebody needs to pay attention to numbers because otherwise you can't make optimal decisions. I believe heart comes first data second, but both are necessary. I started using them just for fun to explore. Not numeric things like what kind of titles or words connect with people as a writer and crappy part time speaker. That information helps me at least the moderation. The amount of data that they put at your fingertips is amazing. So if you want to optimize your online presidents, check them out at SCM rush dot com slash partner slash lex to get a free month of guru level membership. Okay, this show is also sponsored by Express VPN. It provides privacy in your digital life without a VPN. Your I. S. B. Internet service provider can see every sight you've ever visited as terrifying. Even when you're browsing in incognito mode. Even if you clear your history in the US, they can legally sell your data to add companies. Express VPN prevents them from being able to do all that by rerouting and encrypting your internet connection to their secure servers. I've used it for many years on Windows Lennox and android, but it's available everywhere else too. For me it's been fast and easy to use one big power on button. That's fun to press. Probably my favorite intuitive design of an app doesn't try to do more than it needs to. I believe there's a Charles bukowski quote about that go to Express VPN dot com slash flex pod to get an extra three months free on a one year package that's Express VPN dot com slash lex pod and now here's my conversation with eric Weinstein who's the greatest musician of all time. Would you say? We were just off camera talking about Eddie van Halen. He unfortunately passed away. [/INST] Who's the greatest musician of all time. Yeah, Jonathan Richmond, who's that? It's a weird question. So I'm gonna give you a weird answer. It's not because thank you. Okay, Jonathan Richard. The reason I'm picking on him is that he had a quote. Uh he was the front man of a group called the modern Lovers and his quote was something like we have to be prepared to play music when our instruments are broken, the electricity is out and it's raining something like that. And I thought that that quote was very interesting because what it said was, you have to be able to strip this thing down farther and farther back to get to something that is intrinsically musical. So we were having a conversation just now about virtuosity and we're talking about Eddie Van Halen and his recent passing and that affected me emotionally. I don't know whether it affected you. I was never Van Halen, the group fan, but I revered Eddie van Halen's capacity for innovation. Just I saw him like uh you know Rodney mullen the skateboard, I had dreamed of having the two of them on the same podcast just to talk about what it's like to totally discontinuous lee innovate. </s><s>[INST] And you posted a video of spanish fly. I think you're saying like I didn't know the guitar can make those kinds of sounds like. What is this voodoo [/INST] magic? Well, this is the thing, the arpeggios that he did on a single string are so fast and the attacks uh, from the hammer ons when they go at light speed as he did uh particularly the reason I chose that was, is that I wanted to strip out the electronics because part of the claim will be is that he's a rock musician and a lot of the innovations had to do with things peculiar to sort of the electrified setup. You know, his, his use of the whammy bar for example or the Franken Strat that he built from different pieces right? All of those aspects in my opinion is just dwarfed by his innovation and his musicianship and that's why I chose spanish fly because everyone of course will go to something like your eruption or running with the devil, which is the first things that they heard that let them know that there was a new force erupting out of southern California that was Eddie van Halen. Right, I mean I just, I'm in love, I'm in love with the story of it, </s><s>[INST] you're often so poetic about music like it clearly touches your soul and some kind of on many levels. What is that? Is it deeper than just rocking out with the in your convertible Corvette 69 Imaginary Eric Weinstein just driving down the California highlights blasting some kind of music. Is it just like being able to be carefree for moments of time or is there something more fundamental that connects to like the theory of everything in physics and life and all [/INST] that? How often do you have the chance for example to hear mathematics performed as you do in box? Right. Like something with that kind of precision and elegance that can't really be grasped where you know uh to go back to Leonard Cohen's uh famous line, the baffled King composing, right, such a good song, that's such a good song but it's also like individual verses of that song are insanely important. The baffled King is how we often make music, We don't really understand. What did we just do that broke that person's heart sitting on the couch. Right? And so it's a very strange thing that you should be able to have Think of it like you're a computer, you've got this weird open music report, you know, ports 37.8, you know, like it's not even it's not even supposed to be there. And suddenly somebody starts playing guitar and they're making you feel things or you know, like in particular, particular instruments like the violin, uh it's so difficult, it's so unforgiving and when it gives up its secrets, it just, you know, it wraps its fingers around your heart and won't let go. Sometimes I talk about head heart and loins, when something can grab your head heart and your loins at the same moment and integrate them. Um there's very few opportunities to live like that. And if you think about Eddie van Halen, uh you know, as far as your head, the musical innovations and the fact that he was drawing directly from the classical canon, um you know, really speaks to the idea that maybe rock is what um somebody like Jimi Hendrix saw it as being, you know, an infinitely extensible medium in terms of Heart. Um I always notice the smile on his face, it's painful to look at an Eddie van Halen solo now, like sometimes you'll see the cigarette dripping off the side of his mouth and you're like, that's gonna fucking kill you. And I'm not even worried about it for you, I'm worried about it for me, you're gonna rob. I don't even need to hear you play another note. I just like knowing that you're in the world, that there is somebody that everyone looks to that. No, but I've never heard a guitarist say, yeah, I don't know, I think it was okay. Like I've just never heard it, You can hate him, but you still think he was a genius. There are very few people like that in the, in the world and then loins those leaps, that guy was incredibly good looking and you know, skin tight pants, super athleticism. He completely owned the sexuality, male sexuality of the stage, both being at the completely dominant, you know, sort of mythical alpha male. I hate that expression, but there you are. But also this kind of little boy with this mischievous smirk and you know, the sense that it all came together, </s><s>[INST] how could you not eat that up? You can just imagine the millions of like young teenage boys who are just like playing air guitar in there in their room, just yeah, basically dreaming of being that kind of God, the most perfect example of what a human being can be. Yeah, it's fascinating to think [/INST] it is and and then, you know, as in many of the cases with these bands, you get these multiple talents in the same outfit and I think that the original configuration with David lee Roth. I mean David lee Roth is such a hot mess at all times. </s><s>[INST] I would love you to talk to David lee Roth. Like if they, that that dance would be just gorgeous. I don't know. He's, can you handle [/INST] it? Can you ride that? Probably not. Probably not because I think he's very, I, I get the feeling that he is very smart and very dis regulated and I don't know that I could </s><s>[INST] like, like bring him down to earth for a moment. [/INST] I can also get pretty dis regulated. Yeah. And so I don't know, I don't know whether it could be magic, It could be a ship show. I don't know what you thought of his appearance on Rogan. That was an interesting one. </s><s>[INST] I loved it. But joe and that and joe does this. Sometimes sometimes he just sits back and listens and he just lets like the music play, which works really well. I think you have a chance to kind of jump into the chaos and then you'll just start and the places you'll go. You may not even talk about music for like hours. It might just go to this because he, I think lives in Japan, like there's a weird, he's been [/INST] like an E. M. T. After he was a rock star, he chose to become like, I don't know, you </s><s>[INST] know, it's like there's depth to that man that that hasn't been explored by him either. So that'll be an exciting conversation. Can we go back to Leonard Cohen? Can we just the things I feel when I listen to Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen or anything by him? Really? But that one, [/INST] what you want to get in, </s><s>[INST] Let's go, what what is it that song mean to you? Is it love? [/INST] Oh boy. Well, first of all, it's mystery. Like it starts off about mystery. So what are you, what are you doing? You're doing this alternation between the two chords. So three notes at the same time, one is called the the tonic or you have the major and the relative minor and he's alternating between them. There's only one note of difference between those two chords, One of them would be feeling sad. One of them would be more joyous typically described. Um And so by altering one note, it's the minimal amount to take you back and forth between joy and happiness as that's encoded in us. So, he starts off with it, I heard there was David played the police a little bit. You don't really care for music, do you? Um That's really interesting because it's he's using this technique called Bathos, right? So the alternation between the sublime and kind of the guttural or ridiculous of the mundane, right? So he's like, </s><s>[INST] uh there's a bitterness to it too. Is this just play [/INST] well? The way I hear it again, you know, a great song allows for different interpretations you happen to be asking me. So I'm going to impart some stuff that probably isn't in the song, but why it speaks to me, that's what great. Um the way I hear it is he doesn't believe the audience. You don't really care for music, do you? Then what are you doing listening to this? You stupid? It is. You know, of course, of course you care for music. You're, you're too cool to care. So I see through you and screw you. That's like the kind that's that's the energy I get. Uh then he does this weird thing. It goes like this is where he should put the description of where he is in the chord progression, which is the tonic, right? It goes like this and then he hits the fourth and the fifth, which are the two other major elements, the sub dominant, the dominant in functional harmony. So he's describing the chord progression in real time in the lyrics. There's two ways this can come about another songs, like we had this example of um every time we say goodbye. Do you know this song? Every time we say goodbye. No, I think it was a cole porter? Maybe Gershwin? Maybe porter. I don't know, I cry a little. There is no love song finer. But how strange the change from major to minor, right? Like it's beautiful uses. Uh Then then there's times when it's duplicitous. So for example, you have, I guess my favorite examples of this are johnny Cash's ring of fire. I fell into a burning ring of fire. Then what does he do with the lyrics and the tune? I went down, down, down, he goes up. Right. And so the idea is like, okay, that was a head fake, right? And another one of these um you know, is Nina Simone's feeling good. Okay, so what do you get a bird flying high? You know how I feel and sun up in the sky, You know how I feel </s><s>[INST] that woman's voice, You doesn't give a damn and yet [/INST] Yeah, but then what's the uh yeah, it's like heavy stripping music. It's it's you're not in a good place, You're probably in some strip club with the last of your money. You're drinking lousy beer, some bad situation. She's feeling good. No, it's funereal. It's oppressive, right? I </s><s>[INST] never thought of that song that way, wow. [/INST] Well, you think of it as </s><s>[INST] joyous? No, [/INST] no. If you think about it, contrast it with ray Charles for example. You know, you know, you know Lonely Avenue? Well, my room has got two windows, but the sunshine never comes through. It's really depressed. It's the same sort of vibe as Nina, but she's claiming that she is in great shape. So she's like a good case of the unreliable narrator, Leonard cohen to me is talking about the unreliable audience. That's too cool to be with the performer on stage. There are things that go with the music, like the cole porter stuff that go against like the johnny Cash, I think these are the games that musicians play, that the rest of us only sort of noticed subliminally. Okay, 4th the fifth then he when he he should say something about the relative minor or the he's giving you the secret, the baffled King. In other words, he doesn't know why it works. Did paco bell know why paco bells? Canon would work. It was a discovery. That's the whole thing. Like some music is discovered and some music is invented and he's talking about a musical discovery. He's talking about the pythagorean power of the wave equation and then superimposed, like there's two genius intellectual concepts behind music, one of which is the wave equation. Usually we solve it for one dimensional medium because we're talking about strings or air columns. Occasionally, you're talking about things like hand pans or steel drums or Motala phones or gallons whatever and those have a wave equation to that's much more chaotic. The other equation is this crazy thing that to, to the 1912th is almost exactly equal to three, which is what gave us even temperament. And so the tension between those two things is in fact one of these most beautiful stories inside of that system. That formula of the baffled King is a discovery. It's not he's not really composing it. The reason he's baffled, it's imagine that you took like a little brush and you started brushing off a pyramid under the sands. You might think that you created the pyramid by your brushing. But in fact somebody else did it. That's why you're baffled. Right, </s><s>[INST] That's beautifully put you. Right. And as creating one of the greatest songs of all time. And as he's doing it, he's baffled and its many letters within the song. [/INST] And he Leonard is baffled my contention. But he knows enough to know that he's baffled. Right. And so the idea is that he is composing, he has the audacity to compose as David. He's echoing David at a minimum. And then in a later song, which I really wish we would discuss. That's totally dystopic. And you will not like it at all. Uh is the future which contains this line that I think I used in my episode with Roger Penrose on the portal. Note the subtle plug </s><s>[INST] the border, the border, the border of the I'm [/INST] the little jew that wrote the bible. So there is this way in which Leonard cohen, I think is constantly coming to the idea of being a biblical like scribe. And I think this is one of the great things that, you know, you see Dylan doing this with all along the Watchtower, you saw Warren Zevon who we should talk much more about doing this with a song called, I was in the house when the house burned down. Do you know this thing? </s><s>[INST] This is embarrassed, sweetheart. It's a great thing. [/INST] Warren Zevon is one of the most important songwriters of our time and he's been largely forgotten uh, by this generation. But you know, bob Dylan would sing one of his songs in tribute. I've heard bob Dylan, you know, Very small number of songwriters really move him. What he got three Gordon? Lightfoot and Warren Zevon, by the way, bob Dylan, If you're out there appear on either one of our podcasts, we need to get your voice into a new medium for a new group, definitely. This is a, this is a time for bob Dylan, my friend. Yeah. Honestly, you've been doing an amazing job in the space. One of the reasons I'm super excited to do this podcast again is that, um, I've learned some things about what I don't do well. And I also have sort of struggled with the question, should I do those things better? Because what if it's, you know, I always use the same example of the fitted sheet when you're trying to put a queen size fitted sheet on a king sized mattress. He's like, okay, I got that corner squared away and then you get another corner that pops off, they have to go back around. I wonder whether I can improve my style in the ways in which ah you know, I think it's just a recognition of a difference, You do a better job of getting to the soul of a really top intellectual guest and making them accessible and presenting them as themselves for a huge number of people and I'd give my eye tooth to be able to do that. </s><s>[INST] Do you ever think about this? Because I think about what is the greatest conversation I'll ever have, You know like in a sense, the portal not to reduce it to anything, but there will be the greatest conversation you may have already had it, but it's very possible if if enough people like me can keep twisting your arm to keep doing the portal please. Is there will be an amazing conversation. One of the questions that I ask myself is like who is the person that I'm especially equipped for some reason, I'm convinced on Putin. There's something in my head that says, I I can do this man better than anyone else in this world. I got this thought in my head about it, I don't know why and I'm convinced, but I think the universe works in that way. Like if it tells you it's gonna [/INST] happen the way I would say it is is that almost everybody who becomes a Supreme Court justice believes at a very early age, they're going to become a Supreme Court justice. Many people believe at an early age that they can do it don't get there but of those who get their, almost all of them had this sort of, well I call it pathological self confidence and I do think you have pathological self confidence and you also have humility and most people would hear those as a contradiction. I think that you would not be able to get away with what you do if you didn't have the humility. And so I think you know the great danger is that your equation becomes unbalanced, that you either lose the humility or you lose the humility overwhelms the ego and the drive because right now you've got a mexican standoff in your mind and the rest of us are just benefited. That's beautifully put. My mexican standoffs aren't as stable as yours all reservoir dogs all the time. But actually the person who that describes as peter thiel, Peter thiel thinks more, people always say like what does Peter think about X. Y. And Z. P. And Q. Is like well do you want communist? Peter do you want hyper capitalist? Peter Oh my God! Right on everything, that's why he's successful is that he's got all these minds fighting each other. And so when people say peter is this peter is that I just laugh because it like nobody who knows him would describe him as having thoughts at the level that people are claiming and I do think that you know, in my case, um you know, there's also pathological epidemic humility. Like just I know it, I know how little I know how little I can do in one life, I know how many things I've screwed up, I know how many things I got wrong. And on the other hand, I know that if, if not, you know, it's like Hilal's questions, you know, if I'm not for myself, who will be for me if I'm only for myself, what am I if not now, when you know at some level, there's a question about if I don't decide that someone is capable and that somebody is me and I, if I apply that to everyone else on the planet that nobody's going to do anything. And so I do think that one of the things that people like you and I get is who are you to say that f that man? Just sign me up for some dunning Kruger </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but it's multiple minds. Like you said, like this morning I was feeling so good and confident about, I couldn't think no wrong. And I remember last night clearly thinking that I'm the dumbest human who has ever lived and nothing I've ever said is worth anything, what the funk am I doing with my life, why am I scared? And I was terrified as this conversation, who the hell am I because I'm an idiot because you know, I like it. But no, but this morning I was the baddest motherfucker has ever [/INST] walked this earth. So I was I was </s><s>[INST] very conscious, I think it was the coffee. I'm not sure maybe some sleep. [/INST] This sounds very Russian and it involves multiple beverages, some of them being alcoholic, others containing caffeine. </s><s>[INST] There's in fact I can't share the story behind it, but there is a bottle of vodka in the fridge. Okay, so I mean [/INST] I should have hit you for coffee because this is the morning, it was a morning show here. </s><s>[INST] So I put out a call that we get a chance to have this conversation and people ask these wonderful questions. A few people asked about depression and suicide a this is a Russian program. So we have to go there. Uh and I think about Leonard Cohen and one of the things that always kind of broke my heart and kind of suffocated the hope I have for just uh yeah, I don't know for love in a person's life is to hear how much how much depression was a part of Leonard Cohen's life and how much he suffered? I guess one way I'm not sure where we can go with this question, but do you think about the places that the mind can go like these dark places. Yeah. Is there something like where the only escape out is suicide for example, that's the darkest version of it that [/INST] I really think suicide is a big place and suicidal ideation and self harm. And we don't talk a lot about it. Um, it's a similar problem to trying to talk about trans, these are umbrella categories. And if the commonality is that somebody harms themselves, but we don't know whether that's coming because of a problem in brain chemistry because of an event in their life. Um, whether evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal, whether or not it might have a religious motivation. There's There's too many different forms of self harm and something like the 10th largest killer thereabouts. Um, and I think that, you know, you can look at it from different angles. I'm old enough to have, you know, had Pete Seeger come to my college when I was at university and to watch his good humor in the face of all adversity. Um, I think of Odetta used to go to Odetta concerts and I don't know if you, you know who she is, Okay, this is gonna be one of the better days of your life. Check out Odetta when we're done with the interview. Um, she was a civil rights figure, but also just had a profound voice and great musicianship. These people were in the struggles, right? And they they saw lots of bad things happen and they kept their humor about them. And, you know, the thing is that you can take on the bell Schmitz. You know, the pain of the of the planet or you can try to do something else, which is to be a happy warrior, even if the odds are terrible and the and the cost of failure is catastrophic. </s><s>[INST] So even when surrounded by darkness. But the thing is with Leonard Cohen is he created such beautiful music. And yet it's like Anthony Bourdain the same and yet they go to this dark place and it could be, it's easier to say it's just biochemistry. [/INST] No, there's a linkage between this highly generative creative side and in some cases dark depression in other cases, not. So you can't say that it's tied the genius and madness are always co traveling or the beauty and pain are one and the same. What you can say is that there's a cluster of people that tell you that for that cluster there is a relationship between the darkness and the beauty. And I do think that in part it's squaring circles that can't be squared. You know that we're just talking before about the inability to serve to perfect systems, the perfect system of the wave equation and the perfect system of even temperament, they're both perfect. They're not compatible. And once you realize that there is perfection and an inability to make contact with perfection, I think, you know, you recognize that um there is no solution to this world. Mhm. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. That's weird with the poets and musicians. Do you want to say this is a particular thing that you do? But then there's spanish fly by Van Helen and then you realize, oh [/INST] well what do you get out of spanish fly? But even here, I I think it's very singular because of it's the fact that it's purely acoustic. </s><s>[INST] For some reason, I always, I couldn't imagine Eddie Van Halen separate from the band in front of thousands of people just screaming and rocking out with lights everywhere and spanish fly. Made me think like you made me imagine him sitting alone in a culture in the room. I think that's who he [/INST] was. I really do. I mean, I I it's, believe me, I get it. He was a rock star's Raqqa. Got it, got it, got it, got it. I'm almost positive that you can't get to where he got to without being a complete introvert. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. It made me imagine that there's like some half naked supermodel walking around hoping that they can, you know, do their thing together and, and he's completely disinterested. He'd be able to be [/INST] with the guitar, right? Because like honestly at some level, in one case, you know, maybe your maybe your conquest, ng maybe you're pursuing love and romance and the other case you're talking about a relationship to the, to the order, the creator, the almighty, whatever it is you want to call that substrate, that is reality. And you know, do I believe that Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and Paganini and hyphens jacked into the, you know, the true essence of the world. Yeah they did. I don't think it's as good as differential geometry. I'm sorry. Do think it's amazing for other reasons And thank God because it's very difficult to communicate differential geometry at scale. But the thing about eruption, for example what level do you want to come into eruption? Do you want just the sheer majesty and pageantry? Do you want the theatrics? Like you could put him on on wires and you know set his pants on fire or whatever and you know it would be it would be totally in keeping with it. On the other hand you want to have something completely precise that you know shows off the virtuosity of what's possible with a stratocaster everything works multi axis, there's a </s><s>[INST] precision to it. Which in which is very different than Hendrix. There's a messiness to Hendrix that to me, somebody who has O. C. D. Has always been how [/INST] does protect you? I mean let's have the Jimi Hendrix conversation. I don't know that we can do anything to it that hasn't already been done to it. Maybe that's not true. Maybe the idea is that every generation has to have its Hendrix conversation and this is a long </s><s>[INST] Jimi Hendrix experience. Yeah. So [/INST] funny. I hear he sold it from joe Rogan. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Uh There's so many details. one it hurt my so on so many levels that you can put a thumb over the guitar to play a note to hold the note? And it doesn't because I wanted to be the Russian virtuoso that sits with his classical guitar and perfect form plays really fast with the fingers and, and then you don't want, you want the thumb to be perfectly relaxed and support [/INST] the Russian conservatory's to conservatives. So yeah, then there's the Russian wild man. </s><s>[INST] Which one is that? Well, haven't [/INST] there different Russian archetypes? Right, So the completely idiosyncratic Russian is very different in a weird way from the uh huh, you know, I can do this backwards in any key and any sleep in my sleep and in any time signature that you, you know, just, just snap your fingers. We've discussed my uh piano tuner in previous episodes. </s><s>[INST] No, no, that was offline conversation. You told me the story. [/INST] Like, I should tell you that, you should, you should retell the story. There was in darkest Manhattan with the world's shittiest. Uh it wasn't even an upright was a spin at piano. A friend had given it to me, the piano fell out of tune and I would have to tune in and the only tuner I knew was this Russian guy and I hated dealing with him. It's something about his attitude just really rubbed me the wrong way. So anyway, my wife says, tune that thing. So we get the piano tuner to come? And he's tuning this? He's like, are you sure, are you sure you want to do this? This piece of ship? You know? Okay fine. So he's like okay, it's your money, the phone rings and I have the phone ringers set And a landline to Paganini, Caprice 24. And immediately as the phone rings, he figures out what key the phone ringers and which is not the key that like list composed the variations on uh caprice 24 and he starts going into theme and variations increase 24 at some level I've never heard before just jaw dropping it and like the phone stops ringing. We have this awkward silence. I said I didn't know you were such a great piano player and then he says one of these things in you know in Russian accented english hurts in a way you can't imagine it. No, you are the piano player. I am merely the piano tuner. It was just like oh man through the heart, </s><s>[INST] you know, it's kind of reminiscent, I love to hear actually your opinion. This is reminiscent of the good will hunting story. What do you think about that that movie, that movie? Its summit is [/INST] Yeah, I guess when I think of that film, I think about matt Damon is a young guy risking everything. Giving up Harvard I think you know probably the most accomplished group of people in the world are people who choose to give up Harvard voluntarily beautiful, right, bigger than Harvard, you know Ives was one of these people Bill Gates of course, uh huh and then oddly uh what Zuckerberg, but then steve jobs gave up a read and reid is like the weirdest, craziest college in the world. People should pay much more attention to read and I'm sorry it's going through a hard time at the moment, but what it was before, the current craziness is really an interesting story Regardless, as we say in the 617 area code, um I think that a lot about a lot of my reaction is to the real story of matt Damon having this vision and being the young guy to pull it off. And I also think about Robin Williams trying to explore heart through this lens of acting and you know, as you and I, you've hung out with comedians, they know that they already screwed up a bunch of people, They do fail, they're proud about it. They really are the idea that Robin Williams who I saw many years ago when I was in L. A. Um in the comedy clubs around here. You know, he was a straight up crazy, dis regulated genius in tremendous pain and his desire to do it earnestly through acting rather than constantly by just sniping, you know, or being a clown or showing us how fast his mind worked relative to ours. Um I I was really moved by that I thought that he, he brought some authenticity and took a huge risk for a comedian to be that real. </s><s>[INST] And again, like you said, it doesn't always have to be, but in that case the madness and genius were neighbors. [/INST] That one couldn't have been any other way. Yeah. Because his mind, you know, the thing about seeing him in a comedy club was that he would react to random stimulus in the environment, it could be a heckler. Sometimes you almost got the feeling that he wanted a heckler because it was, it gave him something to play against, right? He was just, he was infinitely instantly inventive. </s><s>[INST] But I actually, to me the best Robin Williams is as he got closer and closer to the end of his life because there was a sadness and he's almost fighting the sadness with this improvisational, like the weapons he has is this wit and humor and his dancing that he does with language. But and then sometimes when you just fall silent you can see the sadness and I don't know, there's something so beautiful about that. It's like this bird with a broken wing that's like trying to fly. You know, and it's getting older and older and it and I mean those, he would have made a one hell of a podcast guest. I'll tell you, I'll tell you that that's a sad. [/INST] Yeah, I have some sadness that I really do think that part of what we call podcasting is actually just getting to know a soul over and over again. Like maybe the idea is that this is talking about depression and sadness and heavy feelings is not an american specialty. Seeing that in context with the beauty of life is a Russian specialty. It is very much </s><s>[INST] specialty. Sounds like a diner menu. What [/INST] what the Russians? A big, big scoop of ice cream with tons of depression. I I do think that we're in a really terrifying and depressing time and I think that part of it is we don't know if something huge is about to get started and we don't even know what this is. I mean we just sit here in this weird world, is falling into some new state and we're not even super curious is like what the hell just happened. Everybody's got an answer. And I'm positive that all of those answers are wrong. </s><s>[INST] Let's let's try to at least sneak up on the good answer. [/INST] So the central core of the answer is that the US seemed to be the greatest thing in the world in large measure because we hadn't noticed that we were getting a benefit from having no plan not having to make a plan for low growth. As long as we had growth, we were in great shape. Let's imagine that there was a then you could run an experiment, You have a billion copies of Earth and you start the initial conditions slightly different on some giant number of planets. A lot of the things That were discovered from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century are discovered in a period of time because a lot of that just has to do with once you crack the puzzle of getting better, instruments you can see more and the more you can see, the more you can make use of what you can see. And it turns out there was lots of stuff to do with like you know, germs or electron orbital's or you know, spectrum, electromagnetic spectrum. So we got to do all of those things and the US roughly corresponded for a good chunk of its history with this bonanza. And so of course we look like an amazing genius country. We have no plan. Imagine that you you can sell a car, you don't have to put in seat belts, you don't have to put in air bags, you don't have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors or rear view mirror. You could save a lot of money on a car by not putting in all of the stuff to keep things from going wrong. And I think that's what we had. We had a machine that as long as growth was insanely good. We plowed it back the riches and spoils and treasure back into the system and made more genius stuff and we carried along a good chunk of humanity hundreds of millions of people. We did not have a plan for what happens when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society. </s><s>[INST] How confident should it be that the growth has slowed in in a way that it's permanent rather than a kind of a slap in the face where [/INST] let the right concept, right concept is I try to use the same words over and over again in case people c'mon, because then the per separation actually get somewhere. So I use this analogy of the orchard because everyone talks about low hanging fruit, they know the concept of low hanging fruit, but they don't think in terms of orchards. So they say things like you think we've picked all the low hanging fruit, but I believe in the infinite inventiveness of the human mind, it's like, okay, that doesn't even work as an analogy. What if the idea is we only picked all the low hanging fruit here and then we're having this stupid argument about low hanging fruit and we're not going and looking for new orchards, we're not planting new orchards, we're not looking for forests. Were just sitting here arguing about low hanging fruit. So my claim is there's probably a lot more low hanging fruit and it's not here, </s><s>[INST] it's another orchard, [/INST] it's another orchards. One of those turned out to be the digital orchard, the digital orchard has not been a stagnant uh as lots of these other like the chemical orchard, you know, </s><s>[INST] I have faith that there is a small percentage of the population, but not zero. That's looking for those other orchards. Like I'm excited about one of those orchards, which is I believe there will be robots in everybody's homes and that will unlock some totally new thing, totally new set of technologies ideas the way we live life, the productivity, all everything will change everything. So I'm excited about that orchard. So you know, I'm roaming that orchard and wondering how the hell you kind of bring back like the ant that finds a new source of food. I'm trying to find an apple. I can bring back to the [/INST] so your urine in an explorer idea </s><s>[INST] and you have faith that there is enough of those. I don't [/INST] think there are very many of us. I mean, I'm one of them too. </s><s>[INST] How many does it take takes one end. It takes one end. What are you talking about? How many uh, how long does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Okay, [/INST] let's imagine that we went imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food. Right? And then it comes back to the colony and it says, hey, I think I found a new source of food and their initial reaction is you're not, you're not authorized to find new food. What? Why would you try to go find your food? </s><s>[INST] We're gonna remove you from twitter. Yeah. [/INST] And by the way, I think the fact that you think you're allowed to go find the shows how privileged you are as an and get out of the colony, kill him, kill him. Well, that's probably not a great model for finding new orchard. And I think that what we find is that where there is a system that allows somebody to ascend without a lot of gatekeeping, you can have that. But you know, I saw this happen in hedge funds, hedge funds for a while, hoovered up a lot of talent because they were places that had funding and had freedom and in general, really smart people want to be free and they don't want to think a lot about how they're going to feed themselves. They want to get lost in their minds so you can either give them productive places to play dangerous places to play. You know, they're either going to break into computers or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies and we're not providing for the people who have to disrupt and have to innovate and trying to channel that effort. We're so focused on this other thing which is like fairness and safety and fairness and safety by the way are really important. I don't want to denigrate them. But the singular focus on fairness and safety without in the same breath being focused on growth and discovery and creation is going to doom us because what we're talking about is we're always talking about divvying up the pie that is as opposed to the pie that will be imagine that you spend all your time trying to divvy up the 13th century pie And you destroyed your ability to get to the 20th century. You'd be an idiot. But </s><s>[INST] one place I think I disagree with you is uh I don't think you need that many people to empower the geniuses, the innovators, the people who refuse to spend most of their days and meetings about fairness, This is good. Uh let's have a disagreement. I think podcasting, whatever you call that medium is just one little example of a tool that you can give power to like you and your podcast can have the next thing on mosque and make them a stuff. Now I see [/INST] where you're going. Okay. There has been a series of places for people to play and be free and we've lost them successively. </s><s>[INST] What's a good place you remember? Because I disagree with you there too. I think they're still there. You can still play you interviewed. [/INST] Noam chomsky. Yes. Okay. Noam chomsky comes from an era. </s><s>[INST] Well, you can play [/INST] where you could play </s><s>[INST] at MIT at MIT and you can't play This is where I disagree with you. [/INST] We've already had this, but go check the clips channel for the lex Friedman podcast. I </s><s>[INST] think I wasn't brave enough at that time and I'm not really brave enough now. Come on because that's the vodka. Uh it's a feeling and people are gonna tear me apart. So what are you and you speak from emotion and facts? The feeling [/INST] of podcast is it's yours. Okay. Tell the people who are currently editing your brain because I saw that move right now. Do you think should go find another podcast? Right, let's get rid of some of your audience right now. </s><s>[INST] Please go find another podcast if you're editing my brain. Nevertheless, all the self doubt there, sitting in that brain. So God, I can't stand to [/INST] watch this. But all right, okay, what is this self doubt loop that you're in? </s><s>[INST] The thing is when I walk the holes of MIT Yeah, there's bureaucracy. There's administrators that never have done anything interesting in their entire lives. There's meetings, there's all the usual, the usual crap. But there's in the eyes of individuals. Yeah. There's this glow of excitement has nothing to do with career. I understand this and and that it's still a playground. There's little little pockets of playgrounds from which genius can emerge still. And they're unaffected by diversity meetings or fairness meetings or or blah, blah, blah. I love to hear this. Yeah, you don't think so? I don't believe it [/INST] because I've watched the change legs. I've watched people and we're all editing ourselves all the time. I remember my old mind, I liked it better. All of this relentless focus on critical race theory. And, you know, critical theory, Postmodernism, fairness social justice? It's making many of us into worse people. </s><s>[INST] You think that's do you think the matt Damon's of, you know, the character is paying attention to any of that? You think that has enough. You've seen [/INST] what happened to Matt Damon himself. Matt Damon has tried to say various things at various times. It seemed to be relatively innocuous. He can't can't speak </s><s>[INST] Okay, well that's that's not mix up. Matt name is just an actor that, I [/INST] don't know. He was just a Harvard student who came up with his own genius, screenplay acted and made it happen. No, where somewhere else? You </s><s>[INST] don't think you can build a rocket company? I think [/INST] so. I think that there are things that you can still do, </s><s>[INST] but we're losing them, [/INST] we lose them, we keep losing them. </s><s>[INST] I would say the biggest problem here, let me just say like what I think the solution would be, is to fire anybody who doesn't like who's not like faculty, especially young faculty should have way more power. And administration should have much less power because right now the administration which used some of the whom used to be faculty, but they've lost the fire. The spark that gave them, they've lost the memories of the playground. So the people that admire and love the playground, like you could see it in their behavior should have way more power and so we should create a systems that give them power. [/INST] You're very idealistic and you're very, you've got a huge heart, It's a weird time because I don't want to dissuade you from believing beautiful things. Um, because I see how potent you are. You do all these things you did to guitar, podcasting, programming computers, um, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think you're right. I think we're in a really deeply screwed up place where even the tiny number of, let me give you an alternate version of the dystopia. I do think that there are people who are capable and there's still places to play and cause things to happen that progress the story forward. But if you look at the fire that some of the people are in, who fit that profile, like how much crap has Elon musk taken? Quite considerable. </s><s>[INST] Right? And not much admiration from the [/INST] craig venter jim Watson. These are very difficult. People steve jobs is a very difficult guy. You know, </s><s>[INST] it is a bit heartbreaking to me. I mean everybody is different generations. I just, my mind is a little focusing on musk because he's the modern, [/INST] well, you know him, he's a person to you. </s><s>[INST] It hurts my heart to see how few faculty and people with Nobel prizes and so on, admire eon, like how little problem he gets, He gets a lot of fans from like people who buy his products and, you know, young minds just excited, but like why don't we as institute. Why doesn't m I. T say that we want to, we somebody amongst us will be the next thing on musk and we want to encourage them. Like say that, say that the meeting, say that like that's success. No kidding for us as I might. And they instead there's this jealousy, it's like, well here's, did you hear what he almost tweeted? Did you, did you like how irresponsible is what he's doing? How the, like just saying all these things that are just dripping with jealousy and basically [/INST] I want what he's got. That's the thing, right? And then if here's the weird thing, that rivalry has a different signature, you see when you know that you're never gonna make it. Yeah, that's the position you take. What is it in kung fu panda? Which you've watched now? Yes. What does Tai lung say When, uh, he's looking for the Dragon Warrior and the furious five come to defeat him on the bridge. one of them gives up pose name accidentally and Thailand hears it po so that is his name. Finally a worthy opponent. Our battle will be legendary, right? He's excited. Why is that? Well, you learn about this in boxing. Sometimes you'll see a division for an MMA, which is lousy with talent just, you can't swing a cat without hitting an amazing, amazing athlete. Sometimes you'll have a division, which at that particular moment has one star in no real competition in that weight class or something, that person is in bad shape because you can't build a legend without the other, when you think of Muhammad ali, what are the names that you immediately think of, </s><s>[INST] and you have to fraser, you have to think of the other heavyweights Liston, [/INST] right? Yeah, so those, those opponents are in part what made Muhammad Ali Muhammad ali, and that's, you know, that's that's why the, the Mayweather McGregor revelation that okay, this guy has got his opponents picture in his house, how weird is that? Well, because without the opponent, you may not be able to get there now, I am not a huge fan of the wrong kinds of rivalries, </s><s>[INST] you have examples of mine, [/INST] Well, there are rivalries where people take each other's credit and screw each other over and then there are other rivalries like the RNA tie club, where these guys were so in love with what they were doing, that they couldn't wait to share everything and like Nobel prizes were so abundant, that most people got Nobel prizes just for being a member of the RNA tie club and doing cool stuff and yeah, that's, that's the golden, that's the golden kind of sweet spot. Um most of these people can't do what Ellen is doing because they can't break rules, they can't take the pressure, I'll tell you what really concerns me about your perspective, I think that there are a lot of genius ideas inside of people who don't have the stomach for conflict and derision and I think a lot of those people are female. Mhm and I think that until we come up with a world in which we can swat down the trolls where we can actually cause the trolls not to ruin everything. And I don't necessarily mean by shutting them up, I don't necessarily mean by being brutal to them, but somehow separating off people who are working in people who are trolling. I think that we're losing a huge amount of human genius in part because women in particular are not necessarily going to push an idea If it results in 10 years of being derided, very few men are willing to do that either. But there are some of us who are so dumb That we will pigheaded Lee stick to an idea for 10 years, even if the world collapses, I don't think that there is many women who are going to make that calculation, even if they know the idea is correct. </s><s>[INST] And one of the things that I believe technology can help us fight the trolls of all definitions of troll, like I believe that a better twitter can be built [/INST] interesting. I do not, I don't believe that a twitter successor can be built that solves most of the problems. I think you can always improve what we have, but I don't think that converges in something that really works because I think ultimately the problem isn't twitter, the problem is us, for example, I recently made a very disturbing realization which is academics and trolls have very many similar behaviors. Absolutely. It's largely a trolling community. </s><s>[INST] I tend to believe that the trolls are not, it's like the peter thiel many mind idea which in all of the trolls there is the possibility of goodness and all you have to do not, all you have to do what you have to do is create technology that incentivizes them too. To embrace, to discover, to embrace, to practice the better angels of their nature. And I believe that like the people actually want to do that, that trolls is a short term dopamine rush of childish toxicity that all of us want to overcome. I believe that like deep within we want to overcome [/INST] that, I try to keep myself from believing what you believe </s><s>[INST] because you'll be disappointed if it's not because it's [/INST] dangerous because a lot of these people are implacable foes and there aren't many of them. But when you meet somebody like yeah, I just like screwing people up, I'm here for the pain. </s><s>[INST] I just believe even in them, there's a good [/INST] it's a wonderful book that I'm gonna recommend to you, where I hope this comes from, Maybe I've got the source wrong, but in any event, it's a great book called Maximum City about Bombay. Mhm And I believe that the conceit is that the author um leaves Bombay as a kid and comes back as an adult. He realizes he has to rediscover the city because he can't live in the city he left. So he gets in contact with all of the weird areas of the city and one of them is the underworld hangs out with the police, but in the underworld he's talking to contract killers. And um he says, you know, it's really weird, everybody pleads for their life right before I kill them. And they always say this thing about I've got a I've got two kids at home, he says, never say that to a contract killer because we have terrible relationships with our parents doesn't interest you. And I was just like, wow! So there's a minus sign in front of that statement. You're sitting there saying, you know, I've got a three year old, it's like, okay, well I'm gonna take this pos out of out of that kid's life, maybe I'll have a chance. You don't know how people are wired and as much as I hate to say it, there are people whose wiring is so disturbing and so different from yours that you will never guess why you can't reach them or how much pleasure they may have gotten because they may have gone over a point of no return. </s><s>[INST] Nevertheless, you are just a smart guy who is using his intuition to make a hypothesis. You do not know this for sure and I am, you know, whatever the hell I am uh that has a different hypothesis that even in the darkest human beings that, that seemed to be only full of evil. There's a good person there that could be discovered. Mhm. [/INST] And that's one of the reasons I love doing your show is that you have these beliefs. Even as a Russian, </s><s>[INST] the [/INST] Russian special as you know, the Russian, there is a weirdness which is a total cynicism and total idealism locked together, right? That's very much part of the Russian character. </s><s>[INST] The reason I was, I was kept bothering you, kept bothering to have this conversation is I'm really worried about the next couple of months. No kidding. And if there's anybody in this world that could help alleviate my worry by um by at least walking along with me through this worry of mine, it's you do you think we're headed towards some kind of civil war, some kind of division that explodes beyond just stuff on twitter, but something that's really destructive, destructive to the fabric of our society? [/INST] Well, I believe we're in a revolution as you know, I've called the no name revolutionary and squared revolution. I've been talking about it for years. I don't think, I think waiting for this to be called the civil war is not smart, </s><s>[INST] only history will call it such fine. But I [/INST] think that the problem is that you're encountering things that you've never seen, trying to fit them into things that you already know, right? And but history repeats itself. Yes, ish </s><s>[INST] You don't see lessons from history, and I do. We see today, [/INST] but I don't see it repeating itself. You know, the famous quote is that it rhymes, </s><s>[INST] it rhymes. I mean, the thing I guess I'm speaking to is violence [/INST] and we're in there, the abstraction of violence. Imagine you were coding up violence as an abstract class. Okay, </s><s>[INST] thank you for speaking to the audience, trying [/INST] to lose these people. Come with me, Go on. I've dealt with your audience and your audience contains the smartest people around. I guarantee you if I say some stuff, first of all, any wrong thing that I'll say they're going to detail so that that will be a little bit of catnip to bring in the smart people, but they'll also digest it for each other is one of the great lessons of long form podcast. If you don't if you don't waste all your time explaining things, that's the job of the audience to do amongst themselves. They're happy doing the work. And those who aren't they leave isn't that great? They'll leave the people who don't want to struggle, will leave and get rid of them. I think that the point is you would want to say violence is defined relative to a context. So let's call it meta violence so that we don't get into the the problem, we already have a term for physical violence, right? So we have meta violence and physical violence. I would say that physical violence is sub classed from meta violence. Meta violence is the disruption of a system. It's sort of, you know, it's a, for example, if a cell dies, you can die through apoptosis, or necrosis. Apoptosis is controlled, programmed cell death. Uh, necrosis is just like, okay, this didn't work. That was a violent disruption of the system. </s><s>[INST] And this meta class is presumed in the documentation. Is it all negative? [/INST] No. What are you talking about? So, this is part of the problem in the madness of our age, right? Which is if you if you open up a drawer in your, in your cabinet, right? In your kitchen, and you see knives, spoons and forks, do you have a sense that the spoons are good utensils? And the knives or forks or bad utensils? Because they're mean, I mean, like, if you start thinking in these terms, that knife is there to do violence. That's violence you want done, right? When I cut a mango, I'm doing violence to the mango. The mango expects that I will do violence to it, because otherwise, I won't be able to get the meat and it won't get its seed, um, spread somewhere else. So, in part, violence is absolutely part of our story. </s><s>[INST] So, okay, so there's this meta violence class. Yeah. And [/INST] what's so the meta violence class is already, you know, it's a multiple inheritance pattern, whatever is going on right now, inherits from meta violence? </s><s>[INST] No, but there's there's certain sub classes that allow evil to emerge. So what what, what I'm specifically worried about is that what's on your mind lex, [/INST] what's what's really going on? Okay. </s><s>[INST] I worry that amidst the chaos of we have these protests or the chaos that could be created by the feeling that the election does not represent the voice of the people. Like saying that whoever gets quote unquote wins the election according to the some kind of reporting of the numbers that come out. That's not going to represent what people actually who people actually want to be the leader. Like something in that narrative will create so much division that people will resort to literal violence, like protests that really that the United States loses its United aspect. And because of that, because of that chaos and tension, evil people, evil forces. That my definition of evil is, you know, just cruel human beings use that moment to attain power. The kind of power that ultimately goes against the ideal of the United States. That could be donald trump that could be another human being. It doesn't really matter. My my worries that love doesn't win out in this. The unity doesn't went out on this and I feel like you and I have responsibility no small. [/INST] Yeah, I know. </s><s>[INST] And so how do we let love win in this moment of [/INST] we're gonna potential chaos, you're going to have to become a fighter, you have to, you're going to throw some serious punches if that's what you want. </s><s>[INST] You have to be Muhammad ali here because the moment you start criticizing anything, people, you have to be a masterful communicator, [/INST] because that's why you're here, look, lex in part, your decency is allowing you to do things that you couldn't otherwise. I saw that you had Michael malice on your podcast. Now, Michael malice is, I think of somebody who, at his best is extremely shrewd and insightful. Yes, he's also got this trolling game, which is quite open about and you talked to him about it, which I can't stand and that's this is the idea of grandpa doesn't get the internet. Well, I'm grandpa, I don't get the internet, I don't love the trolling. Yeah, there are trolls of the past who were incredibly good. I don't see any of the modern trolls as being that kind of genius level trolling, the people who deserve it in the way that they deserve it. You know, right now, what I see is that anything that stands up gets cut down, you know, it's like anything Ernest, you have to turn into cynicism and a meme, and it's this idea that the people who believe that the world is chaos and has no point are constantly trying to let you know, don't try to use the internet for meaning for decency for goodness, because we are going to find out that that's all sanctimonious hypocrisy and we will we will make you suffer. So I do think that there's a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy in the world, some of it mine some of it yours. But we all have it and the trolls somewhat removed that, but it's not a judicious, kind, constructive, compassionate, caring version most of the time. And a lot of those trolls and I have this feeling about Michael malice. I don't know whether it's right that there's somebody who deeply cares and loves beneath it and that that's motivating some of the trolling behavior and you and I don't seem to be doing that. I don't see you as almost ever trolling </s><s>[INST] you and I are I'm very much against trolling. [/INST] I'm very much against trolling. It doesn't mean that it's selective. You know, I'm not even the same and true. Like everything we say, we say like I'm forward, I'm against it. This isn't my native language. I speak nuance. I don't speak this internet ship. Yeah. And the more I have to communicate through internet ship, right, I almost never take a tweet seriously if it contains the letters L. M. A. O. L. O. L. R. T. F L. U. F. O. L. </s><s>[INST] Mhm. There's an interesting affect where people say stuff and then finish with L. O. L. You're you put it beautifully that it indicates to me that this is a person we've talked about like why I wear the stupid suit is like this is anti this is to fight the L. L. O. L. At the end of sentences is take it's like stand up for the words you're saying. Yeah, don't finish stuff with L. O. L. Removing completely responsibility of the content of the sentence that preceded it. [/INST] Yeah. Also choosing the outfit that works both for men in black and the Blues brothers. Not a terrible choice. Okay, but getting back. Look, lex, we're not in a position to do this. You need to be seated in a different chair. Your chair is the wrong chair, You're in the wrong chair. It's been so long. All right. I want to talk about you. And joe biden, Joe Biden was a 29 year old guy with nothing particular going on so far as I can tell. Okay, I know people as impressive at age 29 is Joe Biden, You know, 12 rows back through three deep. Does't matter a huge number of people, none of them my age can get to where he got like we're all mora Yeah, anytime somebody takes out, like if you found Eddie Van Halen in a guitar shop, you'd be angry. What is this guy doing repairing guitars? Then? Somebody said maybe he loves to repair guitars. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean what is your piano? Russian piano tuner doing, [/INST] what is my Russian piano? That was the whole point of that story. Which is what is it that happened in that life that converted somebody. And I find this for example with Russian doctors who are, you know, technicians and offices. Now there's a huge amount of talent in the world that's not sitting in its proper seat. Yeah. And quite honestly, I've gotten to the point where my feeling is we've got to take the seats, right. Maybe we don't sit in them. Maybe the idea is that we take the seats and we put some smart gen z person in the seat and say, look, no chanting. I don't want to hear you say no justice, no peace. If there aren't verbs, if it rhymes it's wrong. Like I used to have this thing Ryan things that rhyme are more true, </s><s>[INST] but like [/INST] in general, if something starts at 1234, I don't want to hear what the rest of your sentences. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but I, I feel like the responsibility that you carry that I carry. This is where joe Rogan generally removes himself from. I'm just a comedian. This idea of, I'm just a comedian all do that. But at this moment in history, like history literally can pivot on the words of a tattooed, Uh, ripped 50 year old, you know, comedian and I think the same is true with you. [/INST] Okay, well I'm interested and I care. Speaking of lyrics, uh, you know, there are many here among us who feel that life is, but a joke that's not us. The hour is getting late. That's not us in the song, the joker and the thief on opposite sides of jesus, having this conversation over jesus, you and I we've been through that. That's not our faith, that somebody else's fate to throw spitballs at the internet. That's not your fate. You're an earnest guy, you're filled with love, you're getting the most amazing podcast, guest your over the internet. This is the point </s><s>[INST] of trying to make that you're saying I'm just a grandpa. Don't, no internet, [/INST] No, I'm telling you, you're going to get bigger and then you're going to get cut down, you're going to keep ascending for awhile lex </s><s>[INST] and then you're saying, and naturally there, [/INST] I'm telling you, I watched the same process. People get up to a certain level. And one of the things that's going on, in my opinion with Joe Rogan is is that when joe Rogan starts to talk about his misgivings about joe biden, you know, in a way that you find in any bar in America About cognitive decline in a 77 year old who's about to be 78, I believe in November, We have never had anything remotely as insane as a 78 year old person slated to win the white house </s><s>[INST] and you're saying when that idea is being communicated, Is there something about the disc concept to talk about the system, naturally [/INST] bad thing happens to joe or one of joe's close associates, the ability to destroy people who become inconvenient has been documented, this is what we have done in the past, Whether we are doing it now, we don't know because we're not doing this church Church committee to in order to know whether or not you are currently destroying American citizens as we did in the past. And as we have documented as we found out in 1976 um, the federal government destroyed americans who had political beliefs that the government didn't want to continue. And I don't know whether you are grasping that one interpretation of why Jon Stewart and why joe Rogan, why Bill Maher all these people to some extent hide behind it's a joke. It's because they're trying to find a protected class. Is there someplace I can stand and speak the truth which does not result in my being garbage collected? </s><s>[INST] Interesting. I guess you're right. My intuition is you can stand as you gain more power, you can stand. Yeah, [/INST] there's a, for joe Rogan right now. I mean I talked about it for a few years now, people did not understand how big that program was. People didn't understand long form podcasting. I was derided by people who I think of as being very shrewd for believing in these podcasts as a major force and most of the people who derided me and said, wow, did I not get things, it's like if you started to propose, um you know, you wanted to do the sopranos Uh, in the era of 30 minutes sitcoms. Um, like you don't get it, man, The american people, they're not interested in these long plots storylines. That's your weird thing. Nobody cares dude, everybody just wants short, fast memorable and like, okay, so if you do that, you totally missed the opportunity and you know, the savvy people used to say, kid, let me tell you, nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the american people. Well that was totally wrong because they didn't calculate opportunity costs. I have been talking about the problem of, of joe for a long time. The problem is, is that when the system wakes up, they're going to want to control it </s><s>[INST] and they have different, they come up with new, different mechanisms are doing that. I guess one interesting one is cancel culture. [/INST] We'll look at the number of people around joe who they've come after since they realized that joe is really big, Joey Diaz bryan callen um, crystal leah, Now I'm not saying that those are all related, but I do notice that there are at least correlations between when joe says something, when something bad happens in joe's universe, it's easier for me to believe that that's happening when it's happening around joe himself. Yeah, but I'm worried about my friend. Yeah, I don't necessarily want to push him towards being more if he doesn't want it because I don't think I don't want to, I don't want to conscript people, He's got a great life. He's got a great situation. He's done a huge service, thank God, you know? Yeah. Like how much do I owe joe just for what he's done for you to say nothing of what he's done for me or for bret or for sam or any of these people. And you know, I'd like to think that we all try to give back. But I'm worried about joe. He's not worried. </s><s>[INST] One of the inspiring things about joe is, I mean he's in this war alone and the way he fights the war is by just enjoying life. That's his thing, [/INST] stays close to things that he loves and being, you know, one of the things he's honest about his drug use, he looked, he loves to hunt. So he's just, he does a certain amount of like semi vice signaling upfront and then you just also know him. This is why every time they try to take him down, you use the N word. You know, it's like, unfortunately everybody knows who joe is and yes, he, he doesn't act as if he went to a fancy finishing school right? That's not his energy. The fact that you've got some super smart guy who always pretends to be a meathead, just like, you know, like, hey, I'm a comedian, like all these defenses and disguises, okay, you've got the super smart guy who um, he's admitted to most of the things that, you know, you can, you can take him down for him because everybody's been effectively in his den or his basement, think about that studio in his basement. People have hung out with joe so many hours that you can't tell them something about joe or they're going to say, wow, I'm going to believe the new york times and not the hundreds of hours I've spent on the joe Rogan experience. But the cool </s><s>[INST] thing is that this is what inspires me is that the way he's waging war against the system is just by being a good person and, and talking enough hours in a week where that message like bleeds throughout the words and the gaps between and that, that's so inspiring to me that the good people can win by just being good and he's [/INST] kind and he's tough and he also, he's no pushover. Now I always worry a little bit when I sit down in that </s><s>[INST] chair, you still get scared that he'll call you on some kind of bullshit that you weren't even aware of [/INST] the first time I was on the show, the energy wasn't great between us and it was in a sober october situation. So I think I hadn't understood that and maybe our egos got a little bit off. I don't know, I mean, I was having fun, but maybe it was just too complicated life forms, getting to know each other, but the first one was probably, um, yeah, it made me a little nervous for the future, but then you know, jo jo and I have become friends, although sometimes we have miscommunications like on Yom kippur, I texted him and I said joe, you know, I want to apologize for ways, I've let you down as a friend that haven't been there for you and we appreciate everything you've done for me. Alyssa. Like I get this text back like what the fund is your problem? You're great dude, I don't know what bad place your cheer up. It's like joe have any jews in your life to apologize for what they've done. He was just like dude, have you lost your mind? What the hell's gotten into you? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, what do you think? Uh what do you think about the Spotify thing? What about it asked me a question. He's now as opposed to being just a comedian with the podcast. He now is just a comedian with the podcast who stepped like in the middle of the center of cancel culture which is like I know Spotify is in Sweden but they represent Silicon Valley. They represent the very kind of structures they contain and represent the kind of structures that threatened to destroy the villains of the world. Mm And he just like stepped like with his Alex jones and his uh Joey Diaz just strolled right into the middle of it. It's [/INST] awesome. I </s><s>[INST] love it, but do you think he's strong enough to Well I don't know, I mean I don't even know the right way to ask this, but is he strong enough to persevere? [/INST] It's a bit interesting. It's like when alliance decides, wow that honey badger looks tasty, I'm gonna swallow it whole, see what happened. </s><s>[INST] Because I talked him off line, he really seems to be willing to give away the 100 million which gives them so much power. Oh I don't, it's a powerful thing to be able to say. I don't Yeah, to the honey badger, he just strolls in but he's willing to walk away from anything in this. Well [/INST] he's gonna walk out the other side of the lion. I don't think he's gonna go out the way he came </s><s>[INST] in. Yeah, [/INST] well you know what it is? It's Tommy lee jones entering the bug. </s><s>[INST] This is like a giant alien just walks into it. [/INST] He just he gets swallowed by the bug and he blasts out from the inside. I have. It is Tommy lee jones. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but anyway, Rogan to you. [/INST] Yeah, is that my feeling is that Spotify doesn't understand what they're messing with? I could be wrong but I'm not your </s><s>[INST] right because [/INST] joe doesn't need anything man. I mean this is the weird thing about it, it's like I'm sure that he loves all his toys, whatever, blah blah blah. He's a rich guy. Yes, he's got a few money, He had a few money a long time ago. And you're not, you know, the other thing about, it's a bit weird being friends with a dude like that. It just is because like you call them up or he'll call you up and I'm like, what's going on in your life? I don't know. Kind of depressed trying to get some math then what are you up? Oh dude, I can cheer you up. I just came off of a 29,000 person stadium. It's like, oh, cool, How'd you do that? Oh, I don't know. I just announced it on instagram a few days ago and it's filled up just like, oh damn. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. I mean that thing is much lower than that. So powerful. So there you go. I mean, you could be that too. [/INST] The instant takes an interest in politics and saving </s><s>[INST] you might destroy all that. [/INST] It's going, bye bye. I promise. </s><s>[INST] I just disagree with you because you have to, you have to do it like you said this many times before, I'll bet [/INST] you, I'll bet you, uh, bottle of stoli that you can get, uh, if you, you get joe Rogan to get highly politically active and call out the system for all the bullsh it that it is in a very pointed and determined fashion. Uh, and he doesn't get destroyed. I'll give you, I'll give you the vodka, vodka. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that sounds like a pretty damn good deal. But this, you said this. I mean [/INST] there's no living heroes, my friend, no living hero. </s><s>[INST] I just know living heroes. It's just difficult. You just have to be good at it. I mean if you just say generic political things, you're going to be taken down. [/INST] But the more heroic you are, the more beautiful you are, the more you will be made to suffer if they cannot get you on reputation. If jesus himself came down. I don't know if I ever written, I probably never read to you the hit piece I did on jesus. </s><s>[INST] You don't know about this and I did not know. [/INST] I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world. So whoever it was who cured cancer, you know, discovered new particles or whatever it is. I did a hit piece against them to prove that I can do it to anybody around anything at any time </s><s>[INST] except Eddie van Halen is what we're talking about. Well Eddie [/INST] Van Halen is now dead. But if if this was a situation, you know, hot for teacher canceled. </s><s>[INST] Disrespectful. [/INST] Absolutely. Also, you know, packaging female objectification for young men. Clearly, Eddie Van Halen is one of the worst people alive. </s><s>[INST] But it was the skill, the incredible inspiration that is just radiating from his music inspires so many millions that they will fight those canceled pieces, they will fight. So this [/INST] is your thing. You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil and the good has already been decided, designated the winner. It's not true but your belief in that it's true </s><s>[INST] till you make it. No you gotta [/INST] it's motivating both of us. Like I also believe that we're going to win because if I don't then I can't get out of bed and it's pretty heavy at the moment. </s><s>[INST] Do you think 2021 can uh can make us feel good about the trajectory of society. So like where we emerge from this year feeling good like there's a smile and a request to his face and the next time we talk we'll be doing some kind of duet and guitar and not having this worried look on our faces. No. Okay but you've also promised you going to somehow end this in a positive uh positive. Okay. So how do you how do you turn the no around? What's the U. Turn from the [/INST] note until we get some actually decent people in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking about their next paycheck. I don't see a solution. Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are and to to let you know why I don't think it's coming. Mhm. First of all both of these political parties, the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go there tearing us apart. They lack the will to be americans. They don't understand the subtlety of the project. Uh They're simply the people who figured out how to inhabit the seats and that is their great achievement. I believe that in order to solve this, you need people who can integrate, who are not partisan at the level of the partisan warriors that we're seeing. People who believe in dividing the pies of the future rather than the present pie as our main task as americans. Because we are built around growth. I'm sorry to say it. Um, you need an ability to have subtle conversations and you need the ability to exclude. And you know, at the moment, everyone knows that inclusion is good, which it isn't. It's like saying, well water is good. If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me. It's not people drown. People need to, you know, get dehydrated, It can be life saving or life ending. It isn't good or bad. Inclusion is not good or bad. Inclusion is just inclusion, exclusion is part of inclusion. We've taught people that they can reason through the world as um sub you know, cocker spaniels. They just bark things at each other. You know, I'm for safety. I'm for inclusion. I'm for growth. Oh, really? Do you guys use verbs dependent clauses are their compound complex sentences. Where are we in this sea of nonsense. You have to be able to build a place where you have smart, talented people who represent a diverse group of correct opinions. You need to get rid of Almost all of the people who have opinions that are antithetical to what we're trying to accomplish, you need to give them insulation which were terrified because we don't trust anybody. So everything has to be transparent. If you're going to the bathroom, I want those walls to be plexiglass so I can see what you're doing. It's like that's too much transparency. We have too much and not enough at the same time and then, you know, in essence, um, you need to ensure that people aren't worried about feeding their family every four seconds for being real. None of that is happening and are billionaires are billionaires are pathetic. What is the point of billionaires if you're not going to do billionaire type cool stuff like saying F you. Yeah. and I'm going to throw, you know, $3 billion dollars at the project of restoring the national conversation. I don't grasp this. What is the point of creating obscene wealth if we don't have anyone smart enough and carrying enough to use it. </s><s>[INST] So I agree with that, that last part for sure. And you slightly push back on the idea that the leaders themselves are broken. I feel like this goes to the joe Rogan, uh joe biden and trump having a debate on that program? I feel like joe biden has a lot of really interesting ideas that he's almost forgot how to communicate. He's been fake for so long within the system. [/INST] Hillary was fake for too long, I'm sure she had real ideas at the beginning that she still was campaigning on decades later. </s><s>[INST] But like if the system, if the platforms empowered you to search to be honest, to be real, to search for those ideas within yourself, like long form conversations do then we even the donald trump and joe biden leaders we have now would would take this country to a better place that that would unite people. So like we can keep the current congress, we just need to create better platforms. It's mine too. This is going to the intuition that there's good in donald trump, there is depth and compares good intelligence. There is and the same with joe biden, [/INST] there's good and joe biden </s><s>[INST] and it's just we're not incentivizing. I mean there's several things I think are broken. One of them is twitter the other is journalism. Just, it's just the platforms of us communicating with each other. [/INST] One of the reasons that I try to come up with unifying explanations is that, you know, if you look at the number of wildfires in California, let's say that we've just seen, if you treat them all as spontaneous un correlated uh instances it feels like, oh my God, it's just whack a mole every time I send the fire truck here, there's a fire over there. So you want to come up with something like a central theory, which is why do I suddenly have a problem and I hadn't had a problem before. So I look for these unifying explanations. And I found one the other day that really speaks to me. Um, I mean, people are very frustrated because they've been trained to think about this incorrectly in my opinion. But here's the graph that you need to look at on the X axis is time by year and on the Y access is something like average age of a human. The title of the graph is any desirable situation involving institutions. So that could be ceo, it could be tenured professor, it could be, who's getting grants. It could be the age at which people win, Nobel prizes, university presidents. All these things go up In other words, for a long period of time, the average age of the person in a desirable situation has been increasing something like nine months for every 12. Those crafts have to go down at some point. The specter of brilliantly put of having five people all born in the 1940s as the final entrance in the presidential context. That makes no sense. Think about how bizarre thing that nobody's even really talking about the last five people were all ancient By presidential standards, not one, not 2, but five. We're talking about a contest between somebody who is the oldest of the baby boomers. The very beginning of the baby boom summer, 46th birthday fighting. Somebody who is in the silent generation. The silent generation guy at a town hall in florida gets this question from a gen z guy saying, you know what's going on with my future, joe biden has The audacity to say I'm a transitional president. You guys the highly educated one. When has any generation in history needed a transitional 78 year old person to take office? It's bizarre. It's preposterous. That graph is the graph we can't talk about, that graph is the graph of our destruction because it has the you can make a one line argument which is sounds like ageism, which isn't a very good argument </s><s>[INST] now, [/INST] but what it does is is that it muddles the conversation and you always have to ask yourself the question if this conversation becomes muddled who wins as a result of the modeling, </s><s>[INST] what's a battle? But let's just win it. Let's win the battle. You give your running for for sure run. I was born in Russia can't run. So uh but we Russians can hack election so we'll figure it out. Uh This is me officially announcing my run. [/INST] It was born in ST Petersburg florida. Yeah, lex what is it that you really want to ask? </s><s>[INST] I think I want to put some responsibility on the portal, the portal portal, the portal that the portal gives power to the people in that graph like because you you put it quite brilliantly that the people that moved the world, their age has been going up and not move the world, but put in the position where they get the chance to affect the world? The these new platforms? I think twitter falls in them give power to the younger people. It doesn't have to be about asian necessarily but the younger thinking people, so that's a promising thing and you are like you're like Gandalf, you get to get to pick your photos or whatever. I'm not very good with the the analogy, but the whole point is for us, Gandalf, [/INST] I don't know that I make that much sense. Gandalf makes sense. I don't know if people know how to fit me into this ecosystem. I think there's something in my presentation that people find very confused so figure </s><s>[INST] it out. I'm not I disagree with you but you need to look at the mirror and think like what what is it, is it uh maybe you need a mustache, I don't know but there's something about figuring out how to be a charismatic communicator in this and that that's the responsibility you said like finishing sentences with the L. O. L. It's painful for your soul. [/INST] That's just how somebody lets me know. I don't have to take their opinion seriously. </s><s>[INST] Yeah it's still the language the the way that people are communicating and you're swimming that way. If you have a big platform, I have a growing platform, it feels like this is the place to give, I [/INST] agree but we're gonna get swatted down? I </s><s>[INST] just don't think so, you're wrong, Why are you afraid of the big like [/INST] this? As I've studied it? Because I've studied, let me ask you a question lacks, I believe that every society is supposed to have a collection of what I call a break glass in case of emergency people. Yeah, these are people who are universally loved and trusted by your society. For example, David Attenborough, the great british naturalist and presenter uh, recently came on instagram. He's worried about the planet. And I said, you know, look, there's very few of these people left. Let's pay attention, find out what he has to say. Maybe maybe he's gonna be an ask, maybe he's gonna be in it and maybe he's gonna say wrong things. Don't know. Tell Me About Your Top 10 Universal American Heroes. This is not a </s><s>[INST] rhetorical question. No, [/INST] give me five. Everybody looks to that person and says, yep, the best of us, I'm not divisive, </s><s>[INST] well, everybody is an interesting concept. I mean, Elon musk is very divisive, [/INST] right? But I'm talking about overwhelmingly people would, would follow that person if that person gave a rousing intelligent speech that said, we must act now because we're in dire straits. </s><s>[INST] I think a lot of people fall in that category. For me, it would be uh in the, in the tech world, in the engineer? You almost like [/INST] your own mosque </s><s>[INST] the rock, I'm thinking like who is the most eloquent actor. So like you think celebrities. So [/INST] people platforms, </s><s>[INST] nobody well known, I believe like, yeah, so this goes to joe joe Rogan. Mhm [/INST] First two did not really impress me as being what I said, but okay, Ellen several years ago would have, </s><s>[INST] can you, can you try to [/INST] joe Rogan? Why </s><s>[INST] do they fail? Why does, [/INST] why lots of people treat joe Rogan as if he's some sort of right wing racist because they've never watched his program. They don't know who his friends, I don't know. </s><s>[INST] Oh, but when I thought you said everybody, I thought you meant a large enough people where a huge change can happen. Not actually literally everybody [/INST] because I mean people who have pulled up like people who have pulled off something where everybody is convinced that that person just deeply, I think I've told you this story before, but the one time I've seen the power of a figure like this, I mean very few times I've been in a large crowd and I've seen people just moved where they would do almost anything good, bad and different because they were primed. Um, one was a rolling stones concert. The other one was nelson Mandela coming to boston and man, you've never seen anything like this. You check out the photos from the banks of the Charles river when nelson Mandela came um, there are people that you need in your dark hours and we can't agree on who they are and as soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit. We get out the ship brunch. </s><s>[INST] I just disagree with it. So I think, what do we disagree about? I think it doesn't matter who it is. I think really good speeches are needed. And I think a [/INST] lot of them, I saw killer mike tried to give a good Yeah, you did well in Atlanta, right? Yeah. That was something very impressed. Yeah. Even killer mike immediately gets into this sell out or like </s><s>[INST] uh, yeah, but he, he didn't take up the responsibility. I would say he didn't of, of going bigger. So he was speaking to the community and he was on this particular moment. He's exceptional at it. And he was speaking to this particular moment. He didn't take it a step further, which is like giving the same speech but bigger than race bigger than this particular moment. But more about the, the american project. [/INST] You know, the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson? Yes. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] There you go. That's a good [/INST] example. That guy until we screw him up is the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Exactly. </s><s>[INST] Jack. Oh, maybe that's [/INST] another. Jack was pretty good. Jacko is pretty good. I can't really tell us. He's a democrat as a republican. I don't know. He's an american. That's for damn sure. And I think there's a lot of fun and then, you know, I think Jacko. There aren't. That's one of the reasons why Jack is so important. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, your podcast, the portal is something in my literal universe is something a lot of people really love and it moves them. They draw a lot of meaning from it. And also especially in difficult times and they, it gives them a comfort of through like this kind of uh it's not just nuance, it's there's like even when you're talking about chaos, there's love underneath all of it. And I think people would draw a lot of meaning from it, which is why they, okay, I'm wondering why you haven't been doing that many podcasts or you haven't done it in maybe a month and a half or two months in this most difficult of times. Is there is there a good reason? [/INST] Yeah, there are lots of good reasons. So the first one is kind of weird, which is everybody assumes that everyone wants to be famous and if you say I don't want to be famous, it's like, oh you're just saying that because you want to be everyone to think you're famous. You're not that famous. You know, Okay, I don't love being as well known as I've become. There's lots of things that are fun about it is wonderful that you can go to, I can go to any city in the world and our portal listeners there. Uh all I need to do is put out a tweet 20 people show up for a drink </s><s>[INST] and they're amazing [/INST] people and their almost, I mean, you can see my live Q and a s on my instagram page, if you go to eric are weinstein, I just pick somebody randomly and I was really worried about it at first, and you know, maybe I should be worried about it, but in general, people all over the world are just so positive and so, you know, </s><s>[INST] and thoughtful and people have a story that's because their [/INST] self selected. Yeah, but I don't like the fame. </s><s>[INST] The thing we just described comes with the fame. It's a beautiful thing, you know, you're you're worried that it's getting, it's [/INST] ephemeral, it'll look lex, it'll turn on you in a heartbeat. Yeah, it will turn on you in a heartbeat. And the other problem is I don't I don't like my audience being my audience, I want to get closer to them, I want to talk to them, I want to find out what is this doing in your life. My house fills up with art that people send me The latest thing is an effects pedal called something like it was a bowtie overdrive from a guy in Mexico, right? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, you play left you by the way in a tiny little contingent. Did you play like I [/INST] have a stratocaster, but it doesn't have a strap and I don't know what to do with it and I have a bad and so you should, you should, you should hook me up with, </s><s>[INST] we'll find it at home maybe. Okay. You're starting to sense that this is too much. [/INST] No, I wanna be, I wanna be here. I want to do the work very simply. I don't have an ability to fully explain myself. I don't want to claim that I don't love the fact that how much love do we get from these programs? Like generically people are incredibly generous. Um people have begged me set up a Patreon account and I haven't been able to do it. I should do it. I've said to everybody, it's a business, it's a business, it's a business, but like they're so used to being defrauded when somebody starts thinking about monetary incentives. My my goal was to say I'm going to keep talking to you about you wonder why I started doing ads on my show was because I wanted people to think from the get go, this is a business. This is what I sound like what I'm selling. But you know, like you see, I've lost weight. A lot of that is due to athletic greens. Athletic greens, you know, um, </s><s>[INST] code uh what's the, I don't know [/INST] what my promo code is for Athletic green, we'll probably athletic greens dot com slash portal, but doesn't match portal, but you know, Fitbit, who doesn't advertise has also been instrumental as well as a guy named steven kates who, you know, is a fan from the show family on the street and just said, I'm a trainer. I want to help train you got me on a good path. So, you know, that's one paid advertiser and to people that I'm calling out just because you know, to to outfit steven Kates and and Fitbit that have changed my life. I wanted people to say, you know, you don't have to be afraid of advertising. If I do it in this way, this is powering your show. But the whole issue of money is weird because people have these crazy feelings like, oh wow, I knew he was a shill. He's a grifter. You know, okay, I didn't love that. I didn't love the issues. So I didn't set up a Patreon. The security issues for talking and being me are significant and I don't have the kind of money to hire around the clock. I mean, I desperately want to get to a level of wealth where I don't have to think about money. I don't think it's, you know, some people want money because they need it for status. I think I can handle status if I want it doing this. I don't want the status necessarily and I don't want I'd want the status, but I don't want the fame that goes with it. I want the money. I don't want to be seen as this is about money because it's about a substance. Yeah. You know, all of those things that's part of I haven't solved these issues. I've been feeling bad because people say, where's the portal? Words were desperate. These are difficult times. We have an election coming up and it's just like, do you think for a moment that I want to explain that I actually got really uncomfortable being as well known as I was and then what is it that I want? Because I want to be better known and less well known at the same time, It doesn't there's nothing the audience can do. I don't want the audience to be the audience. That doesn't make sense to people. I wanted to be a business, but I don't think people need to fear a business of the businesses open about being a business that and then that's all to the side what you're seeing now in front of the election is an incredibly meta violent period in our online existence. And I believe that anybody who attempts to say these two parties are completely screwed at the moment, the leadership of these parties is unsalvageable. Unworkable. Everyone hears that from inside the two party system. Oh, I get it. He's trying to subtract votes off of biden. Oh, I get it. He's trying to scuttle trump Oh, I get it. This is a play for his show because he's trying to plug in to discuss. There's a Bill Hicks routine on marketing. Have you ever seen this brilliant? I recommend it to everyone, where he comes out on stage and he says, are there any people in marketing and sales in the eyes. Whoa! Yeah, okay, great. Can you do us all a favor and die? And like everybody left? He's like, no, I'm not laughing. I'm seeing being serious. So he talks about how marketing is horrible. So you're like, where's this act going? Then it gets to the point of like, oh, I know how you marketing people think Bill's going after that resentment dollar, That's good dollar. Let's get that resentment. Anti marketing dollar. It's like, no, that's not what I'm saying. I really hate marketers. Oh, that's good. It's the authenticity dollar. You can't escape this kind of negative marketing thought. And I guess that gets to the issue that I don't want to be destroyed in advance of this election. I don't think it's a good use of my relationship to my audience to be broadcasting how completely ridiculous donald trump and joe biden are as candidates for the President of the United States. Full stop. None of this makes any sense. These moderators of these pseudo debates, We're in the wrong format with the wrong people. No part of this makes a wit of sense. </s><s>[INST] Can I try to push back several claims. One is, yeah, I don't believe the systems as they stand now. Can destroy their eric weinstein voice. The voice. [/INST] You're a child. I'm sorry to say that, </s><s>[INST] but well, let me well, it's also possible fight. It's entirely possible that you're the child. Okay. Because a child would say you would call other people a child getting [/INST] the first blow reveal the tell </s><s>[INST] because the only power they have is to attack you psychologically. No. Well, I believe that the army of people that love you is much more powerful than mainstream media than people that you might hear it say ridiculous things that you just said. Which is trying to reduce you like the marketing thinking I just believe there's an army, maybe there's a better term of people that see you for who you are and a hungry. Like [/INST] I'm not disputing those things. </s><s>[INST] And what I'm saying, I would venture to say as your therapist that you're actually uh the battle is all in your mind that you have followed these demons in the system and they're just a tiny minority. And it's all in your mind, they cannot actually remove they're not strong enough to remove the voice. A very quiet stein to silence the Voice. [/INST] I love this. This is some of the best fiction writing I've ever heard. Let me tell you. I have relatives who have known me my entire life Where one article in the New York Times, they will believe that over me. </s><s>[INST] My contention is that there has no power except to affect your psychology. What you have to do is the Rogan thing, which is like hearing me just [/INST] laugh. I am laughing. I know, but I'm no, I'm telling you something. Okay. The way this works is through ruin, ruin can come to anyone. There's no one who cannot be ruined. Every single person is signed up right now to be ruined by the system. </s><s>[INST] But don't you understand that you have more power than the system? The ruins. You can ruin the system. Your twitter account, the podcast. I was telling you about the army. [/INST] I agree that my twitter account, my pocket. But what we've seen for example, you saw what happened to Brett's articles of Unity Project? Yes. Okay. What happened? The unique on the twitter on the twitter side. What happened? What happened? Well, actually say the words say the </s><s>[INST] words, it was blocked or removed from twitter [/INST] suspended account suspended </s><s>[INST] and [/INST] okay, I have a, I have a direct line to Jack. Okay. So I'm talking to the ceo who I am crazy enough to still believe in good. I do too. I believe it somehow. There's a very strange thing going on with Jack Dorsey. I cannot possibly reconcile the actions, but the person I've, that that is a next level mind in there. I'm not, I don't know it well enough to say that it's all next level. I'm not claiming he doesn't have any blind spots. Every smart person I know has blind spots. I don't know what he's up against, blah, blah blah. There's no way that the Jack Dorsey that I've talked to and the Jack Dorsey that interacted over articles of Unity can be the same person. He is constrained by that company in some way. That doesn't make sense to me. Either that or he's the most duplicitous person on earth and I'm not believing it. I just don't buy it. Okay. Yeah. Something horrible is happening. My claim is I can remove you functionally from the chess board in a tiny number of moves, no matter who you are, no matter how virtuous or how much of a bastard you've been your entire life. It doesn't take more than three or four moves to basically neuter you as a force. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And I disagree that if that's possible, that means I'm not very good at chess. Like unity 2020 was removed from Twitter because it's not good enough. Not within the system, like the army of people that feel the brilliance of the idea was too small, [/INST] but fear, uncertainty and doubt is the name of the game. The coin of the realm </s><s>[INST] psychology though, it's not real power. It just affects the mind. [/INST] Okay, I have a reading assignment for you because you're Russian, you'll really enjoy this as part of the great american tobacco settlement. The tobacco Institute had to disgorge its archives of all of its strategies. All of its skullduggery and put it on the web for all time so that we can all understand how the tobacco companies got together and destroyed people, right? You see tobacco destroys people, you can see, you know, scientology destroys people. There are various vindictive organizations that will not tolerate. Um reality and opposition to them take them down. </s><s>[INST] Okay. So I'm trying to tell you is okay. So, so why aren't you doing the podcast to return? Because that's one of the weapons because war? [/INST] Well, first of all, if you're at war, I don't want to discuss strategy on a podcast, Right? But that's your missing Montgomery say about Rommel, but wasn't his line that I read your book, You beautiful bastard. It's like why are using the tactics that you already explained? Okay. So one of the things I'm doing is I'm not having a strategic conversation with you and 100 several 100,000 of our closest friends I pulled back because this is not the battle that I know what I'm doing. I I do not feel passionately enough about defeating donald trump to elect joe biden, even if that's the way I'm gonna ultimately vote, right? Yeah. I don't believe in the biden Democratic Party. I don't believe in the trump Republican Party. So yes, it's an incredibly consequential election. But to me it's like the crips and the bloods and the latin kings fighting over the right to extort, you know, a business and the business trying to figure out who it wants to do the extorting. But </s><s>[INST] don't you think, listen, there's very few people there as good with the english language as you don't you think it's possible to draw a line that doesn't between between defines how we find our common humanity. That ensures a better 2021 without having to say like donald trump is evil or joe biden is incompetent or any of that just somehow draw beautiful, [/INST] so much pain. This election is chewing up the integrity of everyone who comments on it. Lex </s><s>[INST] maybe they're not good [/INST] enough. They're not good enough. No, but the hope is Do you believe in me? Yes, you do listen to me very carefully. My spider sense is my intuition that has allowed me to survive in the space. I'm mouthing off since the eighties tells me this is a super dangerous time for smart people to be spending the dry powder because the election doesn't make sense. It doesn't mean that I don't have a sense that one outcome would be better than the other probably. But the variance on that, I'm not even positive that I'm right. These two options are so Electricly inappropriate to the world of 2020. What we need is so diametrically opposed to more boomers and more silent generation. People trying to sort out a highly technical world being mediated through social media. We need more exclusion. We need more actual elites. The people we've called the elites are not the elite. They need to go, </s><s>[INST] yeah, we need excellence, competence. We need [/INST] people who can be trusted behind closed doors and we need to close the doors so we can't see what those people are doing, here's the thing, imagine that you had a bunch of people who all seen action in combat had all volunteered to be part of the armed services, had all come from backgrounds where they didn't need to. So you were convinced that these people have put their lives on the line for their country, not for a payday. Imagine you had 10 of these people with technical background. Men, women, black, white, muslim jew. Doesn't matter right? I would trust those people and I closed the door. I don't want to know what they talked about. I don't want transparency into all of their negotiations. I want to know that they're patriotic. They see something in the world bigger than themselves and their family fortunes. I want to know that they're courageous. I want to know that they've got all of our well being and I'm willing to roll the dice and if they screw us over, I'd rather go down like that. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so I disagree with you there because there's a difference in those and Jacko because because you're not speaking to people with credentials, [/INST] looking at self credential people. Financial view. Jacko is self credential, but the </s><s>[INST] biggest, the powerful thing about Jacko's he's not only self credential, but he's been real with people. The magical thing about Jacko is in his book isn't his life story is he's been talking on a podcast for long, there's something real that happens. [/INST] Okay? So if you took everybody, if you took dan Crenshaw and Tulsa Gabbert and you took Jacko willing and maybe jesse ventura, right? You can take </s><s>[INST] to see where you're going with this, [/INST] what you can take Bernie Sanders, who's, you know, a lone voice. You take all of these people who like really just risked like why do we trust? Why is Katherine Hepburn the best that Hollywood ever produced? Because she told Hollywood to go fuck itself hard, They gave her four Academy awards and she said, I love you sweeties. I'm going to use them as the door stops for the bathrooms in my house. </s><s>[INST] See that's skill. That's uh that's that's [/INST] just that's what you were talking about. Yeah. Be Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn is pretty amazing. But Katherine Hepburn is next level. Right? Well, you, I mean, that's what you're trying to say to me. Okay, I'm trying to figure it out. Lex Okay, I don't have the answer yet. What I do know is that this election is chewing people up and I mean two separate things. One that parties don't have enough integrity, that if you comment either for or against, there's a short sequence where you make a comment that's nuanced. You get referenced to something, right? Like, you know, take this thing about, you know, fine people on both sides. That is non resolved after 10 years. Whether the context should be reported or not. We are in some situation in which democrats and republicans are primed to fight each other the way introducing two aunts from two different ant colonies always produces a battle. Okay, I don't want to be in that fray because those people are going to kill each other mindlessly like robots. And until the election is concluded like I do, I think this is dire. Yes. Could it be make or break? Absolutely. I'm not saying that. Do I know which way this goes? I can make an excellent argument that we need to elect joe biden right now. We've got a situation which can only be cured by voting for joe biden. I can make another argument that we could have a situation that can only be cured by defeating joe biden right now. And all of the things that the modern Democratic Party represents. Yeah, I don't have you know, it's it's not the lady and the tiger. We're choosing between the tiger and the tiger. It's the sumatran tiger versus the Siberian tiger. Alright, I'm trying to think well which tiger can I do have a better chance against um The key problem for us politically is that we have to divorce the concept of the center and moderation from kleptocracy every time we try to say something like we need more moderate solutions, we need more pluralistic solution. People say, wow you just want to hand us right back into the swamp, don't you? Those swamp people because the moderates and the swamp people are the same people. Right? So then we have these two crazy wings, We can't have crazy right wing people. I don't want any tiki torch bs. We can't have crazy left wing, don't attack my courthouse. Really don't attack my courthouse and we can't have moderates. It's like, okay, how do we install our Children and rape pillage and get these speaking fees when we're out of office and become, you know, cozy with the things were uh, when we're supposed to be regulating them and then, you know, become their lobbyists. You know, immediately when we leave office, all of this stuff, we need an entirely different system and I can't talk about that at the moment when I talk people say, oh wow. So you're going to sit this one out because you're a pussy because you're a coward. Great to know eric. We thought better if you buy click, you know, I don't know what to do. </s><s>[INST] So are you thinking of what to do? Yeah. Oh [/INST] You better believe it. Look Brett Brett had this idea of unity 2020 and I told him it was a wrong idea. Yeah, I didn't tell him that unity 2024 was a wrong idea. I didn't tell him that unity 2028 is a wrong idea. And if I were to make the case that he was right and I was wrong because he's now shuttered. The thing right. I would say that the case to be made that he was correct. Was is that by doing this in 2020, we found out what we were up against. It's good to know that Twitter can turn this off at the drop of a hat. Great to know. It's good to know as we learned that you cannot have meetings of of of presidential candidates in a primary that are not approved of by the party. Uh huh. Right. Like they've got this thing figured out. So we don't have any way in and now unity 2024 Makes sense because unity 2020 was tried. Okay. I don't know that. We get to talk to 2024 under all circumstances and some we do and some we don't, </s><s>[INST] there's, there's a game theoretic thing that I'm not sure you're accounting for, but you, you probably are. But let me just make an argument. Is Jack Dorsey very likely. Listens to your podcast and what this is the power of these [/INST] words. Something deep went wrong, </s><s>[INST] but we can change it with the power of words. [/INST] Something went wrong at twitter. </s><s>[INST] They have so much division on their [/INST] planets. What I'm trying to say. They've </s><s>[INST] gotten. It's not wrong. They just don't know their understand, [/INST] They know they have an insoluble problem difficult to solve. They have an insoluble problem. The argument, </s><s>[INST] I disagree because all right. I'd like to create a competitor. [/INST] No. So then, you know, give it to me, we'll create the competitor. Show me that you actually understood this because my guess is is that most of the things that you'll think about. I mean I can tell you things I've talked to Jack about which I know would make twitter much better. However, I think that this problem of instantaneous communication across the planet and you subtract off all sorts of context and mutual self knowledge. The problem is us. It's not the platforms. You're thinking about a technological solution. And I'm saying the problem is, is that we are ultimately the product </s><s>[INST] and I just disagree with that. And there's a lot of that's probably could save that for tomorrow. [/INST] I look forward to uh spending summers in your villa. Uh, when you, when you debut this product and I would love to angel invest in it </s><s>[INST] by the way. In terms of money, I'll never have a villa. Yeah. No, I will always give away everything. Island Doctor. No, sorry. Uh, invest into like things like you mentioned awesome. Things [/INST] invest fine. But a little bit of avuncular advice. Don't pledge to be the person who disgorges themselves of security. Money is freedom. That's what it is. It's a big honking pile of freedom. Okay. You can choose to use it as the freedom to imprison you if you don't, you know, so you can use it as freedom to make yourself a prisoner of your money. But generally speaking, lex money is freedom and your voice is important. At least retain the amount of money security you need to follow joe's advice. What is the point of F you money? If you don't say F you the number of people who have F. U. Money who don't say F you indicates the number of people who chose the freedom of their wealth to create a prison. They built a prison with the freedom they had and they walked into it, locked the door. </s><s>[INST] I think it's too difficult not to create. The reason I want to give away the money is because I just know my own psychology and you create prisons. Our human minds creates those prisons that have few money is enough for basic shelter and basic food. That's that's the optimal if you don't have kids, this is okay, this is the problem. This is why I'm So this is me, single lex speaking. But [/INST] future lex future lex, I'm talking to future lex single single present lex. Please don't listen. Don't be an ass. You're gonna need some money and don't make these pledges to say on a podcast, I'm saying, I want to save you from yourself. You need money to do many of the beautiful things that we're counting on you to do. Don't f it up. </s><s>[INST] Can I talk to you about Roger Penrose? Sure. You've talked to Roger on the portal, but also in between the lines and offline. Just everything you've said about Roger Penrose for people who don't know, he just recently a few days ago, won the uh 2020, shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics, but it's clear to me that he had like a deep personal impact on you, a connection with you uh in terms of both your love of mathematics, just the way you see the world like this is the Eddie van Halen conversation, this is clearly somebody who is profound in your worldview. Can can you talk about Roger, can you talk about what it means that he won this highest surprises just in general, let's celebrate the [/INST] man. Yeah, okay, so first of all, there are two other people who won this prize, I'm sorry, I just didn't happen to know who they were before they won um Roger is a very, it is not Roger in particular, but the class from which Roger comes, that is so important. So I would put Roger in the class of Feinman, Einstein, dirac yang um </s><s>[INST] put women in there. Yeah, [/INST] I mean, what, what is a special case, but witten is weirdly the reverse of the Roger Penrose story, right, because witten is the first physicist to win a mathematical fields medal, the highest honor in mathematics. Penrose is in some sense of mathematician who has now won the Nobel prize, so it's a perfect sort of a couple. It um Rogers class means everything to me, That's the highest achievement of the human mind. I would probably throw back in with Feynman and dirac and company. Right. Um I think that he was so inventive, it was very frustrating to watch. This career is a little bit frustrating to watch Feynman's career. Um Feinman was so good and had he been born slightly different and slightly different time, I believe his claim on physics would be far greater. Um I feel like Penrose in some sense that came up a very difficult path because you see Einstein effectively solved most of the most important problems in general relativity right at the beginning, as a result, the Children of Einstein are impoverished because there wasn't as much to pick off of the trees and sell at the market, whereas board didn't and and plank didn't do nearly as good of a job with quantum theory. So there's lots to do in quantum theory. I think that Roger affected me personally um by a diagram that I saw in a paper of Herman Gluck at the University of pennsylvania. It was the first picture I'd ever seen of the hop vibration sketched and that, you know, weirdly I brought that to the Rogan program um in order to sort of convey the wonder it was recapitulating my own journey. I think I probably saw that at age 16 or something. I just flipped my mind. Roger is incredibly visual, he's incredibly geometric, he's incredibly sui generous, he just does his own thing. He's got lots of bets, none of them had really come through the way you would hope. And I think they stretched the rules to be blunt about it, </s><s>[INST] to give them the price. Yeah, I do. You said this thing on twitter, which is beautiful, that every once in a while comes a human being that gives a value to the prize versus the prize, giving value to the human [/INST] two different kinds of prizes. The reason that we care about the Nobel prize isn't because of Alfred Nobel, it's because it came along at the right time to reward um Einstein, dirac schrodinger Feinman, Most of the, most of the people who should have won one, most of the awards are not good in the sense that they don't really follow. The prize is used to rewrite history. That's the problem. So, it's you should have a love hate relationship with it because on the one hand, it does focus the world on what really matters. And on the other hand, it distorts what really matters. And both of those functions take place simultaneously. In this case, I think that they violated their own rules slightly. So it wasn't really clearly a case of a prediction and a discovery in the typical fashion, but they like, we better give this award to somebody of that highest caliber to make sure that the prize is fully funded with prestige going forward. That's, that's sort of my weird speculative guess as to what happened. And so Roger is getting on in years and the person should be alive. So they I think they bent the rules and I think they couldn't have meant it for a better person and I hope they will not bend the rules out of weakness, but out of strength in the future would be great to get Madam wu and Emmy nerd er a posthumous prize along with Doug pressure, George Sudarshan, uh and George Zweig as well as ernst Dunkelberg Nobel prizes. There have been some terrible emissions on the first two being females who revolutionized our view of the world, and I've take a very dim view of people pushing for prizes for people from ethnic groups or genders or whatever in order to make it plural and inclusive if it's not following the work. And I feel very clear that in a few cases, we know there was a real problem with the Nobel committee because um we have stunning accomplishments and try to get through a day as a physicist without nurtures theorem, and try to imagine the universe without Madame wu's discovery that left and right don't appear to be symmetric. I mean, these are terrible emissions and there are huge blot on science for not being more inclusive when it matters. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, so just like you said, the Nobel prize is plagued by omissions as much as [/INST] and distortions and illusions, for example, dirac and Schrodinger where I believe given the prize in the same year, there's no reason that those two people needed to dilute each other the same thing with, you know, Dyson was an omission Tominaga probably got included in part because we had an opportunity to show that something had happened on both sides of the pacific after the war, um but I don't think we needed to dilute um Weinberg or Feinman Horsch winger. It just makes me it makes me somewhat sick. All of these people are such important giants and it has to do with the field, I think, not wanting to create luminaries and superstars who could have defended the field from budget cuts and worldly pressure. So I think it's really important that we have absolute superstars because we produce superstars, we acknowledge them, we don't dilute them and that we bend the rules to make sure that the prize stays funded with the prestige that comes from giving it to the Roger Penrose is Albert Einstein's and paul dirac s of the world, </s><s>[INST] Can we talk a little bit about evil? Sure, I haven't actually talked to you about this topic and it's been sitting on my mind mostly because everybody at MIT is quiet about it, which is Jeffrey Epstein, I didn't get a chance to experience what I might do is like at the time when Jeffrey Epstein was part of this, but it's I'd love to try to understand how evil was allowed to flourish in in the place that I love. Whether you think maybe let me ask the question this way, was it the man evil or was the system evil or is evil too strong award? Because what I see is the presence of of this particular human being in the eyes of many, destroyed the reputations of many really strong scientists and also weaken the ability, like weaken the institution of MIT bye, making everybody quiet like almost making them unable to say anything interesting or difficult. Yeah. And what, what is that? And what am I supposed to uh we don't know why is everyone quiet about Jeffrey? Why don't we don't [/INST] we don't know. Obviously I want to scream about it to write and I probably have said too much about Jeffrey Epstein, look, something horrible happened, I don't know what it is, but something horrible happened. And you know, at the one thing that, okay, let's just do this. The first thing I need to do is I need to get rid of this woke crap about power differentials. Okay, in general, you can talk about hyper gamy and power differentials are russell conjugation of the same concept. Just the way particular proportions and symmetries are mathematically provable to be attractive um in females to males, male attractiveness is largely determined by male competence and ability to amass power and success and all these sorts of things. The relationship between consenting adults is quite frankly, not something I want to sort out the relationship between the sexuality of adults and miners and particularly, you know, There's the the 1718 issue. Mhm. That's very different than 1213. Um we're talking about really sick depravity with respect to what appears that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in at some level. I believe this story is super complicated, in part because I think one thing with Jeffrey Epstein was doing was providing money, encouragement and support two scientists. Another thing he was doing, I believe was giving tax advice. two Very rich people. I believe another thing he was doing was hooking very wealthy people up with young adult females. Another thing he was doing, I think was doing stuff with Children that will curl your toes. So between, so there's an entire spectrum of different stuff and at the moment nobody can pull apart or d conflate anything because the woke thing comes over it and says, You know, I think it's disgusting that, you know, a 43 year old billionaire would be partying with a 23 year old. Right? Yeah, Okay. Yeah. I don't want to adjudicate that. I'm worried about 12 and 14 year olds that we're not talking about. </s><s>[INST] But I mostly [/INST] I don't think my tea was deep into pedophilia. My guess is that that did not happen. I don't think that the scientists were the targets of the really sick depraved stuff. It's my guess. My but my guess is that what you're looking at was a government construct? It may have been our government may have been a joint government project. Maybe somebody else's government. I don't know. I believe that in part, we don't really understand robert Maxwell, Sorry, who's robert Maxwell? Gillian Gillian father's will's father. It was very active in scientific publishing. I don't know where peer review came from. I would love to run down the relationship between peer review and robert Maxwell. I would love to run down the missing fortune of robert Maxwell and the mysterious fortune of Jeffrey Epstein, because I don't think Jeffrey Epstein ever ran a hedge fund. I don't think he was a money advisor, the way people claimed. </s><s>[INST] So there's two things I want to talk about. So one is the shallow conversations of woke identity politics that you're referring to. Seems to be removing everyone's ability. No, everyone willingness, one of the things to talk about, like, what the hell is this person and how is he allowed more? Most importantly, how to how do we prevent it in the future? And from the individual perspective, the question for me, it's the same question I asked about 19 thirties Nazi Germany. I've been reading way too much probably or not enough about that period currently is if I was in Germany at that time, what is the heroic action to take when I think about m I. T with Jeffrey Epstein. What is the heroic action to take? We're not talking about virtue [/INST] signaling. Actually know what I would like to know what you're up against. Like you're not hearing me. The problem here is what was Jeffrey Epstein? </s><s>[INST] Well, that question might be the heroic action to take. [/INST] That's all I'm trying to say. I'm just trying to get my first question. You have to map the silence with Jeffrey Epstein. What you're describing is a map of the silence at MIT. Yeah, well, is there a map of the silence in Washington state? Around Jeffrey Epstein? The Bay Area, new york City. The amount of silence around Jeffrey Epstein should be telling you everything. The number of dogs that don't bark is like nothing we've ever seen. </s><s>[INST] You're exactly correct, but I want to know what is it telling us Because what it's telling me it's not some kind of conspiracy, but more a disappointing weakness. Not people or my is not some kind of conspiracy, but [/INST] got to be kidding. No, you're so you're so afraid of saying the word conspiracy that you don't think it's a conspiracy. </s><s>[INST] I personally, I just think it's people who I thought were my heroes just being weak. No, [/INST] be of good cheer, sir. A cheer, be of good cheer. </s><s>[INST] Of good cheer. You [/INST] think that there is a conspiracy? I think there is a conspiracy? </s><s>[INST] I'd be very impressive one. That's the scale of it. I I tend to believe that large scale can only be an emergent [/INST] phenomena really. I find this so fascinating because I always see you as like a logic, logic and love. Drive your, drive your soul. You're very logical, you're relentless. Got a lot of love in your heart. I believe that if you would review the video, where is it from Dubai or abu Dhabi of the mysterious hit on the hotel guest, you've ever seen this thing? All right. It's the assassination in 2010, 10 years ago of Mahmoud al Mabhouh boom, something like that in Dubai where I believe 26 uh separate individuals on multiple teams are shown converging coming in from all over the world on false passports, pretending to be tennis players or you know, business people or vacationers and all of these teams have different functions and they murder this guy in his, in his hotel room. And the Dubai I guess chief of Police security officer was so uh angered that he put together this amazing video that says, we can completely detail what you did. We caught you on closed circuit tv. We don't know exactly who you are because your disguises and your false passports. But yeah, 26 people converged to kill one. No, I don't believe you. I don't believe after cointelpro an operation paperclip and uh operation mockingbird. I don't know whether I should even bring up rex 84 to not believe in conspiracies is an idiocy. </s><s>[INST] So you you have a sense that evil can be as confident and [/INST] more competent first of all, when evil wants to operate at scale, it needs to make sure that people don't try to figure out evil when evil operates at scale from first principles, you have to realize that evil must not want it investigated. That's correct. The most efficient way to keep yourself from being investigated. If you are an evil institutional player needs to do this repeatedly, is to invest in a world in which no one can afford to say the word conspiracy. You will notice that there is a special radio activity around the word conspiracy. We have provable conspiracies, we have admitted to conspiracies, you have been invited to conspiracy, there is no shortage. Conspiracies are everywhere, some of them are mundane, some of them are like price fixing cartels, you know, or trade groups are generally speaking conspiracy. So the first thing you have to realize is that all of us are under a in a medic complex where you can be taken off the chessboard by saying conspiracy. There get done to one, it's like a one line proof. We don't have to listen to Alex. He said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show. Okay, that is partially distorting our conversation. If you want to ask me about Jeffrey Epstein, you have to agree with me that that is a logical description of what you would have to have if you wanted to commit conspiracies is that you have to make sure that people are dissuaded from investigating this. Okay. </s><s>[INST] But it's a very it's a Fascinatingly difficult idea then because the world with conspiracy theories, in the world without conspiracy theories, to the to the shallow glance looks the [/INST] same. Well, my point there is responsible conspiracy theorizing where you look at the history of unearthed conspiracies and just like you would with any other topic, just think about how different the rules in your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X. Theorizing where X can be anything right? It's like if I say to you um I can say the statement that average weight is not the same between widely separated populations, you'd say yeah, I'd say average height is not the same between widely separated population you say. Yeah, then I say in fact no continuous variable that has, that shows variation should be expected to be identical between widely separated. Of course eric like whoa, hold on, right, so we have a violent reaction to specific topics. So the first thing I want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into everyone's mind. </s><s>[INST] That's really important to state. Yeah, that's it's very interesting that and as a prerequisite as you're saying, that would be the first step. If you wanted to uh pull off a conspiracy in a competent way. That's he would have to first convince the [/INST] World and I just watched the film 1971 about my favorite conspiracy of all time. I highly recommend it </s><s>[INST] 1971. [/INST] Well the film is entitled 1971 and it's about the citizens committee to investigate the FBI which was run by a student of Murray gellman, a physicist and broke into FBI offices in pennsylvania to steal files which allowed freedom of information requests that discovered a huge conspiracy. It was a conspiracy that unearthed a conspiracy inside the federal government. A double conspiracy story which launched multiple conspiracies. I think that the problem with modern americans is that they are so timid that they don't even learn about the history of conspiracies that we have absolutely proven. So with that done, Jeff Epstein, in my opinion represented somebody's construction </s><s>[INST] I don't kind of scary to think about. Yeah. Well [/INST] what part of the story isn't scary I in part did something which I I imagined may get me destroyed because I was more worried about being destroyed by somebody else. I had a conversation with around Jeff Epstein. Right, so I'm just trying to like get let it be known that I don't know anything more than I've already said now. Your friends at MIT. Yeah. Their problem is is that Jeff Epstein showed up as the only person capable of continuing us scientific tradition. You see the U. S. Scientific tradition, it's a little bit like the Russian. It's it's combative. Okay and We're a free society and we act like a free society where a rich society and we researched like we're a rich society that is historically, and then came the 1970s and William Proxmire and the golden fleece awards and the idea that we have to, we're paying too much and these are welfare queens and lab coats and blah blah blah blah. We need more transparency, more oversight, everything went to hell and the national culture of us, science was lost. The thing that produced all this prosperity and security and power was lost. And then Jeff Epstein shows up and a tiny number of funders, maybe fred Kavli, um maybe yuri Milner, maybe um who else would be in this category, peter thiel to an extent, um Howard Hughes would be the largest of these things, which has different grant structures than the NIH gave people a modicum of risk taking ability. Mhm. Okay, Well, when Jeff Epstein showed up, everybody wanted to take risk in science And suddenly a charismatic billionaire says, Hey, I can make that work for you. Here's $100,000. Go go research something crazy. Well that money was supposed to be provided by the federal government. Under the terms of the endless frontier compact between the federal government, the universities and the federal government, The taxpayers, welsh too. Okay, </s><s>[INST] so that's one place to lay the blame for Jeffrey Epstein as at the the failure of the federal government [/INST] to honor its to honor its commitment, right? So the universities became psychopathic, It's not like everybody doesn't remember what we're supposed to be doing to be moral, but the point was there wasn't enough money to be moral. So it was time to to eye each other as a source of protein as I like to say. And in that process Jeffrey Epstein said, Hey, come to my world, we can do it like we used to do so in part, my point is, is that almost none of your colleagues at M I. T. Have that kind of religious commitment to science that they're willing to go down with ships science. Mhm. The Galileo galilee thing became very important to science because occasionally you just have to say, look, this isn't about me and you, there isn't enough money in the world to buy the kind of legacy I want to leave to this planet. This is one of the great things about science, you know, potentially is worth dying for. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I'm glad you said it. Science is one of the things that is best. That's worth dying for. [/INST] I mean, I'm not eager to martyr myself. Mhm. But I've certainly risked my health, my fortune. You know, I've destroyed myself economically over science and and my my my my need to oppose these sons of bitches in chaired professorships who are destroying our system, along with everyone else. </s><s>[INST] Let me um bring in grandmaster went into this oogway, oogway [/INST] master. Oogway, </s><s>[INST] I think he's a grandmaster that would make him a [/INST] chess playing turtle? </s><s>[INST] So I ever had some Wikipedia. Uh she was a master. There's apparently only one grand master. That's okay. [/INST] Anyway, is the phrase grandmaster ever uttered in the script? </s><s>[INST] I don't think so. I don't think so. But there's a story, [/INST] oh, there's, there's off, off script cannon. I'm gonna call Glen berger right now and find out if any of this is true. </s><s>[INST] All right, You're not supposed to call out my journalistic integrity. Um, but master Oogway Master Oogway, he says a couple of things I'd like to bring up with you. So one is part of a longer quote recommends that you should find a battle worth fighting. We've talked about several battles just now. What is the battle worth fighting for for eric Weinstein in the next few months in the next year [/INST] there's only one. Well, it's the moses, it's the moses thing. It's time to go. It's time to leave this place is over to get off the planet. Yeah, I freaked people out when I say that, but like look at your world, you just got introduced to the problem of the virus. Wait, wait till its fusion devices and you understand what it means to have one interconnected planet with no un correlated experiments happening anywhere else? You know? </s><s>[INST] So do you see the foray your work in physics and maybe like the echoes of it in ship. Ellen, [/INST] everybody who has a possible plan to avoid what is coming if we don't have one should work on the plan that he she thinks best. Right? So Ellen wants to do rockets people misinterpret me. I meta eric says I don't think that's a smart plan. Mhm. Regular eric says, Mhm. All people who have hope should do that thing. Yeah, at least it's mars man at least it's the moon and mars and maybe tighten and whatever and I don't think it will work and it doesn't make sense and it looks silly </s><s>[INST] but that's exactly the kind of fight. Worth fighting. But it's [/INST] The kind of fits for the same reason that I went on Brett's unity 2020 thing when I didn't think it had a hope in hell and people you know, are making fun of it. Like we got to do things that make that make us feel dumb and silly and childish, they possibly have a hope of working. Okay, so everybody should do something. My version of this I'm the most hopeful about because I wouldn't have chosen to do if I thought that daniel smoked in burgers wisdom project was a better hope I do that. It's more down to earth in a certain way. I just think that it's more probable. Look, we got from powered flight with the Wright Brothers and wind tunnels to sending back images from the surface of titan huygens cassini in less than a century. Okay, what we can do if we can change the laws of physics is something we can't even conceive of. It may be that it buys us nothing. And at least we'll, we will know why we died on this planet. </s><s>[INST] As a small aside, I think this is not the right time to take the full journey. But I feel like you will guide me like master wei did and I'm the kung fu panda. [/INST] It's something I only have one conversation. </s><s>[INST] We're on our way. We didn't [/INST] well, </s><s>[INST] we're jews and they weren't so we talked too much, but the guy doesn't have to be with words. Uh, you don't think po is jewish. It's debatable. We'll have to go back to the Wikipedia. [/INST] Yeah. </s><s>[INST] Is there, um, that you would guide me through some more intuition about the source called the source code of our universe. Can you comment on where since we last spoke, where you're thinking has been, has roamed around geometric unity around that work in physics. In this fight. I'm trying to figure out [/INST] when to release it and how I mean, I've released the video in the video quite honestly, I think it has a very bizarre reaction. I think one of the things that I've learned from the video because the video is coming up on half a million views on youtube alone to say nothing of the um, the audio. But yeah, it produced a very strange reaction. One of the things I don't think that I properly understood is that most physicists don't talk in this geometric language. I thought that more of the physics world probably had converted over into manifolds, bundles, differential forms, connections, curvature, tensors, et cetera. And I saw a lot of the comments would say things like I have a PhD in theoretical physics and I'm not even familiar with all of these concepts and I think that was probably a distortion coming from living in Cambridge massachusetts for almost 20 years. So what's the solution to that? Do you want to do it? I can make this make as much sense as anybody needs to. My problem is, you know, my calculation is that as long as the boomers are still in charge, the same people have these perverse incentives on them where they've invested in these programs that didn't work. So they're extremely hostile and kind of difficult to deal with. The fact that I'm not a physicist, um, has its own set of issues, which is that effectively, it's like the hermit kingdom. They don't get any visitors and they don't necessarily want somebody, you know, rolling up and saying, I know how to do physics. So I'm always very clear. I'm not a physicist. Um, that said, if I wait too long, I don't know that theoretical physics is really going to exist after the boomers because everyone in you, I think you had Wolfram on your program. I don't remember whether he said this to you or brian keating, but he said something like everybody got discouraged. It was too hard. We can't do that guys, we cannot do that. There's something about the renormalization revolution that innovated the physics community because it taught them just because you can see in this energy regime doesn't mean you can extrapolate somewhere else unless you understand how, you know, coupling constants run and what kind of UV fixed points exist, blah blah blah. Somehow that discouraged people from guessing from believing everything became an effective theory. The beauty of the effective theory wasn't taken to be really the beauty of the universe, just the beauty of an energy level. So, I think the renormalization was one of the most important revolutions that ever happened in science and also its interpretation by the physics community was catastrophic. Well, the story I'm telling myself is that in part I'm waiting for them to get weaker. But on the other hand, I don't know that we have any time left. And so are </s><s>[INST] you also thinking about ways of uh you know, you know, the podcast medium is revolutionary for public for discourse for what I mean? I don't even know the right words for it. Are you thinking of revolutionary ideas for re energizing the physics community? So basically for communicating Jessica. [/INST] Look, I have a fantasy. Okay, my fantasy is that all of these things are the same problem and it goes back to this thing that I read about in, in Fine Men's books about Tartaglia. They asked him this question like what's the greatest thing that ever happened in math? He says Tartaglia solution of the cubic? Just like the weirdest answer. So you're like okay, I'll bite why is it Tartaglia solution of the cubic? And he said because it was the first time a modern person had done something profound that the ancients had failed to do. Mhm I was like, oh I got it. It's the thing that opens up new psychology that says maybe things are possible. Again, </s><s>[INST] it's a new orchard, [/INST] you tortured new farmers, new people who can find fruit that they can pick and once you have one person do that very often you get many like one of the things that we're talking about with Eddie van Halen, the reason that he created a revolution in somebody like Roy Buchanan did not is that you could follow Eddie Van Halen, you couldn't pioneer it and maybe you couldn't play as well and as cleanly and as fast as inventively but you could follow once you understand that there is a tapping principal, it was just the beginning of something called percussive guitar. Mhm um my belief is that once we start innovating in the present, everything will come because everything around us is screwed up </s><s>[INST] on that. Let me with one last question bring back Master Oogway, the probably the most famous quote of his right with yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is [/INST] called the present. Very beautiful. Although I would have gone with quit. Don't quit noodles, don't noodles. </s><s>[INST] I feel, I feel like people need to know [/INST] way too much context for that to make sense. It's your audience just to hell with context. Yeah, they, they'll figure it </s><s>[INST] out. Well, let me ask, what are you grateful for today? What is your present? We've talked about a lot of dark things, but what do you brings you joy to your heart that I can't believe. I'm lucky enough to have this [/INST] Nyla and Xev Uh huh My wife Pierre um the fact that we've got our health, all the little things saying grace after meals, you're coming over for friday night shabbat dinner. So we'll say we'll bench together and say Grace. It's important to just like this bottle of water in front of me. I made a point um of just thinking about how wonderful it is that there's a quenching bottle that happens to be placed in front of me because somebody cared. Yeah, so that that small thing made a difference to me. Um I still have strength for the fight so far. I think that's something I'm grateful for. I can't believe that I'm not more beaten down after all of this nonsense. Um I have the most interesting set our friends, I really do. I mean I'm not that rich by monetary standards, but if there were friend billionaires, Forbes would be all over my assets. Um yeah, I just can't believe who I can talk to, you know at the drop of a hat and I'm really grateful. I think this is the end of something profound and it's the beginning of whatever is next and whatever is next could be terminal, Whatever's next could be amazing. Whatever's next could be Return to the horrors of the early 20th century. That doesn't manage to go totally catastrophic. But you know, it takes hundreds of millions of lives in the process. I'm grateful to having half of my life in the rear view mirror. It may be it took place in a bubble and maybe it was unsustainable, but it was nice to be able to move around the world without a mask. Uh It was nice to be able to see a little bit of the world even if it was from a uh caught in a hospital in some country um, </s><s>[INST] to fall in love. Absolutely. I mean it was a good life. [/INST] Find the last indian jewish girl </s><s>[INST] left [/INST] who knew </s><s>[INST] uh you're a lucky guy. Well let me just say [/INST] actually it's something I wanted to just say before you get to that I forgot to say something falling in love with an intellectual collaborator. There's a special thing that not everybody gets a chance to do. Like I think when I met pia I fell deeply in love with her all her normal characteristics. And I she and I had an antagonistic relationship around uh geometry and economics. And then, weirdly, you know, just like in a buddy picture where in the first half of the film, they hate each other. The two fields, like we're fighting with each other cats and dogs. And finally, the sexual tension clearly was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. And we came up with geometric marginal is um which is this other theory, not geometric unity, which allowed me to inhabit space with somebody who I already knew intimately and had fallen in love with and to see the quality and beauty of their mind and to play into dance. It's sort of the intellectual version of the tango. Um, one of the most romantic periods of my life that doesn't fall into most people's experience. That was a chance to see something totally unexpected. Haven't really had it since because she doesn't want to revisit the material. But something I'm super grateful for this very particular and unique. </s><s>[INST] But to flip the tables on you for hundreds of thousands, I think millions of people I can speak. Me and them are really grateful. One that you exist and two, sorry for your podcast and I do hope your voice in some form continues To to reverberate. I think in the at least in the 2020 ones. And and beyond. Even if it takes a brief pause, [/INST] we're pausing at the moment. We've recorded some for future episodes and I'm recording for you. I really appreciate that. I mean, it's earnestness ah trades at a discount at the moment because it's easy to make fun of it. One of the things I like best about you is is that you and I are both fairly earnest. We made, we made joke and Jeb, but honestly, there's a project here in a world to win, as they say. Um the thing that uh I want my and your listeners to know is that I'm not stepping away from the podcast, um because I don't appreciate that people really want more. It's not, you know, this is hugely financially costly to me. Um I want to make sure you guys are getting the best that I can do and destroying myself right in front of an election. I think lex is incorrect. I think that the forces that are trying to make sure that there aren't any planes in the sky that aren't either colored red or colored blue um is a big danger given how angry I am at the system and I don't want to be removed from the chessboard because if nobody's going to talk about Jeff Epstein, there need to be people, if nobody's going to talk about various things that we've talked about on these programs. I want to make sure that I'm there do. I think that this is potentially an existential election. Yes. Do my positive that I know that my way to bed is the right way out. No, I'm not. I don't know people, I just don't know and where we are right now seems so dumb and so catastrophic in terms of how it is chewing up smart people that I decided it's really not about cowardice because it's hard for me to restrain myself. I have so many reactions every day. Um, this is really about trying to plan for all of our futures to make sure that I'm around. I had a huge concern that what happened to Brett's articles of unity was going to happen to Brett, what's gonna happen to the Youtube channels. I want to make sure that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket. So if something goes wrong over there, So, you know, that's the whole idea of the intellectual dark web, which is at some level, a loose confederation, it can become a strong confederation if somebody wants to back it and make it work, it can dissolve so that there really isn't anything. Um, the thing is to be hard to kill because ultimately when they hit pieces come, they don't come for what it is that they're angry at you about. They come from where they can get you. And so it's very important that right in front of an election. Um, yeah, I think that the, the desire of the old system to defend itself through reputational destruction is one of the most pernicious aspects of the new America and we have to fight the ability to destroy reputations as a means of institutions, keeping individuals with podcasts and the ability to reach millions like through sub stack out of their domain. I don't surrender this domain to them. They have plenty of weaponry with which to fight us and I believe that they could remove you or me in an instant by the end of today. If they wanted us off the chessboard, we would be off the chessboard. I know that's not your perspective. My goal is to stay here as long as possible to make sure that you have enough of a counterbalancing set of ideas and to let and help other podcasts or start. And my hope is is that that works. But you know, long heroism, short martyrdom is a good motto for anyone and I try to remember the short martyrdom part of that </s><s>[INST] First of all beautifully put. 2nd of all way to end the conversation and a disagreement, which is how you hook them for the next conversation to be continued [/INST] when lex says </s><s>[INST] erIC, it's a huge honor, thank you Once again, [/INST] let's really appreciate every time we get together. Thanks buddy. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with eric Weinstein and thank you to our sponsors Graham early a service I use in my writing to check spelling, grammar, sentence structure and readability. Sun basket, a meal delivery service. I used to add healthy variety into my culinary life. SCM Rush, the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across. I don't like looking at numbers but someone should, it helps you make good decisions and finally express VPN the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on youtube, review it with five stars on apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, connect with me on twitter. Elex Friedman and now let me leave you with some words from Leonard Cohen in a song titled hallelujah, well maybe there's a god above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you and it's not a cry that you hear at night, it's not somebody who's seen the light, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah, thank you for listening and hope to see you next time [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] I had like several moments in my life where you kind of realize the body is weird and it's weirder than the average advice. Like one of them is how well I performed for my own standards when I fast ah First of all intellectually, but that's more known and and understandable, but like physically the fact that I could train like 90, 20 hours, 24 hours and then do a hard like judges secession for like two hours. Like hard, it's incredible to me. Like this makes no sense because I used to eat like many times a day, of course you have to eat like you don't want to get too close to the training session was my thinking, but you definitely need to load up on carbs like three hours before. Like in order to have enough energy. The fact that it could not eat and have like incredible focus, but also athleticism. Like both endurance and explosive just is a special thing. It's like more like chess, it's not like powerless thing or not on that powerlifting, olympic lifting? Where it's like true, explosiveness, but that's fascinating and it makes you wonder like, what other things are there to um to discover about yourself. The annoying thing about food is, it's delicious. So it's hard to do good science and yourself like to do, you know, for two weeks or a month to do like strict no carbs and then maybe next month you add 20 g or 40 g of carbs and see how you actually feel. Not like in that moment, but over a period of several weeks and then doing everything else, like, right with, based on best available science, like with electrolytes and vitamins, but then also like remove all the humans from your life that affect you positively or negatively, because you might feel amazing because you're hanging out with cool people and then uh, you know, like removing basically all the variables, it's kind of fascinating and you kind of, all of us land in a place where we find something that worked for us and then we maybe use some of the placebo effect to help us out to stick in that place. And then, uh I suppose that's the way to live life. I guess it's impossible to find the optimal for any of us. But carnivore is an interesting new kind of caveat and you challenged the nutritional community because more and more people seem to be doing well under carnivore. [/INST] Yeah. Well, the nutrition community probably, we just got done, like dealing with the vegans now, we got this opposite end of the spectrum coming at us. But I think, well, I mean, what this all tell us what this all tells me is like, there is uh for one, like In our food environment, like the failure rate of anyone approach at a population level is gonna be incredibly high. I mean, it's why we have, you know, what is it, like, 88% of the population has some sort of like metabolic syndrome. And it's it's like, you know, it's because there's an endless quantity of everything that you can get your hands on for relatively cheap. Um and I think that's that that presents a problem if your mindset is going to be, we need this set of parameters for nutrition and everyone needs to adhere to that or you're wrong. And it's like, well, tell that to the person who like went carnivore and cleared up some like crazy skin ailment or something like that. That's a </s><s>[INST] Weird one. Yeah, like where the carnivore seems to treat like, like depression, like mental stuff. It's fascinating. There's all these stories, again, it's anecdotes, but it's like the [/INST] Mental one, I think may I'm stepping out a bit on a limb here, but I want to say like, some of the research of Dominic d'Agostino and Jeff Baldock was looking at the ketogenic diet, which a carnivore diet is basically going to be a part of a ketogenic, I mean, you could always go like way too high on the protein I guess, but most people that I see doing carnivore, they're cognizant enough that at least if they're doing it for therapeutic reasons, they're not going like, you know, 50% protein, 15, they're more like 70, 30, 80, 20, something like that. And and I think like you you do see some some work with like the brain and so the mental stuff. I know some of the I'm not sure if this was part of the DARPA funding that that doctor Dominic d'Agostino had where they were looking at things like mental stuff like post traumatic stress disorder and that sort of stuff with with like a strict ketogenic diet. So I wonder if some of that, like, the depression related stuff has to do with that we're now like their body is just fueling the brain differently than maybe they were in the past. But um that's just, you know, wild guesses on my part. Um And I'm deviating from the conversation, but like, </s><s>[INST] no, that's brilliant in terms of your own story on food, Can you say something? We're I think we're kind of referring to diet broadly. Can you say something about how you like to fuel you're like whether it's race or great training sessions, like maybe the day before, let's go even that far during and maybe a few hours after. [/INST] Okay, it'll be a little different for racing than it will be for like a big work out just because the interesting thing about ultra running is just like, you never do the race, even like, most endurance races, you're going to cover the distance, you're gonna replicate the race almost up to it in training, whereas with 100 miles, you can you might replicate a third of it. So, so I'll do, I'll walk you through, kind of, my approach for, like, 100 mile race, and I can tell you maybe what I would do differently on, like, a training day. But yeah, so, for um where, where the community is an agreement is that you do want to be very good at burning fat for ultra marathons. I mean, there's just the intensity is low. If you're if you're ratios are skewed very high towards carbohydrate metabolism, then you're going to have to defend your muscle glycogen through tons of carbohydrate consumption. And and that's just gonna be very hard to do over the course of an entire day, even at low intensities. So, it's a fuel tank thing. I mean, it's like, you're, you're leanest endurance athletes have way more fat than the do glycogen stores when you're doing low intensity performance, you want to be burning high levels of fat and sparing that muscle glycogen. What I tend to do is I want to start the race burning really high levels of fat. So I'm gonna, I'll maybe have some carbohydrate the night before for dinner, but then I'm going to lean into the overnight fast breakfast the morning of I'm gonna stay away from carbohydrates for 100 mile or anyway, and I'm going to have something like something that's pretty like the high energy, low volume. So like, I'll do like an S fuels life bar, they've got like, </s> |
<s>[INST] in this life. [/INST] It's gonna pay off. Which reminds me of, let me ask you </s><s>[INST] already asked you for [/INST] advice about for a filmmaker </s><s>[INST] how to win an Oscar. [/INST] Well, I haven't won an Oscar how </s><s>[INST] to get nominated for an Oscar. That's [/INST] true or just </s><s>[INST] how to make great [/INST] documentaries, how to make great film. But let me </s><s>[INST] ask even Zuma [/INST] bigger. You mentioned </s><s>[INST] some of these [/INST] things doing the things that you think matters, </s><s>[INST] What advice would you give to young people, high school college dreaming [/INST] of </s><s>[INST] living a life [/INST] worth living, </s><s>[INST] what advice [/INST] would you give them </s><s>[INST] about career [/INST] or maybe just life </s><s>[INST] in general how to have a life [/INST] they can be proud of? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I don't [/INST] know how you're gonna react to this, </s><s>[INST] given, given sort of your [/INST] expertise, but I would say </s><s>[INST] um put [/INST] down the smartphone step away from the monitor, right? Because </s><s>[INST] real life [/INST] is not a screen. I believe that sort of the foundational skills which are, which are conducive </s><s>[INST] and important to success. [/INST] Um aren't </s><s>[INST] necessarily those technical [/INST] skills </s><s>[INST] which we're going to learn in trade schools or [/INST] university, I </s><s>[INST] think [/INST] they're more foundational than that. </s><s>[INST] They're learning how to interact [/INST] um, and listen with humans humans to </s><s>[INST] to really see and [/INST] listen right? Um, and </s><s>[INST] and and and and observe, [/INST] right? Um, and </s><s>[INST] how to step out [/INST] of your door and if the electricity </s><s>[INST] goes out [/INST] Right, and you're five </s><s>[INST] miles away from your [/INST] house, you don't need a smartphone to get </s><s>[INST] home because [/INST] you've set visual markers for yourself on how to get back to where you live, right? I think we're in danger right now of </s><s>[INST] living in a world [/INST] where if the satellite stopped functioning right. Um, then a whole lot of people have become </s><s>[INST] completely [/INST] dysfunctional, right? Because we're so </s><s>[INST] reliant upon the screens in [/INST] our lives. So I think there's a lot of foundational skills </s><s>[INST] that have nothing to do with [/INST] technology that we need to learn that every that and everything rests upon those. So I would say learn those foundations, learn how to write. Well read a lot, right? </s><s>[INST] It's a different kind of knowledge [/INST] and wisdom that comes out of that. The reading is kind of the equivalent </s><s>[INST] of listening and [/INST] observing and writing is </s><s>[INST] um [/INST] kind of integration of all </s><s>[INST] of that that you've observed and listened to and tried to express something with that. [/INST] So I think my training in the theater </s><s>[INST] has served me [/INST] so well in the documentary world, right? Because it's all about </s><s>[INST] interaction [/INST] and listening and talking and dialogue, right? And that's what I do in documentaries, right? As I listen. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, yeah. [/INST] I'm we mentioned </s><s>[INST] fear being [/INST] an introvert, I'm </s><s>[INST] very afraid of people, [/INST] but I'm drawn to them </s><s>[INST] and fascinated by them because of that. [/INST] I enjoyed listening to them and um observing them. And </s><s>[INST] you mentioned reading, you [/INST] mentioned books as a </s><s>[INST] catalyst as a [/INST] stimulator of your imagination. </s><s>[INST] Is their books in your life A couple 1 2, 3 [/INST] that </s><s>[INST] kind of [/INST] left an impact </s><s>[INST] or [/INST] or or a little bit of </s><s>[INST] spark of [/INST] inspiration </s><s>[INST] early on [/INST] in life </s><s>[INST] that stand out from [/INST] your memory. I was given um </s><s>[INST] The Prophet [/INST] by Khalil Gibran when I as a graduation present from my from my high school english </s><s>[INST] teacher and I still have [/INST] that book in a special place in my bookshelf </s><s>[INST] because I think it [/INST] speaks to </s><s>[INST] the nature of human experience and I returned [/INST] to it all the time because there's wisdom there, you know, </s><s>[INST] but but there's many, many books, so [/INST] fiction and nonfiction. What what connects </s><s>[INST] with you usually [/INST] in the past when I I read mostly nonfiction most of the time. Um 10 points is a book, I love a lot. </s><s>[INST] What is it? What is [/INST] 10 points? 10 points is um I think his name is Bill Strickland, he was the </s><s>[INST] editor of I think [/INST] bicycle magazine </s><s>[INST] and it's sort of [/INST] his personal memoir of um his </s><s>[INST] experience growing up with a lot [/INST] of abuse and how that transformed </s><s>[INST] him as a human being. [/INST] You know, one instrumental </s><s>[INST] book for me that [/INST] I bumped into in my early 20s. Boy, these are all nonfiction </s><s>[INST] except [/INST] for the Princess Bride, I have </s><s>[INST] to mention [/INST] it's an outlier. No, no, the </s><s>[INST] The seven habits of [/INST] highly effective </s><s>[INST] people. Um [/INST] I read that in my early 20's </s><s>[INST] and I found [/INST] so many </s><s>[INST] of [/INST] the principles in that </s><s>[INST] book. What are the [/INST] Habits from that one </s><s>[INST] uh [/INST] seek first to understand then to be understood as one of them? You know, the </s><s>[INST] notion of pro activity is one of them. [/INST] Um It's, </s><s>[INST] it's really and so I [/INST] I've held on to some of those principles through my life as well. For sure. What </s><s>[INST] have been, you've [/INST] observed </s><s>[INST] suffering [/INST] darker aspects of human nature in your own personal </s><s>[INST] life. What has been [/INST] some of the darkest </s><s>[INST] moments in your life? Darkest times [/INST] in your life? Is there something </s><s>[INST] that you went through [/INST] and then </s><s>[INST] perhaps you carry it through your work? [/INST] Yeah, </s><s>[INST] probably one of the [/INST] darkest moments was an </s><s>[INST] experience that I had [/INST] again in my </s><s>[INST] early twenties [/INST] and I was </s><s>[INST] living in southern California and I, you know, the pacific coast highway that [/INST] goes north and south along </s><s>[INST] the beach and there's that [/INST] little </s><s>[INST] concrete [/INST] path that people </s><s>[INST] jog and ride their bikes [/INST] and I was riding my bike on the, on the PCH. </s><s>[INST] And um [/INST] I was coming up to a corner on it and I </s><s>[INST] heard this tremendous [/INST] crash </s><s>[INST] and it [/INST] was really loud and I came across the corner around the corner </s><s>[INST] and it wasn't a car [/INST] accident, Car </s><s>[INST] crash, it was a [/INST] multiple, multiple vehicle </s><s>[INST] crash. And [/INST] what had happened is that um a </s><s>[INST] Volvo had [/INST] hit another </s><s>[INST] car and then when it [/INST] hit it, it went over the top of </s><s>[INST] the car [/INST] and hit </s><s>[INST] a Volkswagen van and it peeled [/INST] away the top of the Volkswagen van when it hit it and then landed. </s> |
<s>[INST] so made made total sense and in terms of negotiations and the way things were communicated. It it seemed to Stalin that for sure that they would remain at least for a while, peaceful collaborators and that and everybody, everybody because of that in the soviet union believed that it was a huge shock when Kiev was invaded and you hear echoes of that want to travel to Ukraine, sort of the shock of the invasion. It's not just the invasion on one particular border, but the invasion of the capitol city and just like holy sh it especially at that time when you thought World War One, you realize that that was the war to end all wars, you would never have this kind of war and holy ship this this person is mad enough to try to take on this monster in the soviet union. Uh, so it's not no longer going to be a war of hundreds of thousands dead. It will be a war of tens of millions dead. And yeah, but that like, you know, that's a very large scale kind of lie. But I'm sure there's in politics and geopolitics that kind of lying happening all the time. Uh, and a lot of people pay financially and with their lives for that kind of lying. But in our personal lives, I don't know how often we uh, maybe we, [/INST] I think people do, I mean like think of spouses cheating on their partners, right? And then like having to lie. Like, where were you last night </s><s>[INST] stuff stuff. Yeah. [/INST] Like that's, I think, you know, I mean, unfortunately it happens all the time, right? So </s><s>[INST] we're having like multiple families. That one is great when, when each family doesn't know the other about the other one and like maintaining that life, there's probably a sense of excitement about that too or [/INST] seems unnecessary. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but well, [/INST] just lying, like, like, you know, the truth finds a way of coming out, you know? </s><s>[INST] But that's the thrill. [/INST] Yeah, perhaps. Yeah. People, I mean, you know, that's that's why I think actually like poker, what's so interesting about poker is most of the best players. I know they're always exceptions. You know, they're always bad eggs. But actually poker players are very honest. People, I would say they are more honest than the average. You know, if you're just a random random population sample because a, you know, I think, you know, humans like to have that most people like to have some kind of mysterious, you know, an opportunity to do something like a little edgy. So we get to sort of scratch that itch of being edgy at the poker table where it's like, it's part of the game, everyone knows everyone knows what they're in for and that's allowed and you get to like, really get that out of your system. Um, and then also like poker players learned that, you know, I, you know, I would play in a huge game against some of my friends, even my partner Igor where we will be, you know, absolutely going at each other's throats, trying to draw blood in terms of winning each money off each other and like getting under each other's skin, winding each other up um doing the craftiest moves we can, but then once the game is done, the, you know, the winners and the losers will go off and get a drink together and have a fun time and like talk about it in this like weird academic way afterwards because that and that's why games are so great because you get to like live out our like this competitive urge that, you know, most people have, </s><s>[INST] what's it feel like to [/INST] lose. Like </s><s>[INST] we talked about bluffing when it worked out. What about when you, when you go broke? [/INST] So like in a game, I'm never gone broke </s><s>[INST] for life [/INST] for life. I know plenty of people who have um I don't think it would mind me saying he went, you know, he went broke once in a while, you know, early on when we were together. </s><s>[INST] I feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke. [/INST] Yeah, I </s><s>[INST] some sense, [/INST] right? I mean, I'm happy, I've sort of lived through it vicariously through him when he did it at the time, but what is it like to lose, What it depends. So it depends on the amount, it depends what percentage of your net worth you've just lost. Um It depends on your brain chemistry really, you know, varies from person to person. </s><s>[INST] Very cold calculating way of thinking about this. So it depends what percentage, but [/INST] it really does. </s><s>[INST] Right? Yes, [/INST] that's, I mean, that's another thing poker trains you to do. You see you see everything in percentages, or you see everything in like ri or expected our lease or cost benefit, etcetera, you know, So, um that's I one of the things I've tried to do is calibrate the strength of my emotional response to the, to the win or loss that I've received because it's it's no good if you like, you know, you have a huge emotional dramatic response to a tiny loss. Um or on the flip side, you have a huge win and you're so dead inside that you don't even feel it. Well, that's, you know, that's a shame. I want my emotions to calibrate with reality as much as possible. Um So yeah, what's it like to lose? I mean, I've had times where I've lost, you know, busted out of a tournament I thought I was going to win in is, you know, especially if I got really unlucky or um or I make a dumb play where I've gone away and like, you know, kicked, kicked the wall punched the wall and like nearly broke my hand one time, like, um I'm a lot less competitive than I used to be. Like, I was like, pathologically competitive in my like, late teens, early twenties, I just had to win at everything. Um and I think that sort of slowly waned as I've gotten older, </s> |
<s>[INST] that global warming will likely or very likely lead to the extinction of mankind at the end [/INST] of the times. And that's scary in a very, very clear way because look, if this really is true, if global warming is this meter hurtling towards earth and we're going to be destroyed in 12 years or whatever the number is today, then clearly we should care about nothing else. We should just be focusing on making sure that that asteroid, we should send up Bruce Willis and get this done with. But that's not the way it is. This is not actually what the UN climate panel tells us or anything else. So I think it's not so much about arcing against the people who are saying it's a hoax. That's not really where I am. I don't think that's where Andy or really where the conversation is. But it is a question of sort of pulling people back from this end of the world conversation because it really skews our way that we think about problems. Also, if you really think this is the end of time and you only have 12 years, nothing that can only work in 13 years can be considered. And the reality of most of what we're talking about in climate and certainly our vulnerability, certainly our energy system is going to be half to a full century. And so when you talk to people and say, well, but we're really going to go a lot more renewable in the next half century, they look at you like, but that's what, 38 years too late. And I get that. So I think in your question, what I'm trying to do, and I would imagine that's true for you as well, is to try to pull people away from this precipice and this end of the world and then open it up. And I think Andy did that really well by saying, look, there are so many different sub conversations and we need to have all of them and we need to be respectful of some of these are right in the sort of standard media kind of way, but some of them are very, very wrong and actually means that we end up doing much less good, both on climate, but also on all the other problems the world faces. All the other. Oh yeah. And it just empowers people too. Those who believe this then just sit back, even in Adam McKay's movie, the don't look up movie, there was that sort of nihilist crowd for those who've seen it who just say, you know, fuck this. And a lot of people have that approach when something's too big and it just paralyzes you as opposed to giving you these action points. And the other thing is I hate it when economists are right about stuff like they're these phrases. Like I never knew the words path dependency until probably 10 years ago in my reporting. And it basically says you're in a system, the things around you, how we pass laws, the brokenness of the Senate, you know, that those are, we don't have a climate crisis in America. We have a decision crisis as it comes to how the government works. It doesn't work. So, but those big features of our landscape are, it's path dependency. When you screw in a light bulb, even if it's an LED light bulb, it's going into a 113, 120 year old fixture because, and actually that fixture is almost designed. If you look at like 19th century gas fixtures, they had the screw in thing. So we're like on this long path dependencies when it comes to energy and stuff like that, that you don't just quit magically transition a car fleet. A car built today will last 40 years. It'll end up in Mexico sold on a used car, et cetera, et cetera. And so this, there is no quick fix, even if we're true that where things are coming to an end in 13 years, </s><s>[INST] or 12 years, or eight years. So most people don't believe that climate change is a hoax. So they believe that there is an increase. There's a global warming of a few degrees in the next century. And then maybe debate about what the number of the degrees is. And do most people believe that it's human caused at this time in this history of discussion of climate change? So is that the [/INST] center still? Is there still debate on this? Yale University, the climate communication group there for like 13 years has done this six Americas study where they've charted pretty carefully and ways that I really find useful what people believe. And we could talk about the word belief in the context of science too, but, and they've identified kind of six kinds of us, there's from dismissive to alarmed and with lots of bubbles in between. I think some of those bubbles in between are mostly disengaged people that don't really deal with the issue. And they've shown a drift for sure. There's much more majority now at the alarmed or engaged bubbles than just the dismissive bubble. There's a durable, like with vaccination and lots of other issues, there's a durable never anything belief group. But on the reality that humans are contributing to climate change, most Americans when you ask them, and it also depends on how you write your survey. I think there's a component. I think there's a component. I mean, when you ask around, I mean, if you hear the story from the media of 20 years, of course, that's what you will believe and it also happens to be true. That is what the sign... I think, it's perhaps worth saying, and it's a little depressing that you always have to say, but I think it's worth saying that I think we both really do have except the climate panel science and, there's absolutely global warming, it is an issue and it's probably just worthwhile to get it out of the way. It's an issue. Do you accept? Oh, yeah. </s> |
<s>[INST] Yeah. And the people involved with the smell. So like somehow it's all tied in together with his family and people close to you or even if it's just chefs, there's something about the personality of of the human involved in making the food that kind of sticks with you in the memory. And for me, I I recently did a 72 hour fast and there's a kind of sadness after you eat that. It's over. I think the most delicious part was the I went to the grocery store and just actually walking around and looking at food with like everything looks delicious, even like the crappiest stuff look delicious and I missed that. I really enjoyed that anticipation. And then I picked out the meal, I went home and I cooked it and the whole thing took, I don't know, maybe 23 hours, like the whole process and that was the most delicious part and the first taste of course, and then after, after it was over there was a bit of a sadness because the partner remember is the build up the anticipation and then once you eat it's over, we kind of focus on the destination, but it's the whole journey, the whole, like even if you go to a restaurant, it's the conversations leading up to the meal and the first taste of the meal, that's where the joy is. And if you get to watch the making of that meal, that's incredible. That's where the smell, the visual how the ingredients come together, especially as we were looking over the fire, Like watching it, the fire play with the raw meat and you know, over time bring out the colors, bring out the, I don't know, like you can visually associate the flavor, you know how it becomes uh a little bit of burnt on the outside. You know, it has the crispiness to, it starts to gain that crispness and immediately your past memories of the delicious crispy nous of various elusive eaten. There's somehow mapped into your immediately, you start to taste it visually. I don't know. Yeah, that experience is magical. It's and of course maybe it's the Russian thing, but I'm almost like saddened when it's over. [/INST] I think fasting is gaining in popularity because we're having to relearn the importance of being hungry in anticipation and delight. We have such a fear of hunger. Um And that's really a functional and evolution right? But we have this deep fear of hunger. And part of the great american experience has been that we don't have to be afraid of hunger at all because there's food everywhere and it's really cheap in all that abundance. We've lost this edge of hunger and we don't let ourselves get hungry. And that's one thing that I learned in part of my journey as a cook and chef has been you know moving abroad was the first time when I lived out of the U. S. Was the first time that I regularly experienced hunger because the time between meals was really long and that was just what everybody did. And so I was hungry for two hours before lunch. And that was the first time in my life that there hadn't just been readily available snacks. So I wonder if the intermittent fasting and part of the popularity around it. It I'm sure there's all these amazing metabolic things that are happening. But also people might also feel better because they're really anticipating and enjoying food. And then if you look at the feelings of fullness there's a really interesting thing that happens when you cook and your sense of fullness. Which is if you cook and you're hungry The experience of being around the food smelling it, touching it, sampling it. You'll take your hunger down by 40%. And this is my own observation. But as I mean, we've all had the experience of cooking thanksgiving. And the cook never kind of wants to eat that much thanksgiving. That's an extreme experience. But when you really dive in and you're cooking for a few hours and you're smelling and smelling and smelling, it totally changes your threshold of society and fullness because of other sensory things that are happening. And for those of us looking to, you know, to maintain weight and something to consider in this is that cooking is also part of the part of what your appetite when you're hungry, What are you hungry for? Right, So we tend to think about calories, but when you're hungry, you might also be hungrier for a wider range of things and it might be smells, it might be stopping. There's other elements. And that's something I think as a cook that it's, it's powerful to explore and be with and observe how your hunger changes when you're cooking? </s><s>[INST] Well, let me ask the romantic question. When did you first fall in love with cooking? [/INST] Me falling in love with cooking was about a solving a problem in my family. And it had to do with my mom feeling very anxious about uh cooking and overwhelmed frequently when it came to meals. And I'm naturally very good at juggling a lot of things and it was just something I could dive in and help and help my dad who's very and very, very close to. So it was a very, it was a very functional role where I would see this kind of crescendo of anxiety around meal times as a kid and would be able to dive in and and solve things. And I also loved women who cooked, like my father's mother is a great cook, she was remember her telling me as a kid, you know, I was asking her about church and why she went to church and she's like, I mostly go to church because I get to cook for the, for the, you know, potlucks and so there was, there was an openness around that, that, but she just loved to cook for people and it was, and there was a real tenderness and expression of that love. So seeing women in my life who had this like, real tenderness and I love that they shared through food and then also being able in my own home to kind of pitch in and add value and help my mom and dad was really powerful for me because I felt like I had a superpower, you know, I felt like, oh man, I just made this stressful thing go away. Um that was huge. </s> |
<s>[INST] but the Federated, I don't think it's a good uh I think it requires genius that requires skill requires great design to come up with a way to, you know, there's a parade. Oh front here trade the trade. There's a right way to hit that trade off. And I honestly think there's the UX, the experience should be centralized, should be designed by the company but the data and like a lot of stuff that could be used to violate your basic rights should be owned by the individual. And I think there's a way to decouple those that create an incredible experience to where you go there and you enjoy the market where you can share your data and have complete control over it and always have I mean there's a lot of basic UX ideas like just as an example, I think there should always be in everything. You design a one button that's always there that says forget I ever existed delete everything you know about me and maybe it's maybe it's one button you click and it asks, are you sure? And you have to be able to say yes, like that's a feature that's fundamental to a good social network I believe like that. Currently social networks first of all Muslims don't allow you to do that. They don't make it transparent how much data they had, who they shared it with and they also make it exceptionally difficult to delete accounts. So like that's a very basic starting point but that that having that button means that you have control but that's step one of the control, there's a transparency of knowing exactly when what data is being shared about you. How much data is already being recorded about you all that is transparency. And I believe in the I believe that's a really good business model because when there's transparency and control, people would be willing to give over a lot more data as long as they know what they're given over, as long as they know what they can delete. [/INST] Yeah I guess maybe you're more optimistic about people carrying. I feel like not so few people actually care about their privacy and freedom. I've just watched everybody give it up you know? Um But we'll see I guess just to to bookend that I think we're at this moment we're obviously the centralized platforms are just so much easier and better to use and to to strike it out and and you know adventure out and use a uh like a Federated instance or something. Even like key base which is kind of like a cool encrypted way to like have group chats. Um It just requires like a lot of your time and a lot of people don't have that time. But I will say one thing like I do think there's this future where um we do go into more of this like uh it's called a tribal model or tribes um which is this social environment being built on top of lightning um by uh an app called Sphinx. And the idea is like kind of like it's like a decentralized slack, like you have your slack instance which has like a bunch of people in the community and you have different ways to um message each other and it's all encrypted and then it has like plug ins for like things like gypsy instead of zoom. So like an open source encrypted video messenger. It has ways to like plug in the content you want to get from like uh like different um platforms that you follow like podcast, things like that. And again it allows you to pay those people directly in a censorship resistant private way. So it's really nice to connect to the lighting network. Yeah, so it's all sort of built on lightning. But the idea you can think about it is like you're slowly starting to build up the idea of a wee chat but with freedom principals because right now we chat like the king of convenience and comfort. But of course it's feeding all that data to the Big Brother in the surveillance state um and then we have like our own versions over here in America that are not quite as convenient or amazing, but like we, we give up slightly less, you know, privacy and freedom. But this thing has a lot of promising features to it. It's worth checking out. It's very early days, like it feels like, I mean I was pretty young but it feels like the 90s in the Internet, like it has that feeling. Yeah, you know, it's rough around the edges but you can feel the magic. It's pretty cool. I'm </s><s>[INST] very much like with steve jobs on this, I think the founding principles are exceptionally important. But at the end of the day, the design of how sleek it is, how easy it is to use and and that, that's not just like pretty icing on the cake. That is the icing is the cake because like how easy it is to use, how natural it is. It's a trojan horse thing, like you don't get, it has to be pretty and shiny. It has to have, it has to fundamentally connected the basics of human nature, which is what is pleasant to use, what feels good to use. You have to, you know, to to trick people into eating a broccoli, you have to put like delicious whatever PHP [/INST] is a kind of a pain to use, right, you want privacy signals are way better. Yeah, I mean, and it's way better than it was five years ago and it's not quite as good as like not quite as seamless, right? It's like a WhatsApp yet, but it's almost there and they were able to do it and you're going to see that with Bitcoin wallets as well. I mean they're almost there. They're like if you use like a moon wallet is like I mean it's so cool looking and it's so seamless and they've spent so many hours thinking about your experience, We are getting there. Whereas 10 years ago it's like impossible to use </s> |
<s>[INST] I'm excited to be working with cash app to support one of my favorite organizations called 1st. Best known for their first robotics and lego competitions. They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students in over 110 countries and have a perfect rating and charity navigator. Which means that donated money is used to maximum effectiveness. When you get cash up from the app store, google play and use code lex podcast you'll get $10 and cash up will also donate $10 to First, which again is an organization that I've personally seen, inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world. And now here's my conversation with Jim Keller. What are the differences and similarities between the human brain and a computer with the microprocessor as core? Let's start with the philosophical question perhaps. [/INST] Well since people don't actually understand how human brains work, I think that's true, I think that's true. So it's hard to compare them. Computers are you know there's really two things, there's memory and there's computation right? And to date almost all computer architecture is our global memory which is a thing, right? And then computation where you pull data and you do relatively simple operations on it and write data back. </s><s>[INST] So it's decoupled in modern and modern computers and your you think in the human brain everything is a mesh a mess that's combined together. [/INST] What people observe is there's you know some number of layers of neurons which have local and global connections and information is stored in some distributed fashion. And people build things called neural networks in computers where the information is distributed in some kind of fashion, you know, there's the mathematics behind it. I don't know that the understanding that is super deep. The computations we run on those are straightforward computations. I don't believe anybody has said a neuron does this computation. So today it's hard to compare them, I would say. </s><s>[INST] So let's get into the basics before we zoom back out. How do you build a computer from scratch? What is a microprocessor? What is the micro architecture? What's an instruction set architecture maybe even as far back as what is a transistor? [/INST] So the special charm of computer engineering is there is a relatively good understanding of abstraction layers. So down the bottom of atoms and atoms get put together in materials like silicon or doped silicon or metal. And we build transistors on top of that. We build logic gates. Right. And then functional units like an adder of subtract er an instruction parsing unit and we assemble those into, you know processing elements. Modern computers are built out of You know, probably 10-20 locally, you know, organic processing elements or coherent processing elements. And then that runs computer programs. Right, So there's abstraction layers and then software, you know, there's an instruction set you run and then there's assembly language C C plus plus java javascript. You know, there's abstraction layers, you know, essentially from the atom to the data center. Right? So when you when you build a computer, you know, first there's a target like what's it for? Like how fast is it have to be? Which you know, today there's a whole bunch of metrics about what that is. And then in an organization of, you know, 1000 people who build a computer, there's lots of different disciplines that you have to operate on. Does that make sense? So </s><s>[INST] uh so there's a bunch of levels of abstraction of in an organization, I can tell. And in your own vision there's a lot of brilliance that comes in at every one of those layers. Some of it is science, some of it is engineering some of his art. What's the most uh If you could pick favorites, what's the most important? Your favorite layer on these layers of obstructions. Where does the magic enter this hierarchy? [/INST] Uh I don't really care. That's the fun, you know, I'm somewhat agnostic to that. So I would say for relatively long periods of time, instruction sets are stable. So the x 86 instruction set, the arm instruction set. </s><s>[INST] What's an instruction set? [/INST] So it says, how do you encode the basic operations load, store multiply add subtract conditional branch. You know, there aren't that many interesting instructions give you look at the program and it runs, You know, 90% of the execution is on 25 op codes, you know 25 instructions. And those are stable. </s><s>[INST] Right, what does it mean stable [/INST] Intel architecture has been around for 25 years. It works. It works. And that's because the basics, you know, or defined a long time ago right now. The way an old computer ran is you fetched instructions and you executed them in order. Do the load, do the add to the, compare The way a modern computer works is you fetch large numbers of instructions say 500 and then you find the dependency graph between the instructions and then you you execute in independent units, those little micro graphs. So a modern computer like people like to say computer should be simple and clean, but it turns out the market for simple, complete clean slow computers is zero, right? We don't sell any simple clean computers. Now you can there is how you build, it can be clean, but the computer people want to buy that's saying a phone or data center fetches a large number of instructions, computes the dependency graph and then execute it in a way that gets the right answers </s><s>[INST] and optimize that graph. Somehow [/INST] they run deeply auto order and then there's semantics around how memory ordering works and other things work. So the computer sort of has a bunch of bookkeeping tables, it says what orders to these operations, finishing or appear to finish in but to go fast you have to fetch a lot of instructions and find all the parallelism. Now there's a second kind of computer which we call GPS today and I call it the difference there's found parallelism like you have a program with a lot of dependent instructions. You fetch a bunch and then you go figure out the dependency graph and you issues instructions out of order. That's because you have one serial narrative to execute, which in fact is in can be done out of order. You call it a narrative. Yeah. So yeah, so humans thinking serial narrative. So read read a book right there. You know, there's a sentence after sentence after sentence and there's paragraphs. Now you could diagram that. Imagine you diagrammed it properly and you said which sentences could be read in anti order any order without changing the meaning. </s> |
<s>[INST] the following is a conversation with Jacko willing a retired U. S. Navy Seal co author of extreme ownership. The economy of leadership, discipline equals freedom and many other excellent books and he's the host of jocko podcast. Jackals spend 20 years in the seal teams. He was the commander of Seal team three's task unit bruiser that became the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq war. This conversation was intense and to the point we agreed to talk again probably many times and when I find very interesting, aside from the talk of leadership is the conversation about military tactics of specific battles in history. Quick mention of our sponsors lin owed indeed simply safe and ground news. Check them out in the description to support this podcast Since it's four July holiday in the United States. Let me say a few words about what this country, my country, the United States of America means to me first by way of background. I was born and raised in the soviet union just long enough to get a bit of the Russian soul, an appreciation of soviet, history, music, culture of wrestling and mathematics of engineering and philosophy, stoicism and humor, tragedies and triumphs of war and revolutions all in ways that are uniquely Russian I do happen to at times mentioned that I'm Russian, this is what I mean that I got a bit of that Russian soul but of course who I really am is an american. This country gave me the opportunity, the [/INST] freedom to become </s><s>[INST] and to be who I am, to stand as an individual. This seemingly simple freedom to be a sovereign human being in the face of all the beauty and cruelty of life is why I love this country. Much of life can be unfair, unjust, even tragic. But this is the country where if I'm clever enough or hard enough and just get lucky enough to have a chance to dream big and make my dream a reality. The United States welcomed me, my family and millions of immigrants throughout its history so that we can make something meaningful of ourselves To love to dream, to create, to find joy and meaning. It lets me be the weird kid I am who wears a suit talks about love and has a fascination with robots. I know some people these days have an aversion to pride and love for their country. I don't, I love America. I also love humanity. I believe these two patriotism and humanism are not in conflict, much like loving your family and loving your country are not in conflict. There are all manifestations of the human spirit longing to strive for a better world. I was born in Russian, but I believe I'll die an american. A proud american. Hopefully not too soon, but uh, life is short. Already had one hell off on journey. So I'm ready to go when it's time. As usual. I'll do a few minutes of ads now. No ads in the middle. I find those to be annoying as a listener. I think they get in the way of the conversation. I also do give you time stamps. I hope you don't skip because I try to make these interesting but if you do skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. This episode is sponsored by Leonard Lennox virtual machines. Any time I mention Lennox anywhere brings joy to my heart, lin owed is an awesome computer infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy and scale what applications you build faster and easier. This is both for small personal projects and huge systems. Both things I hope to be involved with in the future. It's lower cost than AWS but more important to me is the simplicity quality of the customer service with real humans. 24 73 65 as opposed to all the fake humans trying to pass the turing test on twitter. I honestly think computer infrastructure done well. Both customer service is of use the bugging, maintenance, understanding the pricing structure, all those things that's essential. I really like what Leonard is doing also is competition for AWS is very good. Competition is always good, especially in this space where more and more of our world is running on a computer infrastructure. The bloodline of our human civilization is becoming computation. So companies like Leonard are essential. The tagline is if it runs on Lenox, it runs on Linux node visit leno dot com slash lex and click on the create free of calm button to get started with $100 in free credit. That's leno dot com slash lex. This episode is also sponsored by indeed a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts have done for the teams have led in the past. They have tools like indeed instant match giving you quality candidates whose resumes and indeed fit your job description immediately. If doing ad reads was a job, I would not get hired by anybody. I'm terrible at this. I like these companies, I'm just not very good at emoting my passion for them. I'm not sure if emoting is award, I'm just going to keep running with it without looking it up. Hence why I would never get hired to do at Reese anyway. Right now, get a free $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post and indeed dot com slash lex get it at. Indeed dot com slash lex offer is valid through september 30th terms and conditions apply, join three million businesses that use indeed by going to indeed dot com slash lex. I've used it, I love it, check it out. You [/INST] might love it too. </s> |
<s>[INST] it was, it was worth it financially. Do you think is it possible that like basically the entirety of Earth will be like a computing surface Like this table will be doing computing, this hedgehog will be doing computing. Like everything really inefficient. Don't computing [/INST] will be a picture book called computer roni um computation. We turn everything into computing. Well most of the elements aren't very good for anything. Like you're not gonna make a computer out of iron, like you know silicon and carbon have like nice structures. You know, we'll see what you can do with the rest of </s><s>[INST] it that people [/INST] talk about, well maybe we can turn the Sun into computer but it's it's hydrogen and a little bit of helium. So </s><s>[INST] what I mean is more like actually just adding computers to everything. [/INST] Okay, you're converting all the mass of the universe into computer. No, </s><s>[INST] so not [/INST] using the ironic from the simulation point of view is like the simulator build mass to simulate. Like </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, yeah, so I mean, ultimately this is all heading towards the simulation. [/INST] Yeah, well, I think I might have told you this story. Tesla, they were deciding so they want to measure the current coming out of the battery and they decided between putting the resistor in there And putting a computer with a sensor in there and the computer was faster than the computer I worked on in 1982 and we chose the computer because it was cheaper than the resistor. So, so sure this hedgehog, you know, it cost $13 and we're gonna put a, you know, an ai that's as smart as you in there for five bucks. It will have one. Yeah. You know, so computers will be, you know, be everywhere. </s><s>[INST] I was hoping it wouldn't be smarter than me because [/INST] well everything's gonna be smarter than you. </s><s>[INST] But you're saying it's inefficient. I thought it's better to have a lot of dumb. [/INST] Well moore's law will slowly compact that </s><s>[INST] stuff, even the dumb things will be smarter than us. [/INST] The dumb things are gonna be smart. Are they going to be smart enough to talk to something that's really smart, you know, it's like, Well just remember like a big computer chip. You know, it's like an inch by an inch and you know 40 microns. Sick. It doesn't take very much very many items to make a high power computer. And 10,000 of them can fit in a shoebox. But you know, you have the cooling and power problems. But you know, people are working on that </s><s>[INST] but they still can't write a compelling poetry, music or uh understand what love is or have a fear of mortality. So so we're still winning. [/INST] Neither can most of humanity. So </s><s>[INST] well they can write books about it. So uh but but speaking about this uh this walk along the path of innovation towards uh the dumb things being smarter than humans. You are now the CTO Of uh can store two as of two months ago. They build hardware for deep learning. How do you build scalable and efficient? Deep learning. This is such a fascinating space. [/INST] Yeah. So it's interesting. So um up until recently I thought there was two kinds of computers. There's cereal computers that run like C. Programs and then there's parallel computers. So the way I think about it is, you know, parallel computers. You have given parallelism. Like GPS are great because you have a million pixels and modern Gpu s run a program on every pixel they call the shader program, right? So or like finite element analysis. You you build something, you know, you make this into a little tiny chunks to give each chunk to a computer. So you're giving all these chunks of parallelism like that. But most C programs you write this linear narrative and you have to make a go fast to make it go fast. You predict all the branches, all the data fetches, you run that more parallel but that's found parallelism. Um ai is I'm still trying to decide how fundamentalist is. It's a given parallelism problem but the way people describe the neural networks and then how they write them in pytorch makes graphs. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that might be fundamentally different than the GPU kind [/INST] of parallelism. Yeah, it might be because when you run the GPU program on all the pixels you're running, you know, it depends, you know, this group of pixels say it's background blue and it runs a really simple program. This pixel is you know, some patch of your face. So you have some really interesting shader program to give you an impression of translucency but the pixels themselves don't talk to each other. There's no graph. Right? So you do the image and then you do the next image and you the next image and you run eight million pixels. Eight million programs every time in modern Gpus have like 6000 thread engines in them. So you know, to get eight million pixels each one runs a program on 10 or 20 pixels and that's how that's how they work. There's no graph. </s><s>[INST] But you think graph might be a totally a new way to think about hardware. [/INST] So Roger Federer and I've been having this conversation about giving versus found parallelism and then the kind of walk as we got more transistors like, you know, computers way back. When did stuff on scale or data. Now we did on vector data. Famous vector machines. Now we're making computers that operate on matrices. Right. And then the category we said it was next was spatial. Like imagine you have so much data that you know, you want to do the computer on this data. And then when it's done it says send the results of this pile of data on some software on that. And it's better to to think about it. Especially then to move all the data to a central processor and do all the work. </s> |
<s>[INST] People just listening. It's a son. David's chest. It's just the hottest it attached is just kind of, [/INST] it sticks on. Yeah on one side you have an on button that you press the lights come on flashes four times. It's good to go it immediately syncs to your phone. And this one uh it's called a bio button, last name. And there's a there's another one that I have that I haven't tried yet. That does E. K. G. On your heart. This is mainly for doctors to monitor patients that go home after a heart attack or surgery. But that's medical grade FDA approved device. So there will be a day. In fact, it's already here that doctors are using these to get patients to go home And save a week in hospital. $2,000 at least for each patient. That's massive safe um savings for the hospital. But ultimately what I'm excited about is the future. That isn't that far off where everybody certainly in developed countries. Eventually these will cost a few cents and rechargeable. The only cost will be the software subscription that can be monitored constantly. And to give an idea what this is measuring me at 1000 times a second is um my vibrations as I speak, My orientation. It can already has told me this morning how I slept where I slept? What side I slept on. We've got sneezing, coughing, body temperature, heart rate, heart of other parameters of the heart. That would indicate heart health. These data are being used to now to predict sickness. So eventually we'll have just in the next year or so the ability to predict whether something or diagnose whether something is pneumonia or just a rhinovirus that can be treated or not. This is really going to not just revolutionized medicine but I think extend lives dramatically. Because if I have, if I'm going to have a heart attack next week and that's possible. This device should know that. And I'll be in hospital before I even have it. </s><s>[INST] Maybe you can talk a little bit about inside tracker because I saw that there's some really cool things in there. Like it actually. So uh maybe you can talk about I guess that you're collecting blood to give it the data. So and it has like basic recommendations on how to improve your life. So we're not just talking about diseases, right? Like anticipating having a particular disease. But it's almost like guiding your trajectory to life how to whether it's extend your your life or just live a more fulfilling. Like improve the quality of life. I suppose this is the right way to say it. What? How does inside track or work? What the heck is because I thought there is also pretty cool. What is it? I guess it's something other people can use. You [/INST] can definitely use it. Uh You can sign up its consumer </s><s>[INST] tech companies, consumer facing company [/INST] it is uh and I also want to democratize the ability to just take a mouth swab. Eventually we don't need to have a blood test necessarily. But for now it's a blood test. And and you go to a lab corps request in the US. It's also available overseas. You can upload your own data for a minimal cost and get the algorithms the ai in the background to take that data plot where you are against others in your age group in terms of health and longevity at by your age. They call it the inner age but also it provides recommendations. And this isn't just a bunch of bs. It sounds like it might be to say I'll go eat this or go to that restaurant and order that. But it's actually based on they basically this company has entered hundreds now it would be thousands of scientific papers into their database and hundreds of thousands of human data points. And they have tens of thousands of individuals that have been tracked over time and anonymously that data is used to say what works and what doesn't if you eat that what works if you take that supplement what works. And I was a co author on a paper that showed that the recommendations for food and supplements um Was better than the leading drug for type two diabetes. </s><s>[INST] That's so cool. The idea that you can connect like skipping the human having to do this work. You can connect the scientific papers almost like meta analysis of the science connected to the individual data. And then based on that sort of connect your data to whatever the proper group is within whatever the scientific paper is. To make the suggestion of how how like how that work applies to your life and that ultimately maps to like a recommendation what you should do with your life. Like it all like this giant system that ultimately recommends. You should drink more coffee or less [/INST] right? And and we'll have the genome in there as well. You can upload that. Uh so these programs will know us way better than we do and our doctors as well. The idea of going to a doctor once a year for an annual checkup and having you know, males get a finger up their button. Uh you know you cough that that to me is a joke. That's medieval medicine and that's very soon going to be seen as medieval. </s> |
<s>[INST] And there's probably fascinating beautiful tensions between that and sort of the engineers. Oh, that's cool, sort of the, you know, developing the what exactly. And which makes it an extra hard job. I'm sure. [/INST] Exactly. </s><s>[INST] Can I ask a sort of a little bit of a personal question. The one sub field of marketing mentioned comms and pr how do [/INST] I I can hear your struggle in your in your sy </s><s>[INST] um why? Or do the comms and pr folks sometimes kill the heart and soul of of of the magic that makes a company or is that is that wrong to say, [/INST] give me an example. </s><s>[INST] I will say the spirit of the example, which is it feels like often the jobs of of communications is to provide caution. It almost it almost works together with legal to say, yeah, we probably should not say this. We're proud. Let's be careful. Let's be careful. Now, that makes sense. Except in this modern world authenticity uh, is extremely valuable and revealing the beauty that is in the engineering. The beauty of the the ideas, the chaos of the ideas, I think requires throwing caution to the wind to some degree. [/INST] I agree. </s><s>[INST] And I just find that, I mean, it's really so to to push back on myself. I think it's an extremely difficult job because people hold you responsible if you're doing communications [/INST] when </s><s>[INST] you take risks. Um, uh, and especially when they fail. So, like the it's it's a difficult job. So I understand why people become cautious, but to me, communications is about taking big risks and throwing caution to the wind at its best because your job is to communicate in the long term communicate the genius, the joy, the genius of the product. And that sometimes is attention with caution. Sorry. So [/INST] I I </s><s>[INST] because I've gotten a chance to meet a lot of very interesting people and interesting engineering teams and so on. I look at what they're doing, and I look at what's being communicated, and it's just there's a mismatch, because the communication is a lot more boring. It's like there's something very like, just straight up boring about the way they're communicating because of caution. Okay, you [/INST] have just teed me up for another diatribe. Okay, I'm going to get on my I'm going to get on my podium here. Yes, please. It all comes out of the leader. If the leader doesn't know how to story tell, or the leader doesn't know how to do bold storytelling, then you get even more conservatism from the pr and communications folks, because they're always so if you have a not a bold leader, they they're always going to be a filter, right there. Always gonna try to smooth things out and take off the rough edges and try. So they're gonna be even more if you have a conservative messaging leader, you're gonna have even more conservative communications department. Why? Because they want to keep their jobs, </s><s>[INST] okay, [/INST] It's really simple. They got to keep their jobs. If they say one wrong thing, it could be the end of it. So, if you have very conservative leader, they're going to be even more conservative. If you have a bold leader, there will be oh, they'll always take a little more conservative bet, but you're still gonna have bold communications. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's brilliant. [/INST] Okay, so it starts with the leader now that said when you you you think about the messages and the joy and revealing things right? Many of these leaders don't tell great stories. So what we do is future shape our investment confirm is we take those scientists all of and the great minds and everything and what do we surround them with marketing, communication people and storytellers to give them the confidence to tell a much broader story about the impacts of what they're creating and how big the global change can be with those technologies because usually they don't those leaders who created those technologies, they don't really know how to communicate really well and they don't feel very comfortable in how they speak. </s><s>[INST] So it's interesting because stories, I'm a huge fan stories. [/INST] Have you ever read the book </s><s>[INST] story by [/INST] Robert McKee? You should read this and this is what I read when it's 26 story by robert Mckee. And it's a book all about the waste, do script writing the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy and how it's been shown over Millennia, how these stories are done. It's a fascinating thing and it gives you an insight too. And it's it's written for, you know, obviously Hollywood and and and and movies and things like that. But it's incredibly useful for what we do. Um, as designers and engineers and technology leaders, </s><s>[INST] there's some aspect in this modern day where you know that this podcast and so on. The um what I love is the humans behind the story too. So some part of the story is that human beings. Um, so humor, drama, heartbreak, hope, [/INST] emotions, </s><s>[INST] emotions, that's not just about a painting, a beautiful story that's flawless, it's [/INST] vulnerability, </s> |
<s>[INST] We may come up with an even better name, but. [/INST] It's kind of like the real AI starting point for your AGI, but a starting point for your AGI. It's like true better because true has like, you can be true hearted, right? You can be true to your girlfriend. So true has true has a number and it also has logic in it, right? Because logic is a key point. I like it. Yeah. So, yeah, with the true AGI system, we're sticking with the same basic architecture, but we're trying to build on what we've learned. One thing we've learned is that, you know, we need type checking among dependent types to be much faster and among probabilistic dependent types to be much faster. So as it is now, you can have complex types on the nodes and links, but if you want to put like, if you want types to be first class citizens so that you can have the types can be variables and then you do type checking among complex, higher order types, you can do that in the system now. It's very slow. This is stuff like is done in cutting-edge program languages like Agda or something, these obscure research languages. On the other hand, we've been doing a lot, tying together deep neural nets with symbolic learning. So we did a project for Cisco, for example, which was on, this was street scene analysis, but they had deep neural models for a bunch of cameras watching street scenes, but they trained a different model for each camera because they couldn't get the transfer learning to work between camera A and camera B. So we took what came out of all the deep neural models for the different cameras. We fed it into an OpenCog symbolic representation. Then we did some pattern mining and some reasoning on what came out of all the different cameras within the symbolic graph. And that worked well for that application. I mean, Hugo Latapie from Cisco gave a talk, touching on that at last year's AGI conference. It was in Shenzhen. On the other hand, we learned from there, it was kind of clunky to get the deep neural models to work well with the symbolic system because we were using Torch and Torch keeps a sort of state computation graph, but you needed like real time access to that computation graph within our hypergraph. And then we certainly did it. Alexei Polipov who leads our St. Petersburg team wrote a great paper on cognitive modules in OpenCog explaining sort of how do you deal with the Torch compute graph inside OpenCog. But in the end, we realized like that just hadn't been one of our design thoughts when we built OpenCog, right? So between wanting really fast dependent type checking and wanting much more efficient inner operation between the computation graphs of deep neural net frameworks and OpenCog's hypergraph, and adding on top of that, wanting to more effectively run an OpenCog hypergraph distributed across RAM and 10,000 machines, which is, we're doing dozens of machines now, but it's just not, we didn't architect it with that sort of modern scalability in mind. So these performance requirements are what have driven us to want to re-architect the base. But the core AGI paradigm doesn't really change. Like the mathematics is the same. It's just, we can't scale to the level that we want in terms of distributed processing or speed of various kinds of processing with the current infrastructure that was built in the phase 2001 to 2008, which is hardly shocking, right? </s><s>[INST] Well, I mean, the three things you mentioned are really interesting. So what do you think about in terms of interoperability communicating with computational graph of neural networks? What do you think about the representations [/INST] that neural networks form? Um, they're bad, but there's many ways that you could deal with that. So I've been wrestling with this a lot in some work on unsupervised grammar induction. And I have a simple paper on that that I'll give at the next AGI conference, </s><s>[INST] the online portion of which is next week, actually. [/INST] What is grammar induction? So this isn't AGI either, but it's sort of on the verge between narrow AI and AGI or something. Unsupervised grammar induction is the problem. Throw your AI system, a huge body of text, and have it learn the grammar of the language that produced that text. So you're not giving it labeled examples. So you're not giving it like a thousand sentences where the parses were marked up by graduate students. So it's just got to infer the grammar from the text. It's like the Rosetta Stone, but worse, right? Because you only have the one language, right? And you have to figure out what is the grammar. So that's not really AGI because, I mean, the way a human learns language is not that, right? I mean, we learn from language that's used in context. So it's a social embodied thing. We see how a given sentence is grounded in observation. </s><s>[INST] There's an interactive element, I guess. [/INST] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. On the other hand, so I'm more interested in that. I'm more interested in making an AGI system learn language from its social and embodied experience. On the other hand, that's also more of a pain to do. And that would lead us into Hanson Robotics and their robotics work I've known, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. But just as an intellectual exercise, as a learning exercise, trying to learn grammar from a corpus is very, very interesting, right? And that's been a field in AI for a long time. No one can do it very well. So we've been looking at transformer neural networks and tree transformers, which are amazing. These came out of Google Brain, actually. And actually on that team was Lucas Kaiser, who used to work for me and won the period 2005 through eight or something. So it's been fun to see my former sort of AGI employees disperse and do all these amazing things. Way too many sucked into Google, actually. Well, yeah, anyway. We'll talk about that, too. Lucas Kaiser and a bunch of these guys, they create transformer networks, that classic paper like attention is all you need and all these things following on from that. So we're looking at transformer networks and like these are able to, I mean, this is what underlies GPT-2 and GPT-3 and so on, which are very, very cool and have absolutely no cognitive understanding of any of the texts we're looking at. Like they're very intelligent idiots, right? </s> |
<s>[INST] So do you think it's possible that Russia takes the south of Ukraine? It takes. Um, so starting from Maria po the Hirsen region [/INST] all the way to Odessa, </s><s>[INST] all the way to Odessa [/INST] and into into Moldova. I believe all of that will happen before the fall, </s><s>[INST] fall of this year, [/INST] fall of this year, Before winter hits europe, NATO wants Germany needs to be able to have sanctions lifted. So they can tap into Russian power, there's no way they can have those sanctions lifted unless Russia wins. And Russia also knows that all of europe, all of NATO is the true, the true people feeling the pain of the war outside of Ukraine are the NATO countries because they're so heavily reliant on Russia. And as they have supported american sanctions against Russia. Their people feel the pain economically there, people feel the pain, what are they going to do in the winter? Because without Russian gas there there people are gonna freeze to </s><s>[INST] death. Ukrainian people, [/INST] people all over NATO Ukraine, everybody knows Ukraine's at risk. Everybody knows Ukrainians are dying. The game of war isn't played </s><s>[INST] just [/INST] it is even played majority of lee by the people who are fighting. The game of war is played by everyone else. It's an economic game, it's not a military game. </s><s>[INST] The flow of resources and energy attention. [/INST] Exactly right. </s><s>[INST] I was on the front in the Kherson region to this very area that you're referring to and I spoke to a lot of people and those, the morale is incredibly high and I don't think the people in that region, soldiers, volunteer soldiers, civilians are going to give up that land without dying. [/INST] I agree with you. I </s><s>[INST] mean, in order to take Odessa would require huge amount of our artillery and slaughter of civilians, essentially, [/INST] they're not going to use artillery and Odessa because Odessa is too important to Russian culture. Um it's gonna be even uglier than that. It's going to be clearing up streets, clearing of buildings, person by person, Troop by troop. It'll be a lot like what it was in Markel </s><s>[INST] just shooting at civilians [/INST] because they can't afford to just do bombing raids because they're gonna destroy cultural uh significant architecture that's just too important to the Russian culture and that's gonna demoralize their own Russian people. </s><s>[INST] I have to do a lot of thinking to try to understand what I even feel, I don't know. But in terms of information, the thing that the soldiers are saying that the Russian soldiers are saying the thing the Russian soldiers really believe is that they're freeing their liberating the Ukrainian people from nazis. [/INST] Mhm. </s><s>[INST] And they believe this because I visited Ukraine, I spoke to over 100 probably a couple 100 Ukrainian people from different walks of life. It feels like the Russian soldiers at least under a cloud of propaganda. They're not operating on a clear view of the whole world and given all that, I just don't see Russia taking the south without committing war crimes. And if Vladimir Putin is aware of what's happening in terms of the treatment of civilians, I don't see him pushing forward all the way to take the south because that's not going to be um effective strategy for him to win the hearts and minds of these people. [/INST] Autocracies don't need to win hearts and minds. That's a staunchly democratic point of view. Hearts and minds mean very little to people who understand core basic needs and uh and true power. You don't see xi Jinping worrying about hearts and minds in china. You don't see you don't see it in north Korea. You don't see it in in Congo, you don't see it in most of the world. Hearts and minds are a luxury. In reality. What people need is food, water, power. They need income to be able to secure a lifestyle. It's it is absolutely sad. I am not in any way shape or form saying that my assessment on this is, is enriching or enlightening or, or hopeful, it's just in fact, it's just calculate herbal empirical evidence. If Putin loses in Ukraine, the losses, the influential losses, the economic losses, the lives lost, the power lost is too great. So it is better for him to push and push and push through war crimes through everything else. War crimes are something defined by the international court system. The international court system has Russia as part of its board and the international court system is largely powerless out when it comes to enforcing its own outcomes. So the real risk gain scenario here for for Russia is is is significantly in favor of gain over risk. The other thing that I think is important to talk about is we everybody is trapped in the middle of a gigantic information war. Yes, there's battlefield bullets and cannons and tanks, but there's also a massive informational war. The same narrative that you see these ground troops in Ukraine, these Russian ground troops in Ukraine believing they're clearing the land of nazis. That information is being fed to them from their own home country. I don't know why people seem to think that the information that they're reading in english is any more or less true. The every piece of news coming out of the west, Every piece of information coming out in the english language is also a giant narrative being shared intentionally to try to undermine the more the morale and the faithfulness of English speaking Russians, which somebody somewhere knows exactly how many of those there are. So we have to recognize that we're not getting true information from other side because there is a strategic value in making sure that there is just the right amount of mis or disinformation out there. Not because someone's trying to lie to americans, but because someone is trying to influence the way english speaking Russians think, and in that world that's exactly why you see so many news articles cited two anonymous sources, Government officials who do not want to be named. There's no nothing that links back responsibility there, right? There's nothing that can go to court there. But that's the information still gets released and that's that's enough to make Ukrainians believe that the United States is going to help them or that the West is gonna help them. It's enough to make Russians think that that they're going to lose and maybe they should just, they should just give up now and leave from the battlefield now. We have to understand we are in the middle of a giant information war. </s> |
<s>[INST] But deep inside your own relationship with effective altruism was um I mean it had nothing to with the publicity that did, did you see yourself? How did the publicity connect with it? [/INST] Yeah, I mean that's kind of what I'm saying is I think the publicity came like several years after afterwards. I mean at the early stage when we set up giving what we can, it was really just Every person we get to pledge 10% is you know, something like $100,000 over their lifetime. That's huge. And so it was just, we had started with 23 members, heavily single person was just this like kind of huge accomplishment. And at the time I just really thought, you know, maybe over time we'll have 100 members and they'll be like amazing. Whereas now we have, you know over 4000 and $1.5 billion pledged. That's just unimaginable to me at the time when I was uh first kind of getting this, you know, getting this stuff off the ground. </s><s>[INST] So can we talk about poverty and the biggest problems that you think in the near term effective altruism can can attack and each one, so poverty obviously is a huge one. [/INST] Yeah, </s><s>[INST] how can we help? [/INST] Yeah, so poverty, absolutely huge problem. 700 million people in extreme poverty living in less than $2 per day where that's What that means is what $2 would buy in the us. So think about that. It's like some rice, maybe some beans. It's very, you know, really not much. Um and at the same time we can do an enormous amount to improve the lives of people in extreme poverty. So the things that we tend to focus on uh interventions in global health, um and that's for a couple of few reasons. One is like global health just has this amazing track record. Life expectancy globally is up 50 Relative to 60 or 70 years ago. Um we've ever advocated smallpox. That's which killed two million lives every year. Almost eradicated polio. Second is that we just have great data on what works when it comes to global health. So we just know that bed nets protect Children from prevent them from dying from malaria. And then the third is just um That's extremely cost effective. So it costs $5 to buy one bed net protects two Children for two years against malaria. If you spend about $3,000 on bed nets, then statistically speaking, you're going to save a child's life. Um and there are other interventions to and so given people in such suffering and we have this opportunity to, you know, do such huge good for such low cost Well, yeah, why not? </s><s>[INST] So the individuals for me today, if I wanted to tilikum poverty, how would I help? And I wanted to say, I think donating 10% of your income is a very interesting idea or some percentage or some setting a bar and sort of sticking to it. How did we then take the step towards uh, the effective part? So you've conveyed some notions, but who do you give them money too? [/INST] Uh yeah, So give well, this organization I mentioned is well, it makes charity recommendations and some of its top recommendations. So against malaria foundation is this organization that buys and distributes these insecticide treated bed nets and then it has a total of seven charities that it recommends very highly. </s><s>[INST] So that recommendation, is that is it almost like a star of approval or is there some metrics? So what what are, what are the ways that give well conveys that this is a great charity organization? [/INST] Yeah, So give, well, is looking at metrics and it's kind of compare charities ultimately in The number of lives that you can save or an equivalent benefit. So one of the charities that recommends is give directly, which simply just transfers cash um, to the poorest families where poor family will get a cash transfer over $1,000. And they kind of regard that as the baseline intervention because it's so simple and people, you know, they know what to do with how to benefit themselves. That's quite powerful </s><s>[INST] by the way. So before give, well before the effective altruism movement [/INST] was there? I imagine there's a huge amount </s><s>[INST] of corruption funny enough in charity organizations or misuse of money. So there was nothing I give up before that. [/INST] No, I mean, there was some, so I mean the charity corruption, I mean obviously there's some, I don't think it's um, huge issue that was just focusing on the wrong things. Um, prior to give. Well, there was some organizations like Charity Navigator, which were more aimed at worrying about corruption and so on. So they weren't saying these are the charities where you're going to do the most good instead. It was like, how good are the charities, financials? How good is its health are transparent and yeah, so that would be more useful for weeding out some of those worst charities. </s><s>[INST] So give, well, just taking a step further sort of in this 21st century [/INST] of </s><s>[INST] data, it's actually looking at the [/INST] effective part. Yeah. So it's like, you know, if you know the wire cutter for, if you want to buy a pair of headphones, they will just look at all the headphones like these. The best headphones you can buy. Um, that's the idea with gift. Well, </s><s>[INST] okay, so do you think there's a bar of what suffering is? And do you think one day we can eradicate suffering in our world? [/INST] Yeah. Amongst </s><s>[INST] humans. Let's talk humans for now. [/INST] Talk to humans. But in general. Um, yeah, actually, um, so there's a colleague of mine coined the term abolitionism for the idea that we should just be trying to abolish suffering. And in the long run, I mean, I don't expect any time soon, but I think we can. Um I think that would require, you know, quite changed, quite drastic changes to the way society is structured. And perhaps even um the, you know, the in fact even changes to human nature. But I do think that suffering whenever it occurs is bad and we should want it to knock her. </s> |
<s>[INST] in a fascinating small tangent. Hundreds, Thompson took his own life. So that's that seems like a deeply human thing. Suicide, yes. [/INST] Um that's a fascinating question itself. If you look at the the number of suicides per year, it's a shocking, shocking statistic that gets almost no recognition and yes, uniquely human. You don't, very, very few animals you see killing themselves because their whole thing is just survival and that humans paradoxically, when survival is more or less guaranteed are killing themselves in vast numbers. Usually linked back to the idea of meaning because it's so hard, it was hard to win the battle for survival, But it's 10 times harder to win the battle for meaning. Um when I think about first off, I'll say right from the bat, there's never going to be an agreed upon sense of meaning is, as I said, there was one thing that our physical bodies agreed upon and which is hardwired biologically into us and that's survival. But once we got two more or less guarantee survival, then all bets were off at that point, you just have to start listing your own criteria and what one person will describe as a meaningful life. Another person will decry is meaningless or wasted. Um Mhm. There's something terrible about the idea that we're sitting around, you know, waiting for meaning to show up on our doorstep. But what I find the best people do is they take charge of it and they look at their lives in a in a form of authorship where they see their life as a tale to be written and they do their best to write that tail and put as much control over the the direction of the story as they can. In the end, we all have to just try and write our own story. We all have our own interests. I try to bring in the sense that even though I'm an atheist, I don't believe that we go on to live after this. I I believe that there's a possibility of God and the afterlife. I don't say it's impossible, but in order for me to believe that they exist, I'd have to see better evidence. And I see currently. Um nonetheless, I do believe that there is a great value and the idea of living for something bigger than yourself the moment. You see yourself as the be all and end all of your existence. You're in for a meaningless life and nothing will ever satisfy you. You can have all the money in the world. You can have all the power in the world. You'll be empty inside. I do believe that humans have a deep and abiding need to follow the interests of a group bigger than themselves as an individual. Is it ideal? No. Is it an answer to the meaning of life? No. Because eventually that group will itself die out. So there's a sense in which it it just plays a kind of delaying game. But I do believe that in order to live a happy life meaning as a central part of that and the deepest sense of meaning. Not a fully complete answer, but a better answer than most people give us to find something which hopefully does very little harm to the people around you and mostly benefits them. Which enables you to become part of a community and to live as I said for something larger than you as an individual. </s><s>[INST] If there is such a thing as a perfect conversation, it would be a conversation on death meaning and robots with the great john Donna heard john I've been a fan. It's a huge honor that you will waste all your time today. Thank you so much for talking today. [/INST] My pleasure. Thank you legs. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with john Danaher and thank you to on it simply safe indeed. And lin owed check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from john Danaher himself in fighting and competition. The objective is victory in training. The objective is skill development. Do not confuse them as such. One of the best ways to train is to identify the strengths of your various partners and regularly expose yourself to those strengths. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] way that we is the peaceful way that we wind down the kinds of things to address. Obviously, it's not just for the powerful and the rich. The people are bothered by the debt. The people are bothered by everything that you describe with fiat. And if you wanna sell yourself in a democracy as a good leader, you might want to make that part of the platform. You mentioned, you know, Michael Malice. He just texted me asking me to ask you, what do you like best about Michael Malice? If you can spend five to 10 to 20 to an hour talking about the genius of Michael Malice, [/INST] what do you like, where does one even start? Well, obviously the haircut first. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, he just gets sexier with age. That's for sure, that's good. Do, you know, his ideas, his trolling and humor, [/INST] have you gotten a chance to interact with him? Yes, yes, I've met Michael maybe 10, 12 years ago in New York. I used to live in New York when he used to live in New York. Met him a couple of times. There was a bunch of anarchists in New York used to throw a happy hour once a month. It was called the High Time Preference Hoppe Hour in honor of Hans-Erwin Hoppe. So I met him there a couple of times </s><s>[INST] and we followed each other on Twitter for a while. Is there interesting that you're aware of philosophical differences in your world views? [/INST] No, I think we pretty much see eye to eye. I think the difference is mainly that he spends a lot of time focusing on American politics and American pop culture, </s><s>[INST] which I don't pay much attention to, I guess. So you look more at the monetary system, the economics of it all and just the history and just looking at it, zooming out at the big picture of it all. Although recently he's working on a book called The White Pill and he's been, every time I see him, I mean, he's in some dark aspect of the 20th century. He's just like, I just finished writing about Hollermore. As you might imagine, he's not taking much, I believe, of a monetary perspective on things. His book is writing at least for time, his kind of philosophical ideology perspective that is outside of the monetary system. But you argue that those are actually inextricably linked. [/INST] So outside. Yeah, and I don't think he would disagree, </s><s>[INST] but a book can only be so long, I suppose. It can only focus on so many things. If you can put on your wise sage hat and give some advice to young people, I mean, the past four hours have been a kind of advice, but if you can focus and somebody in high school or college is thinking about what to do with their career, could have a successful career or to have a life [/INST] they could be proud of, what would you tell them? I'd say probably the most important advice that I would give is to find a way to give value to other people. And this is really the key thing. You need to wake up every morning and figure out how to serve others. This is the key to everything you want in life. Everything that you want is on the other side of you serving others. So figure out how you can serve others in a good way, how you can do it in a way that they value, and you've got an incredible mechanism for figuring that out, which is the market. Go out there and do things for other people. And- The market will tell you exactly. If you're young, you have the enormous advantage of being able to make things, make mistakes, essentially, and learn from them. So go out there, do things of value for others, figuring out how you can do something that, What is it that you can do that contributes the most value to other people's lives? And increasingly, I think with modern technology, this is increasingly becoming online. And I think you should consider how you can create value online, because that scales beyond anything that you can do in the physical world in a very, very, well, maybe not beyond, obviously, there are profitable businesses in the physical world. But I think online is enormous potential. And coding, I think, is enormously powerful. I'm not a coder myself, but I strongly recommend people get into learning how to code. And I think it's probably the thing that carries the most power. So initially, we were working with our hands, we started working with machines, machines are much more productive, or code is an even higher level of productivity, where you basically program the machines to produce things. So a few clicks of a keyboard, and you can move millions of machines around the world in certain ways. So it carries an enormous amount of value. I think I always tell all young people to learn to code, it's the best thing. I used to tell it to my students when I was at university, tell them to drop out and go learn to code. </s> |
<s>[INST] Right? I agree [/INST] with </s><s>[INST] we're talking [/INST] if we didn't have a cerebral cortex is also like to think that part of the brain that really truly makes us human the most evolved in recent evolution. And so in the attempt to make the cerebral cortex and by figuring out a way to have this organized, continued to grow and develop for extended periods of times, much like it happens in the real embryo months and months in culture. Then you can see that the many different types of neurons of the cortex appear and at some point also the astrocytes glia cells of the cerebral cortex also </s><s>[INST] appear. What are these? Uh astrocytes, the [/INST] astra sites are not neurons. So they're not nerve cells but they play very important roles. One important role is to support the neuron but of course they have much more active type of roles are very important for example to make the synapses which are the point of contact and communication between two neurons. They, </s><s>[INST] so all that chemistry fund happens in the synopsis happens because of these cells. Are there the medium in [/INST] which happens because of the interactions happens because you're making the cells and they have certain properties including the ability to make um you know neurotransmitters which are the chemicals that are secreted to the synopsis including the ability of making these actions grow with their growth cones and so on and so forth. And then you have other cells surrounded that release chemicals or touch the neurons or interact with them in different ways to really faster this perfect process in this case of synaptic genesis. Um And this does happen within within organized </s><s>[INST] organized the mechanical and chemical stuff happens. [/INST] The connectivity between neurons. This in a way it's not surprising because scientists have been culturing neurons forever. And when you take a neuron even a very young one and you culture it eventually finds another seller and other neurons to talk to It will form a synapse. </s><s>[INST] Are we talking about mice neurons? We're talking about human neuron. [/INST] It doesn't matter both. </s><s>[INST] So you can culture a neuron like a single neuron and give it a little friend and it starts interacting. Yes. [/INST] So neurons are able to it sounds, it's more simple than what it may sound to you. Um, neurons have molecular properties and structural properties that allow them to really communicate with other cells. And so if you put not one neuron, but if you put several neurons together, chances are that they will form synapses with each other. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so an organized is not a brain [/INST] but </s><s>[INST] but uh there's some it's able to especially what you're talking about, mimic some properties of the cerebral cortex for example. So what what can you understand about the brain? By studying an organized of the cerebral cortex? [/INST] I can literally study how all this incredible diversity of cell type or there's many, many different classes of cells. How are they made? How do they look like? What do they need to be made properly? And what goes wrong if now the genetics of that stem cell that I used to make? The organ came from a patient with a neurodevelopmental disease. Can I actually watch for the very first time? What may have gone wrong years before in this kid, when its own brain was being made? Think about that loop in a way, it's a little tiny rudimentary window into the past into the time when that brain, in a kid that had this developmental disease was being made. And I think that's unbelievably powerful because today we have no idea of what cell types, we barely know what brain regions are affected in this disease is. Now. We have an experimental system that we can study in the lab and we can ask what are the cells affected when during development things went wrong. What are the molecules among the many, many different molecules that control brain development? Which ones are the ones that really messed up here and we want perhaps to fix? And what is really the final product? Is it a less strong kind of circuit and brain is it a brain Alexis cell type? Is it? What is it? Because then we can think about treatment and care for these patients that is informed rather than just based on current diagnostic. </s><s>[INST] So how hard is it to detect through? The developmental process is super exciting uh tool just to see how different conditions develop. How hard is it to detect that wait a minute, this is abnormal development. That's how hard, how much signals there. How much of it is. As if a mess [/INST] because things can go wrong at multiple levels, right? You could have a cell that is born and built but then doesn't work properly or sell it is not even born or a cell does interact with that to sell differently and so on and so forth. So today we have technology that we did not have even five years ago uh that allows us to look, for example at the molecular picture of a cell of a single cell in a sea of cells with high precision. And so that molecular information where you compare many, many single cells for the genes they produce between a control individual and an individual with neuro developmental disease. Uh that may tell you what is different molecularly. Or you could see that some cells are not even made for example or that the process of maturation of the cells may be wrong. There are many different levels here and and we can study these cells at the molecular level. But also we can use the organized to ask questions about the properties of the neurons, the functional properties how they communicate with each other, how they respond to stimulus and so on and so forth. And we may get abnormalities, they're </s> |
<s>[INST] this picture. And I'll give you another example of how this is the anarchist critique of power hunter biden and I'm not gonna, I'm not making fun of him. Nothing shot to him. He had an article in the new yorker where he talks about when he was in L. A. He was buying crack and there was a misunderstanding or like he left the crack pipe in the Hertz car and then blah blah. There's an issue, he's admitting to a felony in writing to a reporter and I'm sure this was in the statute of limitations. There was no possibility he was going to have consequences. Kamala Harris who was a cop, talked about when she was in college, she was smoking weed and it's like I don't begrudge you guys smoking your crack or smoking your weed, but for other people who are poor or maybe just had the short end the stick, this is years of their life being destroyed at the very least, even arrest as a traumatic situation, if you have a weed or cocaine or crack your arrested, that's really going to screw up, it's going to do a number on you being locked up. So to have that double standard to me is completely unacceptable. And that has nothing to do with republican or democrat. That George W Bush was a cokehead back in the day. He talks about overcoming his addiction and I'm glad that he did more power to him, but just to have this kind of, you know, it's just really kind of disturbing to me and this is my anarchist brain, like how prevalent drug use is in college, there's that, I think it's a joke on South Park, like there's a time and a place to try drugs and that's called college where people experiment. But all those college kids which are going to become next generation's elite, don't really have that worry that if they get caught, then anything's going to happen to them, but that kid in the street who did not have that good upbringing, even if he's a piece of crap, like he's not going to have a different punishment. I I think that's just really at his base on american. [/INST] So in contrast to Tolstoy, uh let me ask you about Emma Goldman, you wrote that if anarchism believed in rulers, then Emma Goldman would be the undisputed queen. What uh ideas to find her flavor anarchism would you say </s><s>[INST] Emma was really an old school radical? She was a radical among radicals. I don't know what ideas I mean, what would ideas to find her was anarchism. Obviously, [/INST] there's the violence, I mean, she was more open to the idea of violent opposition versus somebody like </s> |
<s>[INST] Yeah, but humans are intelligent and there introspective and they can reflect on the experiences of their life. So for example, there's been many years in my life where I ate an excessive amount of sugar and then a certain moment I woke up and said uh why do I keep doing this? This doesn't feel good like long term and I think so, going through the Tiktok process of realizing, okay, when I shortened my attention span actually that that does not make me feel good longer term and realizing that and then going to platforms, going to places that um are away from the sugar. So so and so doing you can create platforms that can make a lot of money when we help people wake up to what actually makes them feel good long term developed, grow as human beings and it just feels like humans are more intelligent than mice looking for cheese. They're able to sort of think, I mean we can think we can contemplate our mortality and contemplate things like long term love and we can have a long term fear of certain things like mortality. We can contemplate whether the experience is the sort of the drugs of daily life that we've been partaking in is making us happier better people and then once we contemplate that we can make financial decisions in using services and paying for services that are making us better people. So it just seems that we're in the very first stages of social networks that just were able to make a lot of money really quickly. But in bringing out sometimes the bad parts of human nature, they didn't destroy humans, they just, they just fed everybody a lot of sugar and now everyone's gonna wake up and say, hey, we're going to start having like sugar free social media, [/INST] right? Well there's a lot to impact their, I think some people certainly have the capacity for that and I certainly think, I mean it's very interesting even the way you said it, you woke up one day and you thought, well this doesn't feel very good, Well that's still your limbic system saying this doesn't feel very good, right? You have a cat brains worth of neurons around your gut, right? And so maybe that's saturated and that was telling you, hey, this isn't good, humans are more than just mice looking for cheese or monkeys looking for sex and power. Right? So </s><s>[INST] now you're now a lot of people would argue with you on that one, [/INST] but we're more than just that, but we're at least that and we're very, very seldom not that. So, um my I don't actually disagree with you that we could be better and that we can that better platforms exist and people are voluntarily no ping out of things like facebook and it's a great term. Yeah, I love it. I use it all the time. You're welcome. I want no part of that, right? It's gonna be a hard pass and and that's and that's that's great. But that's again to your point, that's the first generation of front facing cameras of social pressures and you as a you know, self starter, self aware adult have the capacity to say yeah, I'm not gonna do that, I'm going to go and spend time on long form reading, I'm gonna spend time managing my attention, I'm going to do some yoga if you're a 15 year old in high school and your entire social environment is everyone doing these things. Guess what you're gonna do, you're gonna kind of have to do that because your limbic system says, hey, I need to get the guy or the girl or whatever and that's what I'm gonna do. And so one of the things that we have to reason about here is the social media systems or you know, social media I think is a first, our first encounter with a technological system that runs a bit of a loop around our own cognition and attention. It's not the last, it's far from the last and it gets to the heart of some of the philosophical achilles heel of the Western philosophical system, which is each person gets to make their own determination. Each person is an individual that's, you know, sacrosanct and their agency and their sovereignty and all these things. The problem with these systems is they come down and they are able to manage everyone on mass. And so every person is making their own decision. But together the bigger system is causing them to act with a group, um dynamic that's very profitable for people. So this is the issue that we have is that our philosophies are actually not geared to understand what is it for a person to be to have a high trust connection as part of a collective and for that collective to have its right to coherency and agency. That's something like when, when a social media app causes a family to break apart, it's done harm to more than just individuals. Right? So that concept is not something we really talk about or think about very much. But that's actually the problem is that we're we're vaporizing molecules into atomic units and then we're hitting all the atoms with certain things. That's like Yeah, well, that person chose to look at my app. </s><s>[INST] So our understanding of human nature is at the individual level. It emphasizes the individual too much because ultimately society operates at the collective level. [/INST] And these apps do as </s><s>[INST] well in the apps do as well. So for us to understand the progression, the development of this organism, we call human civilization, we have to think of the collective level two, [/INST] I was a multi tiered, </s><s>[INST] multi tiered, multi, so individual as well, [/INST] individuals, family units, social collectives. Um, and, and on the way up. </s> |
<s>[INST] That's LexFriedman.com slash Onnit. I highly recommend you read the book Deep Work by Kyle Newport. It kind of puts the right terminology and structure around how to put long stretches of focused work as part of your day. And then once you have that structure, I think you have to make sure you have the right supplements, the right diet, the right exercise to support that. And that's where Onnit can help out. This is the LexFriedman podcast. And here is my conversation with Kelsey Sharon. You mentioned that studying history had a big impact on you and that your grandfather was a World War II vet. So people that have gone through World War II in my family too, they don't seem to talk about it much. Like the worse the tragedy, the less they talk about it. [/INST] I mean, it's understandable. I can respect that. But I don't think people fully understood the value in human stories over time and sharing that, that certain civilizations don't have written language. The value in that being passed down is extraordinary, but we didn't really have </s><s>[INST] that with the World War II vets, it seems like. Well, they kind of want to protect you from the pain. Like my grandmother went through Hollermore, which is the Ukrainian starvation of millions of people. And then obviously went through World War II with the Nazi occupation. And same on the grandfather's side, who on my dad's side, the grandfather fought in World War II. And they seem to not want to talk about those experiences to protect you from the suffering, to protect you from the evil that they've experienced. Which is sad because the lessons from that history are not then propagated through you. And also there's something about the strength you carry with you knowing that that's in your blood. Those great heroes are in your blood and overcoming that [/INST] suffering is in your blood. I would argue that's exactly correct. If you have someone you know that comes from your lineage that has done something super gnarly, that's just been a badass in so many different ways, you want to know about that person, you have that person's blood in you, that's important to acknowledge. And when that isn't shared, I feel like it's just a detriment </s><s>[INST] to that individual. What do you make of World War II? In terms of history, do you think about those kinds of wars where two times more civilians died than the number of military personnel? So most of the war is basically just the death of civilians and the invasion of homes, [/INST] the burning of homes, the bombing of homes, all of that. World War II for me, I find that was the first experience where I became just obsessed with history. World War II really did it for me. I'm not sure if it's because of the dramatization of film and TV and the way that our generation has looked at it, but for me, it was more than that. I felt a deep connection to it and I still can't figure out why, like a pull almost. People joke around about those past lives and those things or those connections and there's something deeper within me that feels a pull towards that. And I'm not quite sure if it's because I had family that escaped Hungary once the Soviets came in, so thanks for that. Or if it was because my grandfather served in it or for whatever reason, I have this pull to it. And so when you think about the mass casualty of the civilian population, that's very difficult for me to wrap my brain around after being in a war and seeing when you have a small subset of civilians die, how much of an impact that has on that community right there and just in just a tiny area. So to try to wrap my brain around what happened in Europe and all across and all of that, I really struggle with that because I don't know that I can comprehend what that would truly mean to somebody if I didn't experience it or see it for what it is. </s><s>[INST] Does that make sense? Yeah, but so first of all, you're right. A lot of people are drawn to World War II for different reasons. So one is Hitler and Stalin trying to understand how it's possible to have that scale of evil in very different flavors of evil. It's almost fascinating that human nature can allow for that. And then also it's fascinating that so many people can follow leaders like that with the pride and with the love of country. Yeah. And that's like, it's almost like this weird experiment. It's like, wow, I wonder if I'm the same, I'm made from the same cloth as those people. Would I be a good German if I lived in Germany during the time of Hitler? Would I believe that Germany has been done wrong? I'm Jewish, by the way, which makes me a little bit more comfortable talking about this. Would I believe in the dream sold by a charismatic dictator who says that wrongs have been done and we need to correct those wrongs? That to me is the compelling [/INST] thing that draws me to World War II, the human nature question. I would agree with you on that. I think there's a way to look at people like that. And at that time, there was no real, well, there wasn't a full understanding of the psyche the way that we're starting to. I mean, we still don't understand any of it, but it seems like the time gap back then, there was no real understanding of sociopaths and narcissists and psychopaths and really what those traits were. And I feel like people will follow blindly if they're given a good enough reason. Well, if you have an individual who is ranting and screaming at the top of his lungs in the middle of these town squares and he's getting this attention, it's human nature to want to understand and be a part of a group mentality. It's human nature to want to fit in. And so I don't know if it's more of people were at the beginning were just, this is the cool thing to do. Or if it was they were genuinely terrified. Or if there was an aspect that was like, this guy is saying something that resonates with me. There could be a lot of different things. I think it's unfortunate that we didn't get to, or no one got to really, you know, examine this individual's brain and this person and, and why they thought the way they thought. Because that's always been the biggest thing for me is I'm really curious about why people do what they do. Like deeply, deeply </s> |
<s>[INST] So it becomes obvious at high energies, [/INST] it becomes very obvious when when we first did this work, it was frontiers of high energy physics and at big international conferences there would always be sessions on testing Q C D and whether the whether this proposed description of the strong interaction was in fact correct and so forth and it was very exciting. They're big but nowadays the same kind of work, but much more precise with calculations to more accuracy and experiments that are much more precise and comparisons that are very precise uh now it's called calculating backgrounds because because people take this for granted and want to you and want to see deviations from the theory, which would be which would be the new discoveries. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, the cutting edge becomes the foundation of foundation, becomes boring. Huh. Is there some for basic explanation purposes? Is there something to be said about strong interactions in the context of the strong nuclear force for the for the interaction between protons and neutrons versus the interaction between quarks within protons. [/INST] Quarks and gluons have the same relation basically to nuclear physics as electrons and photons have to atomic and molecular physics. So atoms and photons are the dynamic entities that really come into play in chemistry. And atomic physics of course you have to have the atomic nuclei. But those are small and relatively inert really. The dynamical part. And, you know, for most purposes of chemistry, you just say you have this tiny little nuclear switch which UCD gives, you don't worry about it just it's there. The real the real action is the electrons moving around and exchanging and things like uh the but okay, but we wanted to understand the nucleus to and uh so adam's based are sort of quantum mechanical clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces, which is photons. And then this radiation, which is also another aspect of </s><s>[INST] photons, that's where all the fun happens is the electrons and photons. [/INST] That's right. And the nucleus the nucleus are kind of the the uh well they're they're necessary, they give the positive charge and most of the mass of matter. Uh but they don't since since they're so heavy, they don't move very much in chemistry. And uh I'm oversimplifying drastically </s><s>[INST] that being much the interaction and [/INST] they for most purposes in chemistry, you can just idealize them as concentrations of positive mass and charge that that are uh uh you don't have to look inside, but people are curious what's inside really. Uh and uh that and that was a big thing on the agenda of 20th century physics starting in the 19 Well, starting with the 20th century and unfolding throughout of trying to understand what forces held the atomic nucleus together what it was. And so uh anyway, there the emerged the story that emerges from UCD, is that very similar to the way that well, broadly similar to the way that uh clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces uh give you atoms and ultimately uh molecules uh protons and neutrons are like atoms made now out of corks, Quark clouds held together by gluons, which are like like like the photons that will give the electric forces. But this is giving a different force the strong force. And uh and the residual forces between protons and neutrons that mhm are left over from the basic binding are like the residual forces between atoms that give molecules. But in the case of protons and neutrons, it gives you atomic nuclear. </s><s>[INST] So again, for definition purposes Q. C. D. Quantum thermodynamics is basically the physics of strong interaction. [/INST] Yeah, we understand that. We now have done just would I think most physicists would say it's the theory of quarks and gluons and how they interact. But it's a very precise and I think it's fair to say very beautiful theory based on mathematical symmetry of a high order. Uh And another thing that's beautiful about it is that it's kind of in the same family as electrodynamics. The conceptual structure of the of the equations are very similar. They are based on having particles that respond to charge in a very symmetric way. In the case of electrodynamics, its photons that respond to electric charge. In the case of quantum Cromer dynamics, there are three kinds of charge that we call colors, but there's nothing like colors. They really are like different kinds of </s><s>[INST] charge rhyme with the same kind of uh like a similar kind of dynamics. [/INST] Similar kind of dynamics. I call I say I'd like to say that Q C. D. Is like Q E. D. On steroids and instead of one photon you have eight gluons. Instead of one charge, you have three color charges. But there's a strong family resemblance </s><s>[INST] between but the context in which Q. C. D. Does this thing is much higher energies. Like that's where it comes to. Its [/INST] a stronger force. So that to access how its works And kind of pry things apart, you have to inject more energy. </s><s>[INST] And so that that gives us um in some sense a hint of how things were in the earlier universe. Yeah, [/INST] well in that regard, asymptotic freedom is a tremendous blessing because it means things get simpler at high energy. </s><s>[INST] The universe was born free [/INST] born free. That's very good. Yes, chris was born. So, so in atomic physics, I mean, I mean a similar thing happens in the theory of stars. Stars are hot enough that uh the interactions between electrons and photons are, they're liberated. They don't form atoms anymore. They make a plasma. Which in some ways it's simpler to understand. You don't have complicated chemistry. And in the early universe, according to QC D, similarly, atomic nuclei dissolved and take the constituent quarks and gluons which are moving around very fast and interacting in relatively simple ways. And so this uh this opened up the early universe to scientific calculation. </s> |
<s>[INST] on what you can and cannot do? So that's for your personal life is really powerful, but a little bit more intuitive. I think what's really hard is to question constraints in a place like aeronautics or robotics or autonomous vehicles or vehicles, because there's people, there's experts everywhere that have done it for decades, and everyone admires those experts and respects those experts, and for you to step into a room, knowing not much more than just what's in a Wikipedia article, and to just use your intuition and first principles thinking to disagree with the experts, [/INST] that takes some guts, I think. Well, you can't have everyone doing that either, you know? Like there has to be some humility of knowing that something is a hardened concept and a hardened, you know? You know especially, I'm not an engineer. I don't do this stuff. You know, but I can imagine you sitting there having spent six years on a type of valve that perfectly manages crowd gently propellants or whatever, and someone walks in, and says, why don't you just put a heater element in there? Or you know, or something that's, something that's like, because, we've done that 40 times or whatever, or whatever, you know like, I'm sure there are things like that, that are very frustrating. So, I don't know what that's like, </s><s>[INST] so I don't know what that's like. The thing is with the experts, they're always going to be frustrated when the newbie comes in with their first principles thinking, but sometimes that frustration is justified and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just stubbornness for failing to acknowledge a better way and I've seen it in both directions so which is really interesting. So, you need both but that tension's always going to be there and there has to be almost like a dictatorial imperative that breaks through the expertise of the way things have been done in the past to push forward like a new way of doing it. And Elon's done that. I've seen a lot of great engineers do that. In the machine learning world, because there's been so much development, I've seen that happen. Usually when there's like rapid development that starts to come into play. Yeah, and I've seen that autonomous vehicle space, brain computer interfaces that Elon has evolved with, all of it. It's kind of fascinating to watch. What about the actual design and engineering of the engine? Since you've learned about so many different kinds of engines over the past few years, just like what stands out to you about the way that engineering is done at SpaceX or that Elon does engineering. [/INST] Yeah, and I've seen- The hardest thing to kind of remember is how much stuff was developed in the 50s and 60s. The concepts finally being utilized today were already literally done in the 60s. So a lot of the things that SpaceX is doing isn't a novel concept per se. For instance, the Raptor engine utilizes the full flow stage combustion cycle engine. And that was already developed by the Soviets in the 60s for an engine called the RD270. And it makes sense. On paper, 100% it makes sense because you're basically extracting the absolute maximum potential of the chemical energy in both propellants. And at the end of the day, you have to be dumb enough to say, we're going to try using this thing because it's actually really complicated to do what they're doing. But at the same time, so are rockets. Rocket engines are already stupid complicated. So adding 10, 20% more pain in the butt during the R&D, if it's in the long, long, long 20, 30 year existence or whatever future of that engine, is that going to be worth it? Obviously, SpaceX said, yeah, I think we can actually develop this Raptor engine. So it's just interesting to see the things that have been looked at or even reusability. The space shuttle was reusable. It was fully, the upper stage, the shuttle itself, the orbiter was, I mean, that thing was, for all intents and purposes, a reusable rocket. Now, did it live up to its expectations? Not necessarily. So it left a lot of bad taste in people's mouth on the ideas of reusability. So for SpaceX to kind of come back into the room and on the table and say, we're going to use a reusable rocket. Specifically, we're going to do a fully reusable rocket. You know, a lot of people are, even still today, a lot of people are going, yeah, </s><s>[INST] you're not going to be able to do that. Even today. Even today? So like, long term, you're not going to be able [/INST] to reuse at scale. Yeah. But, definitely I think the number of people letter saying that today is a small portion of those that were saying that type of thing five years ago. You know, when Elon did that announcement in 2016 for the ITS, it was very, very aspirational and people were just like, yeah, right. You know, and there's a large number of people that had the factual reasons to think that and do that. You know, at the time they'd only landed like two rockets or something, you know, when they did that, or maybe three, it was a very small number. When they announced that actually they had just lost, a couple of months prior, they just lost MO6. So they like, they were still this young blossoming company and they come in and be like, we figured out reusability and now we're going to go full scale and make the world's biggest, most heaviest, most powerful rocket ever. And we're going to fully reuse it. And it's going to go to Mars. It was just pretty out there. Like it really was. And you know, it's all about perspective. But now again, we're coming up on 100 consecutive landings of an orbital class rocket that's, you know, 45 meters tall, 3.7 meters wide. Like this thing is huge, weighs 20 metric tons, even empty when it's landing. That thing's already huge. So seeing the success of that, I think people are now more like, it's all about, okay, maybe, maybe there is actually the opportunity to be fully reasonable. That's definitely probably the biggest constraint that I think has been questioned. That is. </s> |
<s>[INST] I'm excited to be working with cash app to support one of my favorite organizations called 1st. Best known for their first robotics and lego competitions. They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students in over 110 countries and have a perfect rating and charity navigator. Which means that donated money is used to maximum effectiveness. When you get cash up from the app store, google play and use code lex podcast you'll get $10 and cash up will also donate $10 to First, which again is an organization that I've personally seen, inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world. And now here's my conversation with Jim Keller. What are the differences and similarities between the human brain and a computer with the microprocessor as core? Let's start with the philosophical question perhaps. [/INST] Well since people don't actually understand how human brains work, I think that's true, I think that's true. So it's hard to compare them. Computers are you know there's really two things, there's memory and there's computation right? And to date almost all computer architecture is our global memory which is a thing, right? And then computation where you pull data and you do relatively simple operations on it and write data back. </s><s>[INST] So it's decoupled in modern and modern computers and your you think in the human brain everything is a mesh a mess that's combined together. [/INST] What people observe is there's you know some number of layers of neurons which have local and global connections and information is stored in some distributed fashion. And people build things called neural networks in computers where the information is distributed in some kind of fashion, you know, there's the mathematics behind it. I don't know that the understanding that is super deep. The computations we run on those are straightforward computations. I don't believe anybody has said a neuron does this computation. So today it's hard to compare them, I would say. </s><s>[INST] So let's get into the basics before we zoom back out. How do you build a computer from scratch? What is a microprocessor? What is the micro architecture? What's an instruction set architecture maybe even as far back as what is a transistor? [/INST] So the special charm of computer engineering is there is a relatively good understanding of abstraction layers. So down the bottom of atoms and atoms get put together in materials like silicon or doped silicon or metal. And we build transistors on top of that. We build logic gates. Right. And then functional units like an adder of subtract er an instruction parsing unit and we assemble those into, you know processing elements. Modern computers are built out of You know, probably 10-20 locally, you know, organic processing elements or coherent processing elements. And then that runs computer programs. Right, So there's abstraction layers and then software, you know, there's an instruction set you run and then there's assembly language C C plus plus java javascript. You know, there's abstraction layers, you know, essentially from the atom to the data center. Right? So when you when you build a computer, you know, first there's a target like what's it for? Like how fast is it have to be? Which you know, today there's a whole bunch of metrics about what that is. And then in an organization of, you know, 1000 people who build a computer, there's lots of different disciplines that you have to operate on. Does that make sense? So </s><s>[INST] uh so there's a bunch of levels of abstraction of in an organization, I can tell. And in your own vision there's a lot of brilliance that comes in at every one of those layers. Some of it is science, some of it is engineering some of his art. What's the most uh If you could pick favorites, what's the most important? Your favorite layer on these layers of obstructions. Where does the magic enter this hierarchy? [/INST] Uh I don't really care. That's the fun, you know, I'm somewhat agnostic to that. So I would say for relatively long periods of time, instruction sets are stable. So the x 86 instruction set, the arm instruction set. </s><s>[INST] What's an instruction set? [/INST] So it says, how do you encode the basic operations load, store multiply add subtract conditional branch. You know, there aren't that many interesting instructions give you look at the program and it runs, You know, 90% of the execution is on 25 op codes, you know 25 instructions. And those are stable. </s><s>[INST] Right, what does it mean stable [/INST] Intel architecture has been around for 25 years. It works. It works. And that's because the basics, you know, or defined a long time ago right now. The way an old computer ran is you fetched instructions and you executed them in order. Do the load, do the add to the, compare The way a modern computer works is you fetch large numbers of instructions say 500 and then you find the dependency graph between the instructions and then you you execute in independent units, those little micro graphs. So a modern computer like people like to say computer should be simple and clean, but it turns out the market for simple, complete clean slow computers is zero, right? We don't sell any simple clean computers. Now you can there is how you build, it can be clean, but the computer people want to buy that's saying a phone or data center fetches a large number of instructions, computes the dependency graph and then execute it in a way that gets the right answers </s><s>[INST] and optimize that graph. Somehow [/INST] they run deeply auto order and then there's semantics around how memory ordering works and other things work. So the computer sort of has a bunch of bookkeeping tables, it says what orders to these operations, finishing or appear to finish in but to go fast you have to fetch a lot of instructions and find all the parallelism. Now there's a second kind of computer which we call GPS today and I call it the difference there's found parallelism like you have a program with a lot of dependent instructions. You fetch a bunch and then you go figure out the dependency graph and you issues instructions out of order. That's because you have one serial narrative to execute, which in fact is in can be done out of order. You call it a narrative. Yeah. So yeah, so humans thinking serial narrative. So read read a book right there. You know, there's a sentence after sentence after sentence and there's paragraphs. Now you could diagram that. Imagine you diagrammed it properly and you said which sentences could be read in anti order any order without changing the meaning. </s><s>[INST] Right. That's a fascinating question to ask of a book. [/INST] You can do that. Right? So some paragraphs could be reordered, some sentences can be reordered, you could say he is tall and smart and X. Right? And it doesn't matter the order of Fallen Smart. But if you say the tall man is wearing a red shirt, what colors? You know, like you can create dependencies. Right. Right. And so GPS on the other hand, run simple programs on pixels, but you're given a million of them and the first order the screen you're looking at. It doesn't care which order you do it in. So I call that given parallelism simple narratives around the large numbers of things where you can just say it's parallel because you told me it was </s><s>[INST] so found parallelism where the narrative is sequential, but you discover like little pockets of parallelism versus [/INST] turns out large pockets of parallelism </s><s>[INST] large. So how hard is it to this? [/INST] How hard is it that's just transistor count. So once you crack the problem, you say, Here's how you fetch 10 instructions at a time, here's how you calculated the dependencies between them. Here's how you describe the dependencies, here's, you know, these are pieces. Right? </s><s>[INST] So once you describe the dependencies, then it's just a graph sort of it's an algorithm that finds what is that? I'm sure there's a graph, their theoretical answer here, that's solvable in general programs modern programs that human beings. Right? How much Found parallelism? Is there? What does 10 next mean [/INST] you executed in order </s><s>[INST] versus [/INST] you would get what's called cycles per instruction and it would be about, you know, three instructions, three cycles per instruction because of the latency of the operations and stuff. And in a modern computer, excuse that, like point to .25 cycles per instruction. So it's about We today find 10 x. And then there's two things. One is the found parallelism and the narrative, right? And the other is to predictability of the narrative. Right? So certain operations, they do a bunch of calculations and if greater than one do this else do that. That that decision is predicted in modern computers to high 90% accuracy. So branches happen a lot. So imagine you have, you have a decision to make every six instructions which is about the average. Right? But you want to fetch 500 instructions. Figure out the graph and execute tomorrow parallel that means You have, let's say if you affect 600 instructions and it's every six You have to fetch, you have to predict 99 out of 100 branches correctly for that window to be effective. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so parallelism, you can't paralyze branches. You can, [/INST] you </s><s>[INST] can what is predicted branch mean [/INST] what's predicted? Imagine you do a computation over and over. You're in a loop. So while and is greater than one do and you go through that loop a million times. So every time you look at the branch you say it's probably still greater than one. </s><s>[INST] You're saying you could do that accurately. [/INST] Very accurately monitor </s><s>[INST] my mind is blown. How the heck do you do that? Wait a minute. [/INST] Well you want to know this is really sad. 20 years ago you simply recorded which way the branch went last time and predicted the same thing. Right, okay, </s><s>[INST] what's the accuracy of that, [/INST] 85%. So then somebody said, hey let's keep a couple of bits and have a little counter. So it predicts one way we count up and then pins so save a three bit counter. So you count up and then count down and if it's, you know, you can use the top, it is the sign bit. So you have a signed two bit number. So if it's greater than one, you predict taken and less than one you predict not taken right or lessons or whatever the thing is And that got us to 92%. Okay. I know it is better. This branch depends on how you got there. So if you came down the code one way, you're talking about bob and jane, right? And then said it's just bob like jane, it went one way. But if you're talking about bob and Jill does bob like changes you go a different way. Right. So that's called history. So you take the history and encounter. Mhm. That's cool. But that's not how anything works today. They use something that looks a little like a neural network. So modern, you take all the execution flows and then you do basically deep pattern recognition of how the program is executing and you do that multiple different ways and you have something that chooses what the best result is. There's a little supercomputer inside the computer calculates which way branches go. So the effective window that it's worth finding grass and gets bigger. </s><s>[INST] Why was that gonna make me sad because that's amazing. [/INST] It's amazingly complicated. Well, here's the here's the funny thing so to get to 85% took 1000 bits to get to 99% takes tens of megabits. So this is one of those To get the result, you know, to get from a window of say 50 instructions to 500. It took three orders of magnitude or four orders of magnitude more bits. </s><s>[INST] Now, if you get the prediction of a branch wrong, what happens then flush the pipe to flush the pipes is just the performance cost, [/INST] but it gets even better. So we're starting to look at stuff that says so executed down this path and then you have two ways to go. But far far away there's something that doesn't matter which path you went. So you miss, you took the wrong path, you executed a bunch of stuff, then you had to miss predicting to back it up. You remembered all the results, you already calculated some of those are just fine. Like if you read a book and you misunderstand paragraph, your understanding of the next paragraph sometimes is invariants that I'm understanding. Sometimes it depends on it </s><s>[INST] and you can kind of anticipate that invariance. [/INST] Yeah, well you can keep track of whether the data changed and so when you come back through a piece of code, should you calculate it again or do the same thing. </s><s>[INST] Okay, How much of this is art and how much of it is science because it sounds pretty complicated. So well, [/INST] how do you describe the situation? So imagine you come to a point in the road we have to make a decision. Right. And you have a bunch of knowledge about which way to go. Maybe you have a map. So you want to go the shortest way or you want to go the fastest way or you want to take the nicest road. So it's just some set of data. So imagine you're doing something complicated like building a computer and there's hundreds of decision points all with hundreds of possible ways to go and the ways you pick interact in a complicated way. Right? And then you have to pick the right spot. </s><s>[INST] Right? So the other side. So I don't know. You avoided the question. You just described the robert Frost problem road less taken. I [/INST] described the Robin Frost problem. Uh What we do as computer designers. It's all poetry. Okay. Yeah. I don't know how to describe that because some people are very good at making those intuitive leaps. It seems like the combinations of things. Some people are less good at it, but they're really good at evaluating alternatives, right? And everybody has a different way to do it. And some people can't make those sleeps, but they're really good at analyzing it. So when you see computers are designed by teams of people who have very different skill sets and a good team has lots of different kinds of people. And I suspect you would describe some of them as artistic, but not very many </s><s>[INST] unfortunately. Or fortunately fortunately [/INST] well, you know, Computer science hard, it's 99 perspiration And the 1% inspiration is really important </s><s>[INST] By just turning the 99. [/INST] You got to do a lot of work and then there's there are interesting things to do at every level that stack </s><s>[INST] at the end of the day, if you're on the same program multiple times, does it always produce the same result? Is there some room for fuzziness there? [/INST] That's a math problem. So if you run a correct C program, the definition is every time you run it, you get the same answer </s><s>[INST] that Well, that's a math statement. [/INST] But that's a that's a language definitional statement. So for years when people did, when we first did 3D acceleration of graphics, mm you could run the same scene multiple times and get different answers right. And then some people thought that was okay and some people thought it was a bad idea. And then when the HPC world used GPS for calculations, they thought it was a really bad idea. Okay. Now in modern ai stuff, people are looking at networks where the precision of the data is low enough that the data is somewhat noisy and the observation is the input data is unbelievably noisy. So why should the calculation be not noisy And people have experimented with algorithms that so you can get faster answers by being noisy. Like as a network starts to converge if you look at the computation graph, it starts out really wide and then it gets narrower and you can say, is that last little bit that important? Or should I start the graph on the next rap rev before we would live all the way down to the answer. Right? So you can create algorithms that are noisy now, if you're developing something and every time you run it you get a different answer, it's really annoying. And so most people think even today, every time you run the program you get the same answer. </s><s>[INST] No, I know. But the question is that's the formal definition of a programming language. [/INST] There is a definition of languages that don't get the same answer, but people who use those, you always want something because you get a bad answer and then you're wondering is it because of something in your brother? Because of this? And so everybody wants a little switch that says no matter what do it deterministic lee? And it's really weird because almost everything going into modern calculations is noisy. So why the answers have to be so clear. It's so where do you stand by design computers for people who run programs? So if somebody says I want a deterministic answer, like most people want that, </s><s>[INST] can you deliver a deterministic answer I guess is the question like when you actually sure [/INST] what people don't realize is you get a deterministic answer even though the execution flow is very un deterministic. So you run this program 100 times. It never runs the same way twice </s><s>[INST] ever. And the answer it arrives at the same [/INST] time, but it gets the same answer every time. It's </s><s>[INST] just it's just amazing. Okay. You've achieved in the eyes of uh many people uh legend status as a chip art architect, uh would design creation? Are you most proud of perhaps because it was challenging because of its impact or because of the set of brilliant ideas that that were involved? Until [/INST] I find that description odd and I have two small Children and I promise you, uh they think it's hilarious </s><s>[INST] this question. [/INST] So I do it. So I I'm uh I'm really interested in building computers and I've worked with really, really smart people. I'm not unbelievably smart. I'm fascinated by how they go together. Both has a, there's a thing to do and is an endeavor that people do </s><s>[INST] how people and computers go together. [/INST] Yeah, like how people think and build a computer. And I find sometimes that the best computer architects aren't that interested in people or the best people, managers aren't that good at designing computers. </s><s>[INST] So the whole stack of human beings is fascinated by the managers, individual engineers. [/INST] So yeah, I just, I said I realized after a lot of years of building computers where you sort of build them out of transistors, logic gates, functional units, computational elements that you could think of people the same way. So people are functional units and then you can think of organizational design is a computer architectural problem. And then it's like, oh, that's super cool, because the people are all different, just like the computation elephants are all different and they like to do different things and and so I had a lot of fun, like reframing how I think about organizations, </s><s>[INST] just like with, with computers, we were saying execution paths, you can have a lot of different paths that end up at uh at uh at the same good destination. So what have you learned about the human abstractions? From individual functional human units to the broader organization? What does it take to create something special? [/INST] Wow, Most people don't think simple enough. All right. So do you know the difference between a recipe and the understanding? Uh there's probably a philosophical description of this. So imagine you're gonna make a loaf of bread. The recipe says get some flour, add some water, add some yeast, mix it up, let it rise, put it in a pan, put it in the oven the recipe, right? Understanding bread, you can understand biology, supply chains, you know, rain grinders, yeast physics, you know, thermodynamics, like there's so many levels of understanding there and then when people build and design things, they frequently are executing some stack of recipes. Right? And the problem with that is the recipes all have limited scope. Look if you have a really good rest of your book for making bread? It won't tell you anything about how to make an omelet? Right. But if you have a deep understanding of cooking right, then bread, um let's, you know, sandwich, you know, there's there's a different, you know way of viewing everything. And most people, when you get to be an expert at something, you know, you're you're hoping to achieve deeper understanding, not just a large set of recipes to go execute. And it's interesting to walk groups of people because executing reps apiece is unbelievably efficient if it's what you want to do, if it's not what you want to do, you're really stuck. And that difference is crucial. And and everybody has a balance of that's a deeper understanding recipes and some people are really good at recognizing when the problem is to understand something deeply deeply. That makes sense. </s><s>[INST] It totally makes sense. Uh does every stage of development deep understanding on the team needed? [/INST] Well, this goes back to the Art versus science question Sure. If you constantly unpacked everything for a deeper understanding, you never get anything done right. And if you don't unpack understanding when you need to, you'll do the wrong thing. And then at every juncture like human beings are these really weird things because everything you tell them has a million possible outputs, Right? And then they all interact in a hilarious way? And then having some intuition about what do you tell them what you do? When do you intervene? When do you thought? It's it's complicated. All right. So it's, you know, essentially computational unsolvable. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it's an intractable problem. Sure. Humans are a mess. But deep understanding. Do you mean also sort of fundamental questions of uh things like what is the computer or why? Like like the why question is why are we even building this like of purpose? Or do you mean more like going towards the fundamental limits of physics sort of really getting into the core of the science [/INST] in terms of building a computer thinks, I think a little simpler. So common practices, you build a computer and then when somebody says I want to make it 10% faster. you'll go in and say, all right, I need to make this buffer bigger and maybe I'll add an AD unit or you know, I have this thing that's three instructions wide. I'm going to make it for instructions wide. And what you see is each piece gets incrementally more complicated. Right? And then at some point you hit this limit like adding another feature or buffer doesn't seem to make it any faster. And then people say, well that's because it's a fundamental limit. And then somebody else to look at it and say, well actually the way you divide the problem up and the way the different features are interacting is limiting you and it has to be rethought rewritten. Right? So then you re factor and rewrite it. And what people commonly find is the rewrite is not only faster, but half is complicated from scratch. Yes. </s><s>[INST] So how often in your career, but just have you seen as needed? Maybe more generally to just throw the whole out? I think [/INST] this is where I'm on one end of it Every 3 to 5 years. </s><s>[INST] Which end are you on [/INST] rewrite more often? </s><s>[INST] Right. And 3 to 5 years is [/INST] if you want to really make a lot of progress on computer architecture every five years used to do one from scratch. </s><s>[INST] Mhm. So where does the X- 86, 64 State had come in or what? How often do you? [/INST] I wrote the, I was the co author of that's back in 98, that's 20 years ago. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, so that's still around. [/INST] The instruction set itself has been extended quite a few times and instruction sets are less interesting than the implementation underneath. There's been on X 86 architecture Intel's designed a few, I'm just designed a few very different architectures and I don't, I don't want to go into too much of the detail about how often, but Um there's a tendency to rewrite it every, you know, 10 years and it really should be every five. </s><s>[INST] So you're saying you're an outlier in that sense, [/INST] in the unit more </s><s>[INST] often we write more often. Well, isn't it scary? [/INST] Yeah, of course. Well, scary to who </s><s>[INST] to everybody involved because like you said, repeating the recipe is efficient. Companies want to make Money No, in the individual juniors want to succeed. So you want to incrementally improve, increase the buffer from 3-4. We'll [/INST] just where you get into the diminishing return curves, I think steve jobs said this right? So every you have a project and you start here and it goes up and they have the mission return and to get to the next level you have to do a new one in the initial starting point will be lower than the old optimization point, but it will get higher. So now you have two kinds of fear, short term disaster and long term disaster </s><s>[INST] and you're, you're grownups [/INST] right? Like, you know, people with a quarter by quarter business objective are terrified about changing everything. And people who are trying to run a business or build a computer for a long term objective know that the short term limitations block them from the long term success. So if you look at leaders of companies that had really good long term success every time they saw that they had to redo something they did. </s><s>[INST] And so somebody has to speak up [/INST] or you do multiple projects in parallel, like you optimize the old one while you build a new one. And but the marketing guys are always like promise me that the new computer is faster on every single thing and the computer architect says, well the new computer will be faster on the average, but there's a distribution of results and performance and you'll have some outliers that are slower and that's very hard because they have one customer cares about that one. </s><s>[INST] So speaking of the long term for over 50 years now, Moore's law has served a for me and millions of others as an inspiring beacon. What kind of amazing future Berlin engineers can build? I'm just making your kids laugh all of today. So, uh, first in your eyes, what is moore's law? If you could define for people who don't know? [/INST] Well the simple statement was from Gordon moore was double the number of transistors every two years, something like that. And then my operational model is we increase the performance of computers by two x every two or three years and it's wiggled around substantially over time. And also in how we deliver performance has changed. </s><s>[INST] But [/INST] The foundational idea was two X 2 transistors every two years. The current cadence is something like they call it a shrink factor Like .6 every two years, which is not .5. </s><s>[INST] But that, that's referring strictly again to the original definition [/INST] of transistor count </s><s>[INST] shrink factor. Just getting them smaller, smaller, smaller [/INST] used for a constant chip area if you make the transistors smaller by .6 and You get one over .6 more transistors. </s><s>[INST] So can you linger a little longer. What's the, what's the broader, what do you think should be the broader definition of moore's law? We mentioned how you think of performance. Just broadly. What's a good way to think about moore's law? [/INST] Well, first of all, So I've been aware of Moore's law for 30 years, </s><s>[INST] in which sense [/INST] I've been designing computers for 40, </s><s>[INST] you're just watching it before your eyes kind [/INST] Of swell and somewhere where I became aware of it. I was also informed that Moore's law was going to die in 10 to 15 years And I thought that was true at first, but then after 10 years it was going to die in 10-15 years. And then at one point it was going to die in five years and then it went back up to 10 years and at some point I decided not to worry about that particular product, Gnostic Asian for the rest of my life, which is, which is fun. And then I joined intel and everybody said moore's law is dead. And I thought that's sad because it's the moore's law company and it's not dead and it's always been going to die and humans like these apocryphal kind of statements like we'll run out of food or run out of air or run out of room or run out of, you know, something, </s><s>[INST] right. But it's still incredible that has lived for as long as it has And yes, there's many people who believe now that moore's law is dead. [/INST] You know, they can join the last 50 years of people had to say </s><s>[INST] there's a long tradition. But why do you think if you can and try to understand why do you think it's not dead? [/INST] Well, currently, let's just think people think moore's law is one thing transistors get smaller, but actually under the sheet, there's literally thousands of innovations and almost all those innovations have their own diminishing return curves. So if you graph it, it looks like a cascade of diminishing return curves. I don't know what to call that, but the result is an exponential curve. Well, at least it has been so and we keep inventing new things. So if you're an expert in one of the things on a diminishing return curve, right? And you can see it's plateau, you will probably tell people while this is this is done. Meanwhile, some other pile of people are doing something different. So that's that's just normal. So then there's the observation of how small could a switching device be. So, modern transistor is something like 1000 by 1,005,000 atoms. Right? And you get quantum effects down around 2-2 to 10 atoms. So you can imagine a transistor as small as 10 by 10 by 10. So that's a million times smaller. And then the quantum computational people are working away at how to use quantum effects. So </s><s>[INST] 1000 by 1000 by 1000 [/INST] Adams </s><s>[INST] that's a really clean way of putting [/INST] It. Well fan like a modern transition. If you look at the fan it's like 120 atoms wide. But we can make that thinner and then there's there's a gate wrapped around it and then their spacing, there's a whole bunch of geometry and you know, a competent transistor designer could count both Adams in every single direction. Uh huh. Like there's techniques now to already put down atoms in a single atomic layer. Right? And you can place Adams if you want to it's just you know, from a manufacturing process placing Adam takes 10 minutes and you need to put you know 10 to the 23rd atoms together to make a computer. It would take a long time. So the the methods are you know, both shrinking things and then coming up with effective ways to control what's happening, </s><s>[INST] manufacture stable and cheaply. [/INST] Yeah. So so the innovation stocks pretty broad, you know there's there's equipment, there's optics, there's chemistry, there's physics, there's material science, there's metallurgy, there's lots of ideas about when you put them from materials together, how they interact with a stable, stable over temperature, you know like are the repeatable, you know, there's like there's like literally thousands of technology is involved. </s><s>[INST] But just for the shrinking, you don't think we're quite yet close to the fundamental limits of physics. [/INST] I did a talk on moore's law and I asked for a road map to a path about 100 and after two weeks They said we only got 2, 50, </s><s>[INST] 100, extra 100 x drink [/INST] 50. And I said, Why don't you give it another two weeks? Well, here, here's the thing about moore's law, right? So I believe That the next 10 or 20 years of shrinking is going to happen right now as a computer designer, you have two stances. You think it's going to shrink, in which case you're designing and thinking about architecture in a way that you'll use more transistors or conversely not be swamped by the complexity of all the transistors you get right, you have to have a strategy, </s><s>[INST] you know, so you're open to the possibility and waiting for the possibility of a whole new army of transistors ready to work. [/INST] I'm expecting expecting more transistors every two or three years by a number large enough that how you think about design, how you think about architecture has to change. Like imagine you're, you you build build brick buildings out of bricks and every year the bricks are half the size or every two years. Well, if you kept building bricks the same way, you know, so many bricks per person per day, the amount of time to build a building when we go up exponentially. Right? But if you said I know that's coming. So now I'm going to design equipment and moves bricks faster, uses them better because maybe you're getting something out of the smaller bricks more strength in their walls, you know, less material efficiency out of that. So once you have a road map with what's going to happen, transistors they're gonna get we're gonna get more of them. Then you design all this collateral around it to take advantage of it and also to cope with it. Like that's the thing people understand, it's like if I didn't believe in moore's law and moore's law, transistors showed up, my design teams are all drowned. </s><s>[INST] So what's the what's the hardest part of this in flood of new transistors? I mean even if you just look historically throughout your career, what's what's the thing what fundamentally changes when you had more transistors in the task of designing and architecture? [/INST] Well there's there's two constants, right? One of those people don't get smarter, </s><s>[INST] by the way, there's some signs showing that we do get smarter but because the nutrition whatever. [/INST] Sorry to bring that in effect. Yeah, familiar with it, nobody understands it, nobody knows if it's still going on, so that's on it </s><s>[INST] or whether it's real or not. But yeah, it's a [/INST] I sort of anyway, but I believe for the most part of people aren't getting much smarter, </s><s>[INST] the evidence doesn't support it, right [/INST] and then teams can't grow that much. Alright, alright, so human beings Under, you know, we're really good in teams of 10, you know, up to teams of 100 they can know each other beyond that. You have to have organizational boundaries. So you're kind of you have those are pretty hard constraints right? So then you have to divide and conquer like as the designs get bigger, you have to divide it into pieces, you know, the power of abstraction layers is really high. We used to build computers out of transistors. Now we have a team that turns transistors and logic cells and another team that turns them into functional. It's another one that turns into computers. All right. So we have abstraction layers in there and you have to think about when you shift gears on that. We also use faster computers to build faster computers. So some algorithms run twice as fast on new computers but a lot of algorithms are in squared. So a computer with twice as many transistors and it might take four times times as long to run. So you have to re factor the software like simply using faster computers to build bigger computers doesn't work. So you have to think about all these things. </s><s>[INST] So in terms of computing performance and the exciting possibility that more powerful computers bring is shrinking the thing we've just been talking about one of the for you, one of the biggest exciting possibilities of advancement in performance or is there other directions that you're interested in? Like like in the direction of sort of enforcing given parallelism or like doing massive parallelism in terms of many, many cpus, you know, stacking Cpus on top of each other. That kind of that kind of parallelism or any kind of uh [/INST] well think about it in a different way. So old computers, you know, slow computers you said it will be plus C times D pretty simple. Right? And then we made faster computers with vector units and you can do proper equations and matrices. Right. And then modern like ai computations are like convolutional neural networks where you can involve one large data set against another. And so there's sort of this hierarchy of mathematics, you know from simple equation, two linear equations to matrix equations to deeper kind of computation and the data sets are good and so big that people are thinking of data as a topology problem. You know, data is organized in some immense shape and then the computation which sort of wants to be get data from immense shape and do some computation on it. So the what computers have allowed people to do is have algorithms go much much further. So that that paper you you reference the sudden paper they talked about, you know like when a I started it was apply rule sets to something that's a very simple computational situation. And then when they did first chest thing they solve deep searches so have a huge database of moves and results deep search but it's still just a search right now. We take large numbers of images and we use it to train these weight sets that we can evolve across. It's a completely different kind of phenomena. We call that A. I. And now they're doing the next generation and if you look at it, they're going up this mathematical graph, right? And then computations, both computation and data sets support going up that graph. </s><s>[INST] The kind of competition that my I mean I would argue that all of it is still a search. Right? The just like you said, a topology problems, data says he's searching the data sets for valuable data and also the actual optimization of neural networks is a kind of search for the [/INST] I don't know if you looked at the inner layers of finding a cat. It's not a search. It's it's a set of endless projection. So, you know, projection and here's a shadow of this phone, right? Then you can have a shadow of that onto something in the shadow and that or something. If you look in the layers, you'll see this layer actually describes pointy ears and round Dinos and fuzziness and but the the computation to tease out the attributes is not search </s><s>[INST] like [/INST] the inference part might be searched but the training is not search and then in deep networks they look at layers and they don't even know it's represented. And yet if you take the layers out it doesn't work. Okay. So if I don't take a search Alright, well, but you have to talk to him, a mathematician about what that actually is. </s><s>[INST] We can disagree but the it's just semantics. I think it's not but it's certainly [/INST] not. I would say it's absolutely not semantics, but </s><s>[INST] Okay. All right. Well, if you want to go there uh so optimization to me is search and we're trying to optimize the ability of a neural network to detect cat ears. And the difference between chess and the space, the incredibly multi dimensional, 100,000 dimensional space that, you know, and that works for trying to optimize over is nothing like the chess board database. So it's a totally different kind of thing. And okay, in that sense you can [/INST] say it loses. You know, I can see how you might say if you the funny thing is, is the difference between given search space and found search space. Exactly, yeah, maybe that's a different way. That's a beautiful way to put Okay, </s><s>[INST] But you're saying what's your sense in terms of the basic mathematical operations and the architecture can be a hardware that enables those operations. Do you see the cpus of today still being a really core part of executing those mathematical operations? [/INST] Yes. Well, the operations, you know, continue to be at some track load store compare and branch. It's it's remarkable. So it's interesting that the building blocks of, you know, computers or transistors and you know, under that atoms you've got atoms. Transistors, logic gates, computers, right. You know, functional units and computers. The building blocks of mathematics at some level are things like adds and subtracts multiplies. But the space mathematics can describe as I think essentially infinite. But the computers that run the algorithms are still doing the same things Now, a given algorithm might say I need sports data or I need 32 bit data or I need, you know, um like a convolution operation that naturally takes eight bit data multiplies and sums it up a certain way. So the like the data types in tensorflow imply an optimization set. But when you go right down and look at the computers, it's and and or gates don't add some multiplies. Like like that hasn't changed much now. The quantum researchers think they are going to change that radically. And then there's people who think about analog computing because you look in the brain and it seems to be more analog ish. You know, that maybe there's a way to do that more efficiently, but we have a million X on computation. And I don't know the represent the relationship between computational, let's say intensity and ability to hit mathematical abstractions. I don't know anybody to describe that, but but just like you saw an ai you went from rules that's the simple search too complex searched as a found search like those are, you know, orders of magnitude more computation to do. And as we get the next two orders of magnitude a friend, Roger Gregory said like every order of magnitude changes the computation </s><s>[INST] fundamentally changes what the computation is doing. [/INST] Oh, you know the expression the difference in quantity is a difference in kind, you know the difference between ant and ant hill, right? Or neuron and brain. You know, there's there's there's there's indefinable place where the quantity changed the quality, right? And we've seen that happen in mathematics multiple times. And my guess is it's going to keep happening. </s><s>[INST] So your senses. Yeah. If you focus head down and shrinking the transistor, [/INST] well, not just head down and we're aware well, the software stacks that are running in the computational loads and we're kind of pondering what do you do with a petabyte of memory that wants to be accessed in a sparse way and have, you know, the kind of calculations ai programmers want. So there's a there's a dialogue, an interaction. But when you go in the computer chip, you know, you find Addison sub tractors and multipliers. And </s><s>[INST] so if you zoom out then with, as you mentioned, very sudden, the idea that most of the development in the last many decades in the eye research came from just leveraging computation and just simple algorithms waiting for the computation to [/INST] improve. We'll suffer. Guys have a thing they called the problem of early optimization. Right? So you write a big software stack. And if you start optimizing like the first thing you're right, The odds of that being the performance limiter is low. But when you get the whole thing working, can you make it two X faster by optimizing the right things? Sure. While you're optimizing that, could you have written a new software stack, which would have been a better choice maybe now you have creative tension. So but </s><s>[INST] the whole time as you're doing the writing the that's the software we're talking about the hardware underneath gets fascinating. [/INST] Goes back to the moore's law and moore's Law is going to continue. Then your ai research should expect that to show up and then you make a slightly different set of choices then we've hit the wall. Nothing's going to happen. And from here it's just us rewriting algorithms Like that seems like a failed strategy for the last 30 years of Moore's law's death. </s><s>[INST] So so can you just linger on it? Uh I think you've answered it, but I just I just asked the same dumb question over and over. So what why do you think more as the law is not going to die? Which is the most promising exciting possibility of why it won't die in the next 5, 10 years. So is it that continues shrinking the transistor or is it another s curve that steps in in a totally sort of [/INST] shrinking the transistor is literally thousands of innovations, </s><s>[INST] right? So [/INST] they're all in there, there's a whole bunch of S curves just kind of running their course and and being reinvented and new things, you know, the the semiconductor fabricators and technologists have all announced what's called nano wires. So they took a fin which had a gate around it and turned out into a little wires. We have better control that and they're smaller. And then from there there are some obvious steps about how to shrink that. The metallurgy around wire stocks and stuff has very obvious abilities to shrink. And there's a whole combination of things there to do </s><s>[INST] your senses that we're going to get a lot if this innovation form just that shrinking. [/INST] Yeah, like a factor of 100. A lot. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I would say that's incredible. And it's [/INST] totally it's only 10 or 15 years </s><s>[INST] now, you're smarter, you might know, but to me it's totally unpredictable of what that 100 X would bring in terms of the nature of the computation that people will be [/INST] familiar with Bells Law. So for a long time it was mainframes, Minis workstation, Pc Mobile moore's Law drove faster smaller computers. Right? And then we were thinking about moore's Law. Roger. Kadoorie said every 10 X generates a new computation. So, Scaler vector matrix, topological computation, right? And if you go look at the the industry trends there was, you know, mainframes and minicomputers and N. P. C. S. And then the internet took off and then we got mobile devices and now we're building five G. Wireless with one millisecond latency and people are starting to think about the smart world where everything knows you recognizes you like like like the transformations are going to be like unpredictable. </s><s>[INST] How does it make you feel that you're one of the key architects of this kind of future? So you're not we're not talking about the architects of the high level people who build the angry bird apps and [/INST] snapping angry word apps. Who knows I'm going to be the whole point of the </s><s>[INST] interview. Take a standard that and the attention distracting nature of mobile phones. I'll take a stand but anyway in terms of it that matters much the side effects of smartphones or the attention distraction which [/INST] part? Well who knows you know where does this all eating? It's changing so fast. So my parents used to all of my sisters for hiding in the closet with a wired phone with a dial on it. Stop talking your friends all day now my wife yells at my kids for talking to her friends all day on text. Uh It looks the same to me. </s><s>[INST] It's always it's echoes of the same thing. Okay but you are the one of the key people architect ng the hardware of this future. How does that make you feel, do you feel responsible? Do you feel excited? [/INST] So we're in a social context? So there's billions of people on this planet. There are literally millions of people working on technology. I feel lucky to be, you know what doing what I do and getting paid for it and there's an interest in it. But there's so many things going on in parallel it's like the actions are so unpredictable. If I wasn't here, somebody else would do it. The vectors of all these different things are happening all the time. You know, there's a I'm sure some philosopher meta philosophers, you know, wondering about how we transform our world. </s><s>[INST] So you can't deny the fact that these tools are there that these tools are changing our world. So do you think it's changing for the butter? [/INST] Somebody I read this thing recently, it said the the the two disciplines with the highest G. R. E scores in college or physics and philosophy. Right. And they're both sort of trying to answer the question why is there anything right? And the philosophers, you know, we're on the kind of theological side and the physicists are obviously on the you know the material side and there's 100 billion Galaxies with 100 billion stars. It seems well repetitive at best. So you know they're they're on their way to 10 billion people. I mean it's hard to say what it's all for if that's what you're asking. </s><s>[INST] Yeah I guess I guess [/INST] things do tend to are significantly increases in complexity and I'm curious about how computation, like like our world our physical world inherently generates mathematics, it's kind of obvious, right? So we have X, Y, Z coordinates. You take a sphere, you make it bigger, you get a surface that falls, you know, grows by R squared. Like it generally generates mathematics and that mathematicians and the physicists have been having a lot of fun talking to each other for years. And computation has been, let's say, relatively pedestrian like computation in terms of mathematics has been doing binary binary algebra while those guys have been gallivanting through the other realms of possibility. Right now, recently the computation let you do mathematical mathematical computations that are sophisticated enough that nobody understands how the answers came out. </s><s>[INST] Right. Machine learning machine [/INST] used to be you get data set you guess at a function. The function is considered physics is if it's predictive of new functions, new datasets, modern. Yeah. You can take a large data set with no intuition about what it is. And use machine learning to find a pattern that has no function, right? And it can arrive at results that I don't know if they're completely mathematically describable. So computation is kind of done something interesting compared to a equals B plus C. </s><s>[INST] There's something reminiscent of that step from the basic operations of addition to taking a step towards neural networks that's reminiscent of what life on earth and its origins was doing. Do you think we're creating sort of the next step in our evolution in creating artificial intelligence systems that [/INST] well, I don't know. I mean, you know, there's so much in the universe already, it's hard to say </s><s>[INST] what are [/INST] human beings working on additional abstraction layers and possibilities? You would appear. So does that mean that human beings don't need dogs? You know? No. Like, like there's so many things that are all simultaneously interesting and useful, </s><s>[INST] but you've seen throughout your career you've seen greater and greater level abstractions built in artificial machines, Right. Do you think when you look at humans, do you think that look of all life on earth as a single organism, building this thing, this machine, greater and greater levels of abstraction. Do you think humans are the peak, the top of the food chain in this long arc of history on earth? Or do you think we're just somewhere in the middle, are we are we the basic functional operations of a CPU are we the C plus plus program the python program or with your [/INST] Network? Like somebody's people have calculated like, how many operations does the brain do something? You know, I've seen a number 10 to the 18th about a bunch of times arrived different ways. So, could you make a computer that did 10 to the 20th operations? </s><s>[INST] Do you think [/INST] we're going to do that now? Is there something magical about how brains compute things? I don't know. My personal experiences is interesting because, you know, you think, you know how you think and then you have all these ideas and you can't figure out how they happened and if you meditate, you know the like what what you can be aware of is interesting. So I don't know if brains are magical or not. You know, the physical evidence says no lots of people's personal experiences. Yes. So what would be funny as if brains are magical and yet we can make brains with more computation. You know, I don't know what to say about that. </s><s>[INST] But what do you think uh magic is an emergent phenomenon? [/INST] What </s><s>[INST] uh let me I don't know. Let me ask. Jim Keller of what in your view is consciousness [/INST] with with consciousness? </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Like what? You know, consciousness love things that are these deeply human things that seems to emerge from our brain. Is that something that will be able to make encode in chips that get faster and faster and faster and faster? [/INST] That's like a 10-hour conversation. Nobody really knows. Can </s><s>[INST] you summarize it in a couple [/INST] of a couple of words? Um many people have observed that organisms run at lots of different levels. Right? If you had two neurons, somebody said you'd have one sensory neuron and one motor neuron. Right? So we move towards things and away from things and we have physical integrity and safety or not. Right? And then if you look at the animal kingdom, you can see brains that are a little more complicated. And at some point there's a planning system and then there's an emotional system that's, you know, happy about being safe are unhappy about being threatened, right? And then our brains have massive numbers of structures like planning and movement and thinking and feeling and drives and emotions and we seem to have multiple layers of thinking systems. We have a brain a dream system that nobody understands whatsoever, which I find completely hilarious and you can think in a way that those systems are more independent and you can observe the different parts of yourself. Can observe them. I don't know which one's magical, I don't know which one's not computational. So </s><s>[INST] is it possible that it's all competition? [/INST] Probably is there a limit to computation? I don't think so. </s><s>[INST] Do you think the universe is a computer? Like it seems [/INST] to be it's a weird kind of computer because if it was a computer right? Like when they do calculations on what it how much calculation it takes to describe quantum effects is unbelievably high. So if it was a computer, when you built it out of something that was easier to compute right? That's that's a funny, it's a funny system. But then the simulation guys pointed out that the rules are kind of interesting, like when you look really close, it's uncertain and the speed of light says you can only look so far and things can't be simultaneous except for the odd entanglement problem where they seem to be Like the rules are all kind of weird. And somebody said physics is like having 50 equations with 50 variables to define 50 variables like, you know, it's, you know, like physics itself has been a ship show for thousands of years. It seems odd when you get to the corners of everything, you know, it's either un computable or undefinable or uncertain. </s><s>[INST] It's almost like the designers of the simulation are trying to prevent us from understanding it perfectly. [/INST] But also that the things that require calculations require so much calculation that our idea of the universe of the computer is absurd because every single little bit of it takes all the computation in the universe to figure out That's a weird kind of computer. You say the simulation is running in the computer, which has by definition infinite computation, </s><s>[INST] not infinite. You mean if the universe is infinite? Yeah, [/INST] well every little piece of our universe seems to take infinite computation and you're out Well, a lot, some pretty big number compute this little teeny spot, takes all the mass in the local one year by one Lightyear space, it's close enough to influence. </s><s>[INST] So it's a heck of a computer if it is [/INST] what I know it's it's a weird, So we're description because the simulation description seems to break when you look closely at it, but the rules of the universe seemed to imply some things up that seems a little arbitrary, </s><s>[INST] the whole, the universe, the whole thing, the laws of physics, it just seems like like how did it come out to be? Yeah, the way it is. [/INST] Lots of people talk about that. It's you know, it's like I said, the two smartest groups of humans are working on the same problem from different, different aspects and they're both complete failures. So that's that's kind of cool. </s><s>[INST] They might succeed eventually. [/INST] Say, well, after 2000 years, the trend isn't good. </s><s>[INST] 2000 years is nothing in the span of the history of the universe. So we have some time, [/INST] but the next 1000 years doesn't look good either. So </s><s>[INST] that's what everybody says at every stage. But with moore's law, as you just described, not being dead. The exponential growth of technology, the future seems pretty incredible. [/INST] Well, it'll be interesting. That's for sure. </s><s>[INST] That's right. So what are your thoughts on Ray Kurzweil sense that exponential improvement and technology will continue indefinitely. That is that how you see moore's law? Do you see moore's law more broadly in the sense that technology of all kinds has a way of stacking s curves on top of each other where it will be exponential and then we'll see all kinds [/INST] of what does an exponential a million mean that's that's a pretty amazing number. And that's just for a local little piece of silicon now, let's imagine you say, decided to get 1000 tons of silicon to collaborate in one computer at a million times of density, Like now you're now you're talking I don't know, 10 to the 20th more computation power than our current already. Unbelievably fast computers like nobody knows what that's going to mean. The sci fi guys called com petroleum. Like when like a local civilization turns to nearby star into a computer, I like island. That's true. But </s><s>[INST] so just even when you shrink the transistor, that's only one dimension. The ripple effects of that. [/INST] People tend to think about computers is a cost problem. Right? So computers are made of silicon and minor amounts of metals and you know this and that none of those things cost any money. Like there's plenty of sand, like, like you could just turn the beach and a little bit ocean water into computers. So all the cost is in the equipment to do it. And the trend on equipment is once you figure out how to build the equipment, the trend of cost is zero. Ellen said first you figure out what can figure Haitian you want the atoms in and then how to put them there, right? Because well what here's the, you know, his his great insight is people are how constraint, I have this thing, I know how it works and then little tweaks to that will generate something as opposed to what do I actually want and then figure out how to build it. It's a very different mindset and almost nobody has it obviously. </s><s>[INST] Well, let me ask on that topic, You were one of the key early people in the development of autopilot, at least in the hardware side. Elon musk believes that autopilot and vehicle autonomy. If you just look at that problem can follow this kind of exponential improvement in terms of the, how the, how question that we're talking about. There's no reason why can't, what are your thoughts on this particular space of vehicle autonomy and you're part of it And you all mosques and Tesla's vision for [/INST] the computer you need to build with straightforward And you could argue, well, doesn't need to be two times faster or five times or 10 times, but that's just a matter of time or price in the short run. So that's, that's not a big deal. You don't have to be especially smart to drive a car. So it's not like a super hard problem. I mean, the big problem with safety is attention, which computers are really good at not skills. </s><s>[INST] Well, let me push back on one. You see everything you said is correct. But we, as humans tend to, uh, uh, tend to take for granted how how incredible our vision system is. So [/INST] You can drive a car over 2050 vision and you can train a neural network to extract the distance of any object in the shape of any surface from a video and data. Yeah, but that's really simple. </s><s>[INST] It's simple. It's [/INST] a simple data problem. </s><s>[INST] It's not, it's not simple. It's because because it's not just detecting objects, it's understanding the scene and it's being able to do it in a way that doesn't make errors. So the beautiful thing about the human vision system and the entire brain around the whole thing is we were able to fill in the gaps. It's not just about perfectly detecting cars. It's inferring they included cars. It's trying to it's understanding that I think [/INST] that's mostly a data problem. </s><s>[INST] So you think what data with compute with improvement of computation with improvement and [/INST] collection there's a you know, when you're driving a car and somebody cuts you off, your brain has theories about why they did it. You know, they're a bad person, they're distracted, they're dumb. You know, you can listen to yourself. So, you know, if you think that narrative is important to be able to successfully drive a car, then current autopilot systems can't do it. But if cars are ballistic things with tracks and probabilistic changes of speed and direction and roads are fixed and given, by the way, they don't change dynamically, you can map the world really thoroughly, you can place every object really thoroughly right? You can calculate trajectories of things really thoroughly </s><s>[INST] right? But everything you said about really thoroughly has a different degree of difficulty. So [/INST] you could say at some point, computer autonomous systems will be way better at things that humans are lousy at like we'll be better. Abstention. They'll always remember there was a pothole in the road that humans keep forgetting about. Remember that this set of roads houses these weirdo lines on it, that the computers figured out once and especially if they get updates. So if somebody changes are given, like the key to robots and stuff, somebody said is to maximize the givens. </s><s>[INST] Right, Right, [/INST] right. So, so having a robot pick up this bottle cap as well as you put a red dot on the top, because then you have to figure out if you want to do certain things with it, you know, maximize the givens is the thing and autonomous systems are happily maximizing the givens like humans when you drive someplace new, you remember it because you're processing it the whole time and after the 50th time you drove to work, you get to work, you don't know how you got there, right, you're on autopilot, right? Autonomous cars are always on autopilot, but the cars have no theories about why they got cut off or while they're in traffic. So that's never stopped paying attention. </s><s>[INST] So I tend to believe you do have to have theories, meta models of other people, especially pedestrians, cyclists, but also with other cars. Everything you said is uh, is actually essential to driving, Driving is a lot more complicated than people realize, I think sort of push back slightly, but [/INST] cut into traffic, right? You can't just wait for a gap. You have to be somewhat aggressive. You'll be surprised how simple the calculation for that is. </s><s>[INST] I may be on that particular point, but there's um uh, I maybe I should have to push back. I would be surprised. You know what? Yeah, I'll just say where I stand. I would be very surprised. But I think it's, you might be surprised how complicated it is that [/INST] I say. I tell people it's like progress. Disappoints in the short run surprises in the long run. It's very possible. I suspect in 10 years it'll be just like taken for granted </s><s>[INST] but you're probably right now it looks [/INST] like it's going to be a $50 solution that nobody cares about. Gps is like, wow gps is we have satellites in space that tell you where your location is. It was a really big deal. Now. Everything has a Gps and </s><s>[INST] yeah, that's true. But I do think that systems that involve human behavior are more complicated than we give them credit for. So we can do incredible things with technology that don't involve humans. But when [/INST] the Cubans are less complicated than people, you know, frequently, abs cry babe, maybe we tend to operate out of large numbers of patterns and just keep doing it over and over. </s><s>[INST] But I can't trust you because you're a human. That's something something a human would say. But my hope is on the point you've made is even if no matter who's right. You, they're hoping that there's a lot of things that humans aren't good at. That. Machines are definitely good at like you said, attention, things like that. Well, there'll be so much better that the overall picture of safety and autonomy will be obviously cars will be safe even if they're not as good [/INST] as I'm a big believer in safety. I mean they're already The current safety systems like cruise control that doesn't let you run into people and lane keeping. There are so many features that you just look at the parade o of accidents and knocking off like 80% of them, you know, super doable </s><s>[INST] just to linger on the autopilot team and the efforts there, the, it seems to be that there is a very intense scrutiny by the media and the public in terms of safety, the pressure of the bar. But before autonomous vehicles, what are your sort of as a person? Uh, they're working on the hardware and try to build a system that builds a safe vehicle and so on. What was your sense about that pressure? Is it unfair? Is it expected of new technology? [/INST] It seems reasonable. I was interested. I talked to both american and european regulators and I was worried that the regulations would write into the rules. Technology solutions like modern brake systems imply hydraulic brakes. So if you'll read the regulations to meet the letter of the law for breaks. It sort of has to be hydraulic, right? And the regulator said they're, they're interested in the use cases like a head on crash and offset crash don't hit pedestrians, don't run into people, don't leave the road, don't run a red light or a stop light. They were very much into the scenarios and you know, and they had, they had all the data about which scenarios injured or killed the most people. And for the most part, those conversations were like, what's the right thing to do to take the next step. Ellen is very interested also in the benefits of autonomous driving or freeing people's time and attention as well as safety. And I think that's also an interesting thing, but you know, building autonomous system. So they're safe and safer than people seemed since the goal is to be tannic, safer than people having the bar to be safer than people. And scrutinizing accident seems philosophically, you know, correct. So I think that's a good thing. </s><s>[INST] What are, it's different than the things you worked at? Intel AMG Apple with autopilot chip design and hardware design. What are interesting or challenging aspects of building this specialized kind of computing system in the automotive space? [/INST] I mean there's two tricks to building like an automotive computer. One is the software team, the machine learning team is developing algorithms that are changing fast. So as you're building the accelerator, you have this, you no worry or intuition that the algorithms will change enough that The accelerator will be the wrong one. Right. And there's a generic thing, which is if you build a really good general purpose computer, say its performance is one And then keep you guys will deliver about five extra performance for the same amount of silicon because instead of discovering parallelism, you're given parallelism and then special accelerators get another 2 to 5 X on top of a GPU because you say I know the math is always eight bit integers into 32 bit accumulators and the operations are the subset of mathematical possibilities. So although, you know, ai accelerators have a claimed performance benefit over GPS because in the narrow math space you're nailing the algorithm now, you still try to make it programmable but the ai field is changing really fast. So there is a, you know, there's a little creative tension there of I want the acceleration afforded by specialization without being over specialist so that the new algorithm is so much more effective that you would have been better off on a Gpu. So there is a tension there um, to build a good computer for an application like automotive, there's all kinds of center inputs and safety processors and a bunch of stuff. So one of Helen's goals to make it super affordable. So every car gets an autopilot computer. So some of the recent starts to look at and they have a server in the trunk because they're saying I'm going to build this autopilot computer replaces the driver. So their cost budgets $10 or $20,000 and Elon's constraint was, I'm going to put one every in every car whether people buy auto autonomous driving or not. So the cost constraint he had in mind was great, right? And to hit that, you have to think about the system design is complicated, it's fun. You know, it's like, it's like it's craftsman's work like a violin maker, right? You can say Stradivarius is this incredible thing. The musicians are incredible. But the guy making the violin, you know, picked wood and sanded it and then he cut it, you know, and he glued it, you know, and he waited for the right day so that when you put the finish on it, it didn't, you know, do something dumb. That's craftsman's work, right? You may be a genius craftsman because you have the best techniques and you discover a new one. But most engineering craftsman's work and humans really like to do that, you know, humans know everybody </s><s>[INST] humans. [/INST] I used to, I dug ditches when I was in college, I got really good at it satisfying. </s><s>[INST] So digging ditches also across the [/INST] middle. Yeah, of course. So, so there's an expression called complex mastery behavior. So when you're learning something that's fun because you're learning something when you do something that's right and simple, it's not that satisfying. But if the steps that you have to do our complicated and you're good at them, it's satisfying to do them. And then if you're intrigued by it all as you're doing them, you sometimes learn new things that you can raise your game. But Preston's work is good and engineers like engineering is complicated enough that you have to learn a lot of skills and then a lot of what you do is then Craftsman's work, which is fun, </s><s>[INST] autonomous driving, building a very uh, resource constraint computer. So computer has to be cheap enough. That putting every single car that's essentially boils down to craftsman's work, its [/INST] engineering. It's other thoughtful decisions and problems to solve and Trade offs to make, you need 10 camera and ports are eight, you know, you're building for the current car, the next one, you know, how do you do the safety stuff? You know, there's a whole bunch of details, but it's fun, but it's not like I'm building a new type of neural network which has a new mathematics and the new computer at work, you know, that, that's like there's a, there's more invention than that. But the reduction to practice, once you pick the architecture, you look inside, what do you see ADDers and multipliers and memories and, you know, the basics. So computers is always this weird sort of abstraction layers of ideas and thinking that reduction to practice is transistors and wires and, you know, pretty basic stuff and that's an interesting phenomena by the way that like factory work, like lots of people think factory workers, road assembly stuff. I've been on the assembly line. Like the people work that really like it. It's a really great job. It's really complicated putting cars together. It's hard, right? And the car is moving and the parts are moving and sometimes the parts are damaged and you have to coordinate putting all the stuff together and people are good at it. They're good at it. And I remember one day I went to work and the line was shut down for some reason. And some of the guys sitting around, we're really bummed because they had reorganized a bunch of stuff and they were going to hit a new record for the number of cars built that day and they were all gung ho to do it. And the news were big tough buggers and uh, you know, but what they did was complicated and you couldn't do it. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] I mean, well after a while you could, but you'd have to work your way up because, you know, like putting up bright, what's called the brights, the trim on a car On a moving assembly line where it has to be attached 25 places in a minute and a half is unbelievably complicated and and human beings can do. It's really good. I think that's harder than driving a car by the way, </s><s>[INST] putting together working, working in a factory to smart people can disagree. [/INST] Yeah, </s><s>[INST] I think dr driving a car, [/INST] we'll get you in the factory something and then we'll see </s><s>[INST] not for us. Humans driving a car is easy. I'm saying building a machine that drives a car is not easy. Okay. Okay. Driving a car is easy for humans because we've been evolving for billions of [/INST] years of cars. Yeah. Do the pale that the cars are super cool. </s><s>[INST] Uh now you join the rest of the mocking me. [/INST] Okay. You know, just yeah intrigued by your, you know, your anthropology. Yeah. I have to go dig into that. </s><s>[INST] There's some inaccuracies there. Yes. Okay. But in general, what have you learned in terms of thinking about passion, Craftsmanship, tension, chaos. You know, the whole mess of it or what have you learned? Have taken away from your time working with Elon musk, working at Tesla, which is known to be a place of chaos, Innovation, craftsmanship. And I [/INST] really like the way you thought like you think you have an understanding about what first principles of something is and then you talk to Helen about it and you you didn't scratch the surface. You know, he he has a deep belief no matter what you do is a local maximum. Right? I had a friend, he invented a better electric motor and it was like a lot better than what we were using. And one day he came by and said, you know, I'm a little disappointed because you know, this is really great and you didn't seem that impressed. And I said, you know, and the super intelligent aliens come, Are they gonna be looking for you? Like where is he? The guy who built the motor? Probably not. You know, like, like, like but doing interesting work that's both innovative and let's say Craftsman's work on the current thing. Its really satisfying. It's good. And that's cool. And then Ellen was gonna taking everything apart. Like what's the deep first principle? Oh no. What's really know what's really, you know, you know that that ability to look at it without assumptions and and how constraints is super wild. You know, we built rocket ship and using that car and you know everything. And that's super fun. And he's into it too. Like when they first landed to SpaceX rockets to Tesla, We had a video projector in the big room and like 500 people came down and when they landed, everybody cheered and some people cried, it was so cool. All right. But how did you do that? Well, no, super hard. And then people say, well, it's chaotic really to get out of all your assumptions. You think that's not going to be unbelievably painful. And new Zealand tough. Yeah, probably the people look back on it and say, boy, I'm really happy I had that experience to go take apart that many layers of assumptions. Sometimes super fun. Sometimes painful. </s><s>[INST] So it could be emotionally and intellectually painful. That whole process just stripping away assumptions. [/INST] Yeah, imagine 99% of your thought process is protecting your self conception and 98% of that's wrong now. You got their mouth right? What do you think you're feeling when you get back into that one bit that's useful and now you're open and you have the ability to do something different. I don't know if I got the math right? It might be 99.9 but it ain't 50 </s><s>[INST] Imagining it. The 50%. It's hard [/INST] enough now for a long time I've suspected you could get better. Like you can think better, you can think more clearly, you can take things apart and there are lots of examples of that people who do that. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] so and Nylon is an example of that. You are an example. So [/INST] you know if I am, I'm fun to talk to. Certainly I've learned a lot of stuff. Well here's the other thing is like I joked like, like I read books and people think, oh you read books? Well no, I brought a couple of books a week for 55 years, Well maybe 50 because I didn't really learn to read to his age or something and and it turns out when people write books, they often Take 20 years of their life where they passionately did something reduced it to 200 pages. That's kind of fun and then you go, you go online and you can find out who wrote the best books and who like, you know, that's kind of all just so there's this wild selection process and then you can read it for the most part I understand it and then you can go apply it. Like I went to one company, I thought I haven't managed much before. So I read 20 management books and I started talking to him and basically compared to all the VPs running around, I'd run night Red 19 more management books than anybody else. It wasn't even that hard and half the stuff worked. Like first time it wasn't even rocket science, </s><s>[INST] but at the core of that is questioning the assumptions or sort of entering thinking, first principles thinking sort of looking at the reality of the situation and using using that knowledge, applying that knowledge. So [/INST] yes, so I would say my brain has this idea that you can question first assumptions and but I can go days at a time and forget that and you have to kind of like circle back at an observation </s><s>[INST] because it is because it's [/INST] challenging. Well, it's hard to keep it front and center because you know, you're you operate on so many levels all the time and you know, getting this done takes priority or you know, being happy takes priority or you know, screwing around takes priority. Like, like, like how you go through life is complicated and then you remember, oh yeah, I could really think first principles ship that's that's tiring. You know what you do for a while and that's kind of cool. </s><s>[INST] So just as a last question in your sense from the big picture from the first principles, do you think you kind of answered already? But do you think autonomous driving is something we can solve on a timeline of years. So 1235, 10 years as opposed to a century [/INST] definitely </s><s>[INST] just to linger in it a little longer. Where's the confidence coming from? Is it the fundamentals of the problem? The fundamentals of building the hardware and the software [/INST] as a computational problem understanding ballistics, roles, topography. It seems pretty solvable. I mean and you can see this you know like like speech recognition for a long time people are doing you know frequency and domain analysis and and all kinds of stuff and that didn't work for at all. Right. And then they did deep learning about it and it worked great and it took multiple iterations and autonomous driving his way past the frequency analysis point. You know use radar don't run into things and the data gathering is going up and the computation is going up and the algorithm understanding is going up and there's a whole bunch of problems getting solved like that. </s><s>[INST] The data side is really powerful but I disagree with both you and you and I'll tell you and once again as I did before that that when you add human beings into the picture, the it's no longer a ballistics problem. It's something more complicated. But I could be very well proven [/INST] cars are hardly damped in terms of ready to change. Like the steering and the steering system is really slow compared to a computer. The acceleration of the acceleration is really slow. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. On a certain time scale on a ballistics timescale, but human behavior, I don't know, I shouldn't [/INST] say beans are really slow too weirdly. We operate, you know, half a second behind reality. I'll be really understands that one either. It's pretty funny. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] yeah, sure. </s><s>[INST] It will be very well. Could be surprised. And I think with the rate of improvement in all aspects on both the computer and the software and the hardware, there's going to be pleasant surprises all over the place. Speaking of unpleasant surprises, many people have worries about a singularity in the development of AI. Forgive me for such [/INST] questions. </s><s>[INST] When AI improves the exponential and reaches a point of super human level general intelligence. Uh you know, beyond the point, there's no looking back, do you share this worry of existential threats from artificial intelligence from computers becoming super human level intelligence? [/INST] No, not really. You know, like we already have a very stratified society. And then if you look at the whole animal kingdom of capabilities and abilities and interests and you know, smart people have their niche and you know, normal people have their niche and craftsman's have their niche and you know, animals have their niche. I suspect that the domains of interest for things that, you know, astronomically different, Like the whole something got 10 times smarter than us and wanted to track us all down because what we like to have coffee at Starbucks, Like it doesn't seem plausible now. Is there an existential problem that how do you live in a world where there's something way smarter than you and you based your kind of self esteem on being the smartest local person? Well, there's what .1% of the population who thinks that because the rest of the population has been dealing with it since they were born. So the the breath of possible experience that can be interesting is really big. And you know, super intelligence seems likely, although we still don't know if we're magical, but I suspect we're not and it seems likely that will create possibilities that are interesting for us. And it's it's interests will be interesting for that for whatever it is, it's not obvious why it's interest would somehow want to fight over some square foot of dirt or, you know, whatever the, you know, the usual fears are about. </s><s>[INST] So you don't think you'll inherent some of the darker aspects of human nature [/INST] depends on how you think reality is constructed. So for for whatever reason human beings are in, let's say creative tension and opposition with both are good and bad forces, like there's lots of philosophical understanding of that, right? I don't know why that would be different. </s><s>[INST] So you think the evils is necessary for the good? I mean, the attention, [/INST] I don't know about evil, but like we live in a competitive world where you're good as somebody else's all right, You know, evil, you know, there's there's the malignant part of it, but that seems to be self limiting, although occasionally it's it's super horrible. </s><s>[INST] But yes, there's a debate over ideas and some people have different beliefs and that that debate itself is a process so that arriving at something. [/INST] Yeah, why wouldn't I continue </s><s>[INST] just But you don't think that whole process will leave humans behind in a way that's painful, Emotionally painful. Yes, for the one for the .1%, they'll be [/INST] why isn't it already painful for a large percentage of the population? And it is I mean, society does have a lot of stress in it About the 1% and about to this and about that. But, you know, everybody has a lot of stress in life about what they find satisfying and and, you know, know yourself seems to be the proper dictum and pursue something that makes your life meaningful. Seems proper. And there's so many avenues on that. Like there's so much unexplored space at every single level, you know, I'm somewhat of my nephew called me a jaded optimist, you know, So it's </s><s>[INST] there's a beautiful tension that in that label. But if you were to look back at your life and uh could relive a moment, a set of moments because there were the happiest times of your life outside of family. What what would that be? [/INST] I don't want to relive any moment. I like that. I like that situation where you have some amount of optimism and then the, the anxiety of the unknown. </s><s>[INST] So you love the unknown, the uh just the mystery of it. [/INST] I don't know about the mystery. Sure, get your blood pumping. </s><s>[INST] What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life? And this pale blue dot, [/INST] it seems to be what it does like the universe for whatever reason makes atoms, which makes us, which we do stuff and we figure out things and we explore things and </s><s>[INST] that's just what it is. [/INST] It's not just yeah, </s><s>[INST] it is [/INST] jim, </s><s>[INST] I don't think there's a better place to end it. It's a huge honor and uh [/INST] super fun. </s><s>[INST] Thank you so much for talking [/INST] today. Great, </s><s>[INST] thanks for listening to this conversation and thank you to our presenting sponsor cash app, download it. Use code lex podcast. You'll get $10.10 dollars will go to first a stem education non profit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to become future leaders and innovators. If you enjoy this podcast subscribe my youtube, give it five stars on apple podcast, Follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or simply connect with me on twitter and now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Gordon moore. If everything you try works, you aren't trying hard enough. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] the following is a conversation with chris Latner currently, he's a senior director of google working on several projects including CPU Gpu tpu accelerators for tensorflow swift for tensorflow and all kinds of machine learning compiler magic going on behind the scenes. He's one of the top experts in the world on compiler technologies, which means he deeply understands the intricacies of how hardware and software come together to create efficient code. He created the L L VM compiler infrastructure project and the clang compiler. He led major engineering efforts at Apple, including the creation of the Swift programming language. He also briefly spent time at Tesla as vice president of autopilot software during the transition from autopilot hardware. One to hardware to when Tesla essentially started from scratch to build an in house software infrastructure for autopilot. I could have easily talked to chris for many more hours compiling code down across the levels, abstraction is one of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of what computers do and he is one of the world's experts in this process. It's rigorous science and it's messy, beautiful art. This conversation is part of the artificial intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on youtube itunes are simply connect with me on twitter at lex Friedman spelled F R I D and now here's my conversation with Chris Latner, What was the first program you've ever written? My first program [/INST] back. And when was it? I think I started as a kid and my parents got a basic programming book. And so when I started was typing out programs from a book and seeing how they worked and then typing them in wrong and trying to figure out why they were not working right that kind of stuff. </s><s>[INST] So basic, what was the first language that you remember yourself maybe falling in love with like really connecting with? [/INST] I don't know I mean I feel like I've learned a lot along the way and each of them have a different special thing about them. So I started in Basic and then went like GW basic which was the thing back in the dos days and then upgrade to Q basic and eventually Quick Basic which are all slightly more fancy versions of Microsoft basic um made the jump to pascal and started doing machine language programming and assembly in Pasco which was really cool turbo pascal was amazing for its day. Um eventually going to C C plus plus and then kind of did lots of other weird things. </s><s>[INST] I feel like he took the dark path which is the you could you could have gone lisp [/INST] you could have a higher </s><s>[INST] level sort of functional philosophical hippy route. Instead you went into like the dark arts of the [/INST] straight straight into the machine. So started with basic pascal and then assembly and then wrote a lot of assembly and um eventually eventually did small talk and other things like that but that was not the starting point. </s><s>[INST] But so what what is this journey to see is that in high school is that in college [/INST] I was in high school. So and then that was, it was really about trying to be able to do more powerful things than what Pasco could do and also to learn a different world. So he was really confusing to me with pointers and the syntax and everything and it took a while, but pascal's much more principles in various ways, sees more, I mean it has its historical roots but it's it's not as easy to learn </s><s>[INST] with pointers. There's this memory management thing that you have to become conscious of is that the first time you start to understand that there's resources that you're supposed to [/INST] manage well. So you have that in pascal as well. But in pascal these like the carrot instead of the star and there's some small differences like that, but it's not about pointer arithmetic. And and and see you end up thinking about how things get laid out in memory a lot more. And so in Pasco you have allocating and reallocating and owning the memory, but just the programs are simpler and you don't have to, well for example, paschal has a string type and so you can think about a string instead of an array of characters which are consecutive in memory. So it's little bit of a higher level abstraction. </s><s>[INST] So uh let's get into it. Let's talk about L L V M C lang and compilers. So can you tell me first what L O V. And stealing our and how is it that you find yourself the creator and lead developer one of the most powerful compiler optimization systems in use today? [/INST] Sure. So I guess they're they're different things. So let's start with. What is the compiler? </s><s>[INST] It's a [/INST] is that a good place to start? </s><s>[INST] What are the phases of a compiler [/INST] where the parts? Yeah. What is it? So what is even a compiler used for? So the way the way I look at this is you have a two sided problem of you have humans that need to write code and then you have machines that need to run the program that the human wrote and for lots of reasons that humans don't want to be writing and binary and want to think about every piece of hardware. And so at the same time that you have lots of humans, you also have lots of kinds of hardware. And so compilers are the art of allowing humans to think at a level of abstraction that they want to think about. And then get that program, get the thing that they wrote to run on a specific piece of hardware. And the interesting and exciting part of all this is that there's now lots of different kinds of hardware, chips like X 86 Powerpc and arm and things like that, but also high performance accelerators for machine learning and other things like that are also just different kinds of hardware. Gpu s. These are new kinds of hardware and at the same time on the programming side of it, you have your basic you have see you have javascript, you have python, you have swift, you have like lots of other languages that are all trying to talk to the human in a different way to make them more expressive and capable and powerful. And so Compilers are the thing that goes from 1 to the other. No. </s> |
<s>[INST] the CIA had something to do with. [/INST] Yes, of course. That's one of the earliest operations of the C. I a wait </s><s>[INST] a minute. What what was, yes of course. What was the what was the CIA doing? [/INST] C. I. A. This is the time at the post war era. </s><s>[INST] In the fifties, [/INST] In the 50s, 40s and the 50's the british empire, which was really the major superpower of the region. After the collapse of the desires empire gradually took the second seat to the americans to where the newcomers and the great powers and the victors of the Second World War. And the americans viewed Iran as an important uh as an important country since it has the largest uh common borders with the soviet union. And it was did the south was the Persian gulf, which at the time was the greatest uh supplier of oil to the outside world. And therefore the americans had a particular interest in Iran. And in the earlier stages their interest was in the interest of the Iranian government. They wanted to get rid of both the soviet union which made the return in the post war era and of course the british that were gradually withdrawing from Iran. But they they had a full control over the anglo Iranian oil company, they changed the name to Anglo Iranian oil company. When the name of the country officially changed from pressure to Iran in the west. Um the name of the company changed And they got into a huge dispute with the with other government that eventually led to the coup of 1953, which eventually created a very, very distressful memory in the minds of many of the Iranian nationalists that this was the betrayal of the great powers, the british and americans. Yes, C I A played a part because see I feared contrary to the british that they were afraid of their own oil in Iran. The C. I. A. Was afraid of the soviet penetration in in the south and particularly because there was a very powerful put a very powerful Communist Party in the two, the party of Iran. So they gradually shifted between the Truman administration and our Eisenhower administration. These are early days of the C. I. A. And then they actually did participate uh to send their agents. There's a long story to that and it eventually resulted in a successful coup that removed from power. </s><s>[INST] What's the United States interest here? Why are they using, say, are they trying to make sure there's not too much centralization of power in this region. They [/INST] were afraid of the fact that the that of the soviet union and during the Cold War, that was the concern, </s><s>[INST] they actually almost want to protect Iran and its own sovereign processes from the influence of the [/INST] Soviets because they were afraid of the fact if Iran or I think this is part of the, I'm simplifying a very complex picture. But the but but the americans basically, we're thinking that if Iran is going to be lost through soviet influence, then eventually, basically all the resources in the Persian gulf are going to be threatened and there and this would basically is the national security of the United States and all of the Western allies, european allies. So in a sense, this was the long arm of the C I A to try to Try to make sure that that's not going to happen. And then of course, they were persuaded by the British British were the old hand which were in Iran since the beginning of the 19th century. They always had relations with Iran and so forth. So they gradually replaced and of course, I don't want to give them this kind of a satanic view that americans was a bad influence because they had also some very good influences in Iraq. But this particular episode somehow shed dark light on the american presence and was used and abused time and again, particularly the revolution 9, 1979 which was this great satan idea that Khomeini created basically was based on the fact is 1953 you were responsible for the downfall of a national government in Iran, which as a matter of fact he had no respect for it. Khomeini had no respect for The national secular, nationally liberals, including Mohammed Masada what he was using it as a, as a rhetorical tool for his own purposes. But what happened is that after 1953 we see it again, the rise of authoritarian Mohammad Reza shows power and </s><s>[INST] then he is, that's the shot, [/INST] that's the shot, that is the son of </s><s>[INST] And technically what is Shaw [/INST] shaw is an old term in Persian that comes from a pre Islamic Persian of ancient times </s><s>[INST] in the context of democracy. Should it be seen as like a supreme leader? King is [/INST] the head of the executive power According to the constitution of 1906 </s><s>[INST] oh, that's in the constitution. They [/INST] actually has a place in the constitution, </s><s>[INST] but the actual terms Okay, interesting. [/INST] But the show is a very old term. </s><s>[INST] It's almost like a monarchic term, like like a king. [/INST] Yeah, it is actually is a term peculiar to Iran, I've written about it somewhere, but because the term that the western world in the ancient times has been rex for royalty and the king in the eastern world in India is right, is the same origin, the same route. Iran never shared that they had the idea of because rex and I don't want to get into too much of Entomology, but this is an interesting one, rex and raj both means the one that opens the road for basically enforcer of religion. Okay, um in enforcer of the right religion because rex and raj. Both have the after the theological origin of right, you see, and right means the right religion basically. </s> |
<s>[INST] that's a that's a really exciting uh future for creative for myself to the creator. So first of all I working on thomas vehicles. I'm a roboticist. I love robots. And I think your fascination with snakes, both natural and artificial robots. I share your fascination. I mean their movement is beautiful, adaptable. The adaptability is is fascinating. There are, I looked it up. 2900 species of snakes in the world. 875 enemies. Some are tiny, some are huge. Yeah. Uh saw that there's one that's 25 ft in some cases. So what's the most interesting thing that you connect with in terms of snakes, both natural and artificial? Why? What what was the connection with robotics ai and this particular form of a robot? [/INST] Well, it actually came out of my work in the 80s on computer animation, where I started doing things like cloth simulation and other kind of soft body simulation and You sort of drop it and it would bounce, then it would just sort of stopped moving. And I thought well what if you animate the spring lengths and simulate muscles. And the simplest object I could do that for was an earthworm. So I actually did a paper in 1988 called the motion dynamics of snakes and worms. And I read the physiology literature on both how snakes and worms move. And then did some of the early computer animation examples of that. And </s><s>[INST] so your interest in robotics [/INST] came out of that came out of simulation and graphics when I moved from alias to apple, we actually did a movie called Her Majesty's secret serpent, which is about a secret agent snake that parachutes in and captures a film canister from a satellite, which tells you how old fashioned we were thinking back then sort of classic 19 sort of fifties or sixties bond movie kind of thing. Um And at the same time I had always made radio controlled ships when I was a child and from scratch and I thought well how how can it be to build a real one. And so then started what turned out to be like a 15 year obsession with trying to build better snake robots. And the first one that I built just sort of slivered sideways but didn't actually go forward. Then I added wheels and building things in real life. Makes you honest about the friction. The thing that appeals to me as I I love creating the illusion of life, which is what drove me to it drove me to animation. And if you have a robot with enough degrees of coordinated freedom that move in a kind of biological way, then it starts to cross the uncanny valley and to see me like a creature rather than a thing. And I certainly got that with the early snakes by S3, I had it able to side wind as well as go directly forward. My wife to be suggested that it would be the ring bearer at our wedding. So it actually went down the aisle carrying the rings and got in the local paper for that, which was really fun. And this was all done as a hobby. And then I um at the time the on board computer was incredibly limited. It was sort of, </s><s>[INST] you should explain that these things, the the whole idea is that you would you're trying to run it autonomously [/INST] autonomously on our on board. Right. And so the very first one, I actually built the controller from discrete logic because I used to do LS I you know, circuits and things when I was a teenager. And then the 2nd and 3rd 1, the eight bit micro processes were available with like the whole 256 bytes of ram um which could just about squeeze in. So they were radio controlled rather than autonomous and really were more about the physic physicality and coordinated motion. Um I've occasionally taken a side step into if only I could make it cheaply enough to make a great toy. Which has been a lesson in how clockwork is its own uh magical realm that you venture into and learn things about backlash and other things you don't take into account as a computer scientist, which is why what seemed like a good idea doesn't work. So it's quite humbling. And then more recently I've been building S. Nine which is a much better engineered version of S. Three where the motor's wore out and it doesn't work anymore and you can't buy replacements, which is sad given that it was such a meaningful one. S. Five was about twice as long and um look much more biologically inspired. I unlike the typical roboticist I tape at my snakes, there are good mechanical reasons to do that, but it also makes them look more biological, although it means every segments unique rather than um repetition, which is why most engineers don't do it. It actually saves weight and leverage and everything. And that one is currently on display at the International Spy Museum in Washington D. C. Now that it's done any spying. It was on Youtube and it got its own conspiracy theory where people thought that it wasn't real because I work at it over, it must be fake graphic and people would write to me tell me it's real and you know, so the background doesn't move and it's like it's not a tripod, you know? Um So that one but you can see the real thing, so it really is true. And then the latest one is the first one where I could put a raspberry pi which leads to all sorts of terrible jokes about pythons and things. But </s><s>[INST] yeah, [/INST] but this one can have on board compute and then where my hobby work and my work worker converging is you can now add vision accelerator chips, which can evaluate neural nets and do object recognition and everything. So both for the snakes and more recently for the spider that I've been working on. Um, having, you know, desktop level compute is now opening up a whole world of true autonomy with onboard computers, onboard batteries and um, still having that sort of biomimetic quality that people are, it appeals to Children in particular, they really drawn to them and adults think they look creepy about Children actually think they look charming. Um, and uh, gave a series of lectures at girls who code to encourage people to take an interest in technology. And at the moment I'd say there's still more expensive than the value that they had, which is why they're a great hobby for me, but they're not really a great product. It makes me think about doing that very early thing I did at alias with changing the muscle rest lengths. If I could do that with a real artificial muscle material, then the next snake ideally would use that rather than motors and gearboxes and everything, it would be lighter, much stronger and more continuous and smooth. So, um, it's, I like to say being in research as a license to be curious and I have the same feeling with my hobby. It forced me to re biology and be curious about things that otherwise would have just been a National Geographic special. Suddenly I'm thinking how does that snake move? Can I copy it? I look at the trails that side winding snakes leave in sand and see if my snake robots would do the same thing. So out </s> |
<s>[INST] different which is back to that compassion-compersion axis. Being, doing, becoming it's pretty powerful also could potentially be algorithmatized into a robot just saying where does um where does death come into that? Being is forgetting I mean the the concept of time completely there's a there's a sense of doing and becoming that has a deadline and built in the urgency built in do you think death is fundamental to this to a meaningful life uh acknowledging or um feeling the terror of death like Ernest Becker or just acknowledging the uncertainty the mystery the the melancholy nature of the fact that the right ends is that part of this equation or it's not necessary. [/INST] Okay look at how it could be related. I've experienced fear of death. I've also experienced times where I thought I was going to die. It felt extremely peaceful and beautiful and um it's funny because if we we can be afraid of death because we're afraid of hell or battery incarnation or the bardo or some kind of idea of the afterlife we have or we're projecting some kind of sentient suffering but if we're afraid of just non-experience I notice that every time I stay up late enough that I'm really tired I'm longing for deep deep sleep and non-experience right like I'm actually longing for experience to stop and it's not morbid it's not a bummer it's and and I don't mind falling asleep and I sometimes when I wake up want to go back into it and then when it's done I'm happy to come out of it so um when we think about death and having finite time here and we could talk about if we live for a thousand years instead of a hundred or something like that it'll be finite time the one bummer with the age we die is that I generally find that people mostly start to emotionally mature just shortly before they die um but um there's if I get to live forever I can just stay focused on what's in it for me forever and if life continues and consciousness and sentience and people appreciating beauty and adding to it and becoming continues my life doesn't but my life can have effects that continue well beyond it then life with a capital L starts mattering more to me than my life my life gets to be a part of and in service to and the whole thing about when old men plant trees the shade of which they'll never get to be in um I remember the first time I read this poem by Hafez the Sufi poet written in like 13th century or something like that and he talked about that if you're lonely to think about him and he was kind of leaning his spirit um into years across the distance of a millennium and would come for you with these poems and I was thinking about people millennium from now and caring about their experience and what they'd be suffering if they'd be lonely and could he offer something that could touch them? And it's just fucking beautiful. And so, like, the most beautiful parts of humans have to do with something that transcends what's in it for me. And death forces you to that. </s><s>[INST] So not only does death create the urgency, it, urgency of doing, you're very right, it does have a sense in which it incentivizes the compassion and the compassion. [/INST] Mm-hmm. And the widening, you remember Einstein had that quote something to the effect of it's an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are separate things. There's this one thing we call universe and something about us being inside of a prison of perception that can only, you know, see a very narrow little bit of it. But this might be just some weird disposition of mine. But when I think about the future after I'm dead, and I think about consciousness, I think about young people falling in love for the first time and their experience, and I think about people being awed by sunsets, and I think about all of it, right? I can't not feel connected </s><s>[INST] to that. Do you feel some sadness to the very high likelihood that you'll be forgotten completely by all of human history? You, Daniel, the name that, that which cannot be named? [/INST] Systems like to self perpetuate. Ego's do that. The idea that I might do something meaningful that future people appreciate, of course, there's like a certain sweetness to that idea. But I know how many people did something, did things that I wouldn't be here without, and that my life would be less without, whose names I will never know. And I feel a gratitude to them. I feel a closeness. I feel touched by that. And I think to the degree that the future people are conscious enough, there is a, you know, a lot of traditions had this kind of, are we being good ancestors and respect for the ancestors beyond the names? I think that's a very healthy idea. </s> |
<s>[INST] Is there a way to make that better? So that's beautifully put level of engagement and even just basic trust and communication as opposed to uh sort of uh uh you know, making artificial enemies out of particular um out of particular countries. Do you have a you have a sense how we can make it better actionable items that as a society we can take on. [/INST] I'm not an expert at geopolitics, but I would say that we look pretty foolish as humankind When we are faced with the opportunity to create $16 trillion dollars for for for for human humanity. And um we were yet we're not solving fundamental problems with parts of the world, still in poverty. And for the first time we have the resources to overcome poverty and hunger. We're not using it on that, but we're fueling competition among superpowers and that's a very unfortunate thing if we become utopian for a moment. Imagine a a benevolent world government that has the $16 trillion. Uh and maybe some ai to figure out how to use it to deal with diseases and problems and hate and things like that world would be a lot better off. So what is wrong with the current world? I think the people with more skilled than than I should should think about this. And then the geopolitics issue with superpower competition is one side of the issue. There's another side which I worry maybe even even even more, which is as the $16 trillion US and China. And a few of the developed other developed countries, the poorer country will get nothing because they don't have technology. Um And uh the wealth disparity and inequality will increase. So a poorer country with large population will not only benefit from the ai boom or other technology booms, but they will have their workers who previously had hoped they could do the china model and do outsource manufacturing or the India model. So they could do the health source um Process or call center while all those jobs are going to be gone in 10 or 15 years. So the the individual citizen may be a net liability. I mean financially speaking to a poorer country and not an asset to claw itself out of poverty. So in that kind of situation, these um large countries with with not much tech are going to be facing a downward spiral and it's unclear what could be done. Um and and then when we look back and say there's $16 trillion dollars being created and it's all being kept by us china and other developed countries, it just doesn't feel right. So I hope people who know about geopolitics can find solutions that's beyond my expertise. </s><s>[INST] So different countries that we've talked about have different value systems. If you look at the United States to an almost extreme degree, there is uh an absolute desire for freedom of speech. If you look at a country where I was raised, that desire just amongst the people is not that uh not as elevated as it is uh to basically fundamental level to the essence of what it means to be american, right? And the same is true with china. There's different value systems, there is some censorship of internet content that china and Russia and many other countries undertake. Do you see that having effects on innovation, other aspects of some of the tech stuff ai development we talked about and maybe from another angle, do you see that Changing in different ways over the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years as uh china continues to grow as it does now in the in its tech innovation. [/INST] Uh there's a common belief that full freedom of speech and expression is correlated with creativity which is correlated with um entrepreneurial success, I think empirically we have seen that is not true and china has been successful. That's not to say the fundamental values are not right or not the best, but it's just that that that perfect correlation isn't, isn't there? It's hard to read the tea leaves on opening up or not in any country. And I've not been very good at that in my past predictions, but I I do believe every country shares some fundamental value. A lot of fundamental values for the long term. Uh so you know, china is drafting its privacy policy for individual citizens and they don't look that different from the american or european ones. So people do want to protect their privacy and have the opportunity to express. And I think the fundamental values are there? The question is in the execution and timing how soon or when will that start to open up? So, so as long as each government knows ultimately people want that kind of protection. There should be a plan to move towards that as to when or how. And I'm not an expert </s><s>[INST] on the point of privacy. To me, it's really interesting. So ai needs data to create a personalized, awesome experience. I'm just speaking generally in terms of products uh and then we have currently depending on the age and depending on the demographics of who we're talking about. Some people are more or less concerned about the amount of data they hand over. So in your view, how do we get this balance right? That we provide an amazing experience to people that use products you look at facebook uh you know the more facebook knows about you. Yes. It's scary to say the better it can probably uh better experience that could probably create so any of you. How do we get that balance right? [/INST] Yes. I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding that it's okay and possible to just rip all the data out from a provider and give it back to you so you can deny them access to further data and still enjoy the services we have. If we take back all the data, all the services will give us nonsense will no longer be able to use products that function well in terms of you know uh right ranking, right products, right user experience. So so yes I do understand. We don't want to permit misuse of the data from legal policy standpoint. I think there can be severe punishment for those who have uh egregious misuse of the data. That's I think a good first step actually china in this side on this aspect has very strong laws about people who sell or give data to other companies. And and that over the past few years since the that locking came into effect pretty much eradicated the uh illegal distribution sharing of data. Additionally, I think giving um I I think technology is often a very good way to solve technology misuse. So can we come up with new technologies that will let us have our cake and eat it too. People are looking into home um or fick encryption which is letting you keep the data have encrypted and train on encrypted data. Of course we haven't solved that one yet but that kind of direction may be worth pursuing. Um Also Federated Learning which would allow one hospital to train on its hospitals patient data fully because they have a license for that. And then hospitals will then share their models not data but models to create a super ai and that also maybe has some promise. So I would want to encourage us to be open minded and think this think of this as not just the policy binary. Yes. No but letting the technologies to try to find solutions to let us have our cake and either two or have most of our cake and eat most of it too. Finally I think giving each end user a choice is important. And having transparency is important. Also I think that's universal. But the choice you give to the user should not be at a granular level that the user cannot understand. Uh G. D. P. R. Today causes all these pop ups of yes. No what you give this site this right to use this part of your data. I don't think any user understands what they're saying yes or no to and I suspect most are just saying yes because they don't understand it. So while G. D. P. R. in its current implementation has lived up to its promise of transparency and user choice. It implemented it in such a way that really didn't deliver the the spirit of G D P R. It fit the letter but not the spirit. So again, I think we need to think about is there a way to fit the spirit of G D P R by using some kind of technology? Can we have a slider that's an ai trying to figure out how much you want to slide between perfect protection, secure security of your personal data versus high degree of convenience with some risks of not having full privacy. Um each users should have some preference and that gives you the user choice, but maybe we should turn the problem on its head and ask can there be an ai algorithm that can customize this because we can understand the slider but we sure cannot understand every pop up questions </s> |
<s>[INST] but it has worked leading up to this particular wobbly situation. So before that wasn't there a public perception of him being A force for good financial four [/INST] 100% yeah, somebody from Sequoia Capital, you know, wrote this glowing review that he's going to be the world's first trillionaire, there's so many pieces done and he's the most generous billionaire in the world that um he was sort of like the steel man of you know it's possible to make tons of money. This is like the effective altruism movement make as much money as you can as fast as you can and give it all away. And he was sort of like the poster child for that and he did give some of it away and got a lot of press for it and I think that was kind of by design. I want to address a real quick point. A lot of people have said that like finance played a role and while they catalyzed this insolvency is a problem that will eventually manifest either way. So I don't put any blame on C. Z. For basically causing this meltdown. The underlying foundation was unstable and it was going to fall apart at the next push. I mean he just happened to be the final kind of like uh I don't know the straw that broke the camel's back </s><s>[INST] revealed. [/INST] Yeah but it's like I don't I don't think he's culpable for F. T. X. Is like malfeasance and how they handled accounts if that makes sense. </s><s>[INST] So what what what role did they play could they have helped alleviate some of the pain of uh investors of people that held funds there. [/INST] Yeah I mean probably I don't know I would see some kind of weird obligation like with the two billion they made on FT. X. Remember they got two billion some of it in cash, some of it some of it in FTT tokens. So I don't know how much actual cash they have from that deal, but they have billions from the success of what seems to be a fraud. Seems to have been a fraud. From early on. They had the back door as early as 20 early 2020 from what I can tell. </s><s>[INST] So the back door between FT. X. And millimeter elementary. Uh Do you think you saw through who SPF is? What is he's doing? [/INST] No, I think I think C. Z. Is like he's a shark. I think he's he's good at building a big business. Um </s><s>[INST] I don't know. I [/INST] don't know. I think sharks just eat. I mean I I don't I don't know. I think </s><s>[INST] my relationship with Shark has like finding nemo there's a shark in that. I [/INST] think like Jeff Bezos is a shark. So whether people have loaded connotations of like how they feel about Jeff Bezos. I mean I would say like I think this is a ruthless businessman. I think he's cold. He's calculated, he's very um deliberate and I think what he should do in this position is forfeit the funds that he profited from that investment. Because largely I think it was um it's owed to the customers there's so much hurting out there. So I think I think they could do a lot of good around that. Um, I don't know if they will because I don't know if he sees it in his best interest. I think that's probably how he's thinking. But yeah, I think they could have helped or they could still help </s><s>[INST] there. Who do you think suffered the most from this? So far? The [/INST] Little account holders, this is always true. So one of the big temptations with fraud, I've covered a lot of scams, frauds is everyone looks at the big number, everyone that's the headline, billions of dollars, the top 50 creditors, what everyone thinks at first, but quickly when you dig down, you realize that most people who lost $10 million. I mean, I'm sure that's terrible for them. I wish them to get their money back. But Uh, it's usually the people with like 50,000 or less that are most impacted. Usually they do not have the money to spare. Usually they're not diversified in a sophisticated way. Um, so I think it's those people, I think it's the small account holders that I feel the worst for and unfortunately they often get the least press time or airtime. </s><s>[INST] That's the really difficult truth of this is that, especially in the culture of Cryptocurrency, there's a lot of young people who are not diversified. They're basically all in on a particular crypto And it just breaks my heart to think that there's somebody 50,000 or 30,000 or 20,000. But the point is that money is everything they own and now their life is basically destroyed. Like you know imagine you're 18 1920, 21 years old, you saved up, you've been working, you saved up and this is this is it, this is basically destroying a life. [/INST] What's so brutal about this is that this all comes on the back, the entire crypto market comes on the back of Comes from the deep distrust of traditional finance, right? Yeah, 2008. Everybody lost trust in the banking systems and they lost trust that if those banking systems acted in a corrupt way that they would receive the justice. It turned out that the banks received favorable treatment, people didn't. So people lost faith in the the structure of our financial system in a way that is, we're still feeling the reverberations of it. And so when crypto came along it was like kind of this way to reinvent the wheel, reinvent the world for the the like sort of lowly and the like less powerful and kind of level the playing field. So it's so sad about events like this is you see that fundamentally a lot of the, the power structures are the same where the people at the top face little repercussions for what they do, The people at the bottom are still getting screwed. The people at the bottom are still getting lied to and law enforcement is way behind the ball. </s> |
<s>[INST] give me to be teary and then I know it [/INST] was a very useful moment. It was an incredible moment for both of us and we talked about it sometimes. You know those moments in time and when you to your point about </s><s>[INST] love the darkest moment, one of the darkest moments in his life probably that [/INST] I think it was, I can tell you it was the darkest period of his life for sure. Uh and he's been very public about how dark that was. And I think you know this is why I have great sympathy for the entrepreneurs of the world, like the suffering and the pain and when he talks about the suffering and the pain that all of these founders have felt. And then we were throwing rocks at them were criticizing them as they try to change the world and save humanity. And in Tesla's case, I mean they weren't, you know, they weren't like delivering pizza. I mean they were trying to get us off of fossil fuels. Like this was a big heavy mission to literally save the environment, the planet humanity and the way they shorted that stock and they attacked him. It was always perplexing to me why any human being who is standing on God's green earth would want to throw rocks at the guy who is trying to stem the dam of global warming that is about to engulf all of us. How dare they throw rocks at that guy. Yeah, there's so many people can throw rocks at, there's somebody who's making the Juul vaporizer throw rocks at that scumbag, no offense, but like whoever's making the jewel things and you know, selling peanut colada flavor to 12 year olds like throw rocks at them, Somebody's doing something, you know abhorrent but not e I mean and uh Yeah, anyway that that car is you know, up the road here sitting under a cover with 20,000 miles on it in my garage And then the Roadster number 16 in the garage next to it and every day I walk by the two of them and I got a warm feeling in my heart because I know he didn't against all odds against all odds. He pulled it off and it was that moment, that month, in that 2000 it was Janet was probably december january december of 2008, I think it was just 12 years ago when you think about 13 years ago, it was dark, I mean it was dark and they almost have the same thing happened uh you know when the model three production in june of two years three years ago and I remember him just trying to get the model three out the door and the company almost crashed then most of these companies have you know these kind of moments. Um and I think friendship is you get what you give, you, get what you give and if you are there for people, you're gonna feel so good about having done that and then the, the reciprocation effect which you probably know very well is so great in the world that any time you're kind to people, you build this incredible bond and then what, what are we at the end of the day lex besides a series of memories with the people we love. That's all it is. It's just a series of memories and moments. It's just moments you ever see Blade Runner? Yes, of course. I remember what Rucker Harris says at the end, all of these memories gone like tears in the rain. I mean that's our existence. It just all goes away at some point, it's just these drops of rain each, each of those memories just like one snowflake or one drop of rain and they're all lost at some point, but they're here now and that's why we have to be there for each other. That's why I feel like what I do is so important in this world And I get such great meeting out of it. Just being a friend, just having these conversations, what you're doing on your podcast, just talking to intelligent people and spreading the word and the disciple uh the gospel of what they're saying and amplifying it. You're inspiring so many people, every podcast, you get 500,000 people, million people watch these videos and there's some kid in Sri Lanka or some little girl in Afghanistan who is going to stumble upon this on Youtube and they're going to change the world in the next century because it's not just about America, Our story is almost over right. Like we were the story of the last two or 300 years. I hope it keeps going. But there's all these other places in the World San Paolo and and Africa where people now have access to these videos and somebody would have this video and go Ellen did it, oh and that guy Jason was his friend and oh and lex does those interviews with the oh yeah, I could do it to </s><s>[INST] your little magical moment of love amidst the suffering with Ellen because you've talked about it, he'll have these ripple effects, it's fascinating to think about. So we had to come in, new entrepreneurs being born new more love being put out there in uh more support these rough times when your people are trying to create new things. I mean that's a that's a beautiful thing. That's a beautiful, I'm glad you think of friendship in this way. Um deeply grateful that you're loyal [/INST] every time you invest you are here's the thing cost you nothing to make this investment. Either the amount of time it takes to be bitter or angry sitting at home uh to be disappointed. You could just channel that same amount of energy into being loyal loving, kind and there for people, it just only takes the intention right? The water is going to those emotions are gonna flow right, like Sam would always tell me when I was struggling in my life and I talked to him, he'd say, you know, Jason, your brain is spewing all these ideas. Imagine you're standing sitting by a river and the river is all your ideas, you are not a slave to any one of these ideas are just whipping by like, each of those little waves in the river, you can pick one of those ideas out and look at it, examine it and either keep it or throw it back in the river and let it go. And I was like, wow! Sam, that was like, my entire friendship with Sam Harris, that was like the one moment where I was just like, oh my God, all my life, I've wondered about all these thoughts in my head, insecurities, you know, imposter syndrome, like, I didn't go to m I T you know, I'm not the smartest guy, but somehow I made a career writing little 50 K checks and now, you know, $3 million checks, but whatever, you know, little checks and being a journalist and doing this little podcast and it's it's added up to something And I'm kind of, I'm proud of it, I'm 50 and I'm kind of proud of what I did and I wake up every morning, I could retired, I say kind of like what I do, I kind of like having the conversation and writing the check and then being on somebody's team and I got offered to be in these giant mega funds And they said Jason You're an idiot, you're invested in 60 companies a year. You know 500K. At a time. You put $30 million dollars a year to work, come work with us, right? 1 $50 million check and then you can go to aspen and cabo and Coachella and not work. But why are you doing all this work? It's like well there's $50 million dollar check. Like it's like a formality it's just like being an A. T. M. Like the companies are already huge by that time. I really want to meet the two people with the idea. I want to meet them in year one. Yes, I want to meet them on day zero. I want to be the guy who wrote the 1st, 2nd or third check. You want a guy who wrote the 3000 check. The last check. Its fucking boring </s> |
<s>[INST] this. Yeah, I know, but I just want to linger one more time that um we have to remember that the signs of intelligence. Um the measure of intelligence is only a part of the human condition, The thing that makes life beautiful and the creation of beautiful things in this world is uh perhaps loosely correlated but is not dependent entirely on intelligence. [/INST] Absolutely. I certainly agree with that. </s><s>[INST] That's so for anyone sort of listening I'm still not convinced that um sort of more intelligence is always better if you want to create beauty in this world. I don't know. [/INST] Well I I didn't say more intelligence is always better if you want to create beauty. I just said all things being equal more is better than less. That's all. I mean. </s><s>[INST] Yeah but that's sort of that I just want to sort of say because a lot to me one of the things that makes life great is the opportunity to create beautiful things. And so I just want to sort of empower people to to do that no matter what some I. Q. Test says at the population level. We do need to look at I. Q. Tests to help to help people and to also inspire us. Yeah. To do to take on some of these extremely difficult scientific scientific questions. Do you have advice for young people in high school and college? Um whether they're thinking about career or they're thinking about a life they can be proud of is their advice you can give whether they're in the [/INST] they want to </s><s>[INST] pursue psychology or biology or engineering or they want to be artists and musicians and poets. [/INST] I I can't advise anybody on that level of what what their passion is. Uh You know but I can't say if you're interested in psychology if you're interested in science and the science around the big questions of consciousness and intelligence and psychiatric illness, we haven't really talked about brain illnesses and what we might learn from. Uh you know if you are trying to develop a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease, you are trying to develop a drug to impact learning and memory which are core to intelligence. So it could well be that the so called I. Q. Pill will come from a pharmaceutical company trying to develop a drug for Alzheimer's disease because </s><s>[INST] that's exactly what you're trying to do, right? Yeah. [/INST] Well what will that what will that drug do in a college student that doesn't have Alzheimer's disease? So I would encourage people who are interested in psychology who are interested in science to pursue a scientific career and address the big questions and this you and the most important thing I can tell you if you're gonna be in kind of a research environment is you gotta follow the data where the data take you you can't decide in advance where you want the data to go. And if the day to take you to places that you don't have the technical expertise to follow. Like you know I would like to understand more about molecular biology but I'm not going to become a molecular biologist now but I know people who are and my job is to get them interested to take their expertise into this direction and that it's not so easy. But uh </s><s>[INST] and if the data takes you to a place that's controversial, that's counterintuitive in this world. Um no, I would say it's probably a good idea to still push forward boldly, but to communicate the interpretation of the results with skill, with compassion, with with with a greater breadth of understanding of humanity, not just the science, of the impact. The results. [/INST] One famous psychologist wrote about this issue that somehow a balance has to be found between pursuing the science and communicating it with respect to people's sensitivities, the legitimate sensitivities. Somehow he didn't say how </s><s>[INST] Somehow, [/INST] somehow and this is </s><s>[INST] part of that sentence somehow and balance is left up to the interpretation of the reader. Let me ask you said big questions. The biggest or one of the biggest, [/INST] we already </s><s>[INST] talked about consciousness and intelligence, one of the most fascinating, one of the biggest questions. But let's talk about the why, Why are we here? What's the meaning of life? [/INST] I'm not going to tell you. </s><s>[INST] You know, you're not gonna tell me this is very I'm gonna have to wait for your next book. [/INST] Uh the meaning of life. You know? Uh we do the best we can to get through the day. </s><s>[INST] And then and then there's just a finite number of the days, Are you are you afraid the finite nous of it? You think [/INST] about it more and more as I get older? Yeah, I I do. Uh And it's one of these human things that it is finite. We all know it. Um Most of us deny it. Uh and don't want to think about it. Sometimes you you think about it in terms of estate planning, you try to do the rational thing. Sometimes you it makes you work harder because you know, your time is more and more limited and you want to get things done. Um I don't know where I am on that. Uh It is uh just one of those things that's always in the back of my mind as I and I don't think that's uncommon. </s><s>[INST] It was just like G Factor intelligence. It's a hard truth that's there. And sometimes you kinda walk past it and you don't want to look at it, but it's still there. [/INST] Yeah. Yes. You you can't escape it. And think about the G factor in intelligence is everybody knows this is true on a personal daily basis. You even if you think back to when you were in school, you know who the smart kids were. You know when you are on the phone talking to a customer service representative, that in response to your detailed question is reading a script back to you and you get furious at this and you and have you ever called this person a moron or wanted to call this person a moron. You're not listening to me. Everybody has had the experience of dealing with people who they think are not at their level, it's just common because that's the way human beings are. That's the way life is. But </s> |
<s>[INST] That shouldn't be political. Well, some of that also requires being transparent from a social media company perspective and transparent in a way that really resists being political. To be able to be transparent about your fight against these evils while still not succumbing to the sort of the political narratives of it. That's tricky, but you have to do that kind of, and I think walk calmly through the fire, because that's what Twitter feels like if you're being political. It's like a firing squad from every side. [/INST] And as a leader, you have to kind of walk calmly. Great, and that is where we need a new generation of people who will have diverse politics, but will stand up against that, right? I mean, that's the lesson from after the Civil War is where progress is made. The war doesn't solve problems or hate. Where progress is made is where you have local leaders and others who stand up and say, we can differ, but we're gonna stop calling people from certain backgrounds monkeys, which was a common thing to do at that time. Jews are still called monkeys in certain places, right? People have to stand up </s><s>[INST] while still maintaining their political differences. Several hundred thousand people died. [/INST] What made this war such a deadly war? It's extraordinary how many people died, more than half a million. And this was without a single automatic rifle, without a single bomb. It was mostly in hand-to-hand combat, which is to say that these 600,000 or so people who died, they died where the person who killed them was standing within a few feet of them. And that's really hard. Most of the killing that happens in wars today is actually from a distance. It's by a drone, it's by a bomb, it's by a rocket, or by an automatic weapon. And just to make this even more focused, to this day, the deadliest day in American history was during the Civil War. September 1862 in Antietam, more than 22,000 Americans killed one another hand-to-hand. There hasn't been a day that deadly in American history since then, that's amazing, </s><s>[INST] considering the technological changes. What was in the mind of those soldiers on each side? Was there conviction for ideas? [/INST] Did they hate the other side? I think actually they were fighting out of fear. What we know from reading their letters, what we know from the accounts, is that yes, their ideas that are promoted to them to get them to the battlefield, they believe in what they're doing, but here it's the same as World War I, and I think the Civil War and World War I are very similar as wars. You are in these horrible conditions, you're attacked, and you have the chance to either kill the other side and live or die. And you fight to live and you fight to save the people next to you. What is true about war, what is both good and dangerous about it, is you form an almost unparalleled bond with those on your side. This is the men under arms scenario, right? And that's where the killing goes, and it's a Civil War, which means sometimes it's brother against brother, quite literally, and what it teaches us is how human beings can be put into fighting and will commit enormous damage, </s><s>[INST] and that's why this happens, it goes on for four years. And just the extensive research you've done on this war for this book, what are some of the wars and some of the best aspects of human nature that you found? Like you said, brother against brother, [/INST] that's pretty powerful. They're both, right? So the level of violence that human beings are capable of, how long they're able to sustain it. The South should not have, the Confederacy should not have lasted in this war as long as it did. By the end, I mean, they're starving and they keep fighting. So the resilience in war of societies and the power of hate to move people. What are the bright sides? You see in Lincoln and Grant, who I talk about a lot in the book as well, Ulysses Grant, you see the ability of empathetic figures to still rise above this in spite of all the horror. Lincoln went to visit more soldiers in war than any president ever has. Often at personal peril, because he was close to the lines and he connected. It wasn't propaganda. There weren't always reporters following him. He was able to build empathy in this context. And I think, as I said, war is horrible as it is, often gives opportunities to certain groups. So African-Americans, former slaves, are able to prove themselves as citizens. Jews did this an enormous number in World War II. Henry Kissinger, who I wrote about before, he really only gets recognized as an American. He's a German-Jewish immigrant. He's seen as an American because of his service in World War II. So the bright side of this is that often in the case of war, on your own side, you will let go of some of your prejudices. Ulysses Grant has a total transformation. He goes into the Civil War, an anti-Semite and a racist. He comes out with actually very enlightened views because he sees what Jewish soldiers and what African-American soldiers did. </s><s>[INST] What's Ulysses Grant's story? What would you learn from him? [/INST] Was he a hero or a villain of this war? I think he's a hero, though he's a flawed hero, as all heroes are. He's a man from Ohio and Illinois, who was really a failed businessman time and again, and had an ability to command people in war. Where did this come from? He was a clear communicator and an empathetic figure. He tended to drink too much, but he was the kind of person people wanted to follow. They trusted him. And so in battle, that became very important. And the second thing is, he did his homework. He had a sense of the terrain. He had a sense of the environment he was operating in, and he was ruthless in pursuing what he had studied. So he turns out at battles like Vicksburg and elsewhere, to actually undertake some pretty revolutionary maneuvers. And then he figures out that the advantage now is on his side in numbers, and he just poundsly, pounds him to death, similar to what the United States does at the end of World War II with Germany and Japan. He comes out of the war, Grant does. He's a believer in union. He wants to protect former slaves and other groups. And he tries to use the military for that purpose. He's limited. And then as president, he tries to do that as well. Right now, we still use many of the laws that were passed during Grant's presidency to prosecute insurrectionists. So the 900 or so people who have been prosecuted for breaking into the Capitol and attacking police on January 6th, those insurrectionists, they've been prosecuted under the 1871 anti-Clucklux Klan law. So that's a big accomplishment by Grant, and we still benefit from it. The problem is Grant was not a great politician. Unlike Lincoln, he didn't give good speeches. He wasn't a persuasive figure in a political space. And so he had trouble building support for what he was doing, even though he was trying to do what in the end, I think, were the right things. What was the role of the KKK at that time? So the Ku Klux Klan is formed at the end of the Civil War by Confederate veterans, first in Tennessee, in Pulaski, Tennessee, and then it spreads elsewhere. And there are other groups that are similar, the red shirts and various others. These are veterans of the Confederate Army who come home and are committed to continuing the war. They are gonna use their power at home and their weapons to intimidate and, if necessary, kill people who challenge their authority, not just African Americans, Jews, Catholics, various others. They are going to basically protect the continued rule of the same families who owned the slaves before in post-slavery Tennessee and post-slavery South Carolina. And when we get to voting, they're often the groups that are preventing people from voting. The white sheets and the ritual around that was all an effort to provide a certain ritualistic legitimacy and hide identity, </s> |
<s>[INST] What kind of projects? So [/INST] labs is working to make the software better. Like make numpy better make sci fi better. Make it only works on open source. So you know, if somebody wants to. So you know, companies do. We have a thing called the community work order, we call it if a company says I want to make spider better. Okay, cool. Um, you can pay for a month of a developer of spider or developer of the umpire, developer of cyp I you're not, you can't tell them what you want them to do. You can give them your priorities and things you wish wish existed and they'll work on those priorities with the community to get what the community wants and what emerges what the community </s><s>[INST] wants. Is there some aspect on the consulting side that is helping as we were talking about morphology and so on. Is there a specific application that are particularly like driving sort of inspiring the need for updates society? Absolutely, [/INST] absolutely. Gpus are absolutely one of GPS and new hardware beyond give us I mean Tesla's dojo chip I'm hoping we'll have a chance to work on that perhaps. Um, things like that are definitely driving and the other thing is driving is scalable like speed and scale. How do I write Numpy code or non pilot code if I wanted to run across a cluster, you know that's desk or maybe it's ray. I mean there's sort of ways to do that now or there's Modin and there's so pandas code, Numpy code sci fi code. Second learn code that I want to scale. That's one big </s><s>[INST] area. Have you gotten a chance to chat with andre and Ellen about because like [/INST] no, I would love to by the way I would love to I just saw their Tesla AI Ds video, super excited, </s><s>[INST] that's one of the, you know, I love great engineering, software engineering teams and engineering teams in general and they're doing a lot of incredible stuff with python, they're like revolutionary, so many aspects of the machine learning pipeline that's operating in the real world and so much of that is like you said, the guy running, you know, Andre Capozzi, running autopilot is tweeting about optimization of numpy versus uh, I love to talk uh [/INST] In fact, we have a concept, we've been fortunate enough to work with Facebook on Puntorch directly to about 13 developers at one site, some of them are in labs, working directly on pytorch, </s><s>[INST] pytorch, right? [/INST] So I basically started once I went to both tensorflow pytorch and said, hey, I want to help connect what you're doing to the broader side by ecosystem because I see what you're doing, we have this bigger mission, we want to make sure we don't lose energy here. So uh and facebook responded really positively and I didn't get the same reaction, I </s><s>[INST] love the folks, I [/INST] really love the folks tensorflow to their fantastic, I think it's the just how it integrates with their business. I mean like I said, there's a lot of reasons, just the timing, the integration of their business, what they're looking for, they're probably looking for more users and I was looking to kind of kept some development effort and they couldn't receive that as easily I think so I'm hoping, I'm really hopeful. Uh, love, love the people there. </s><s>[INST] What's the idea? We had open teams? [/INST] So open teams, super excited by open teams because it's one of the, I mentioned my idea for investing directly open source. So that's a concept called pharaoh s s, but one of the things we, when we started Kwan site, we knew we would do as we develop products and ideas and new companies might come out and anaconda, this was clear, right? Anaconda, we did so much innovation that like five or six companies could have come out of that and we just didn't structure it so they could, but in fact they have, you look at basque, there's two companies going out of desk job, okay, could be a company, there's like lots of companies could exist off the work we did there. And so I thought, oh, here's a recipe for an incubation concept that we could actually spawned new companies and new new innovations. And then the idea has always been well money they earn should come back to fund the open source projects. So, so labs is, you know, I think there should be a lot of things like Kwan site labs, I think this concept is one that scales, you can have a lot of open source research labs along the way. So in 2018, when the bigger idea came how to make open source investable. I said, oh, I need to write it, I need to create a venture fund. So we created a venture fund called constant initiate. At the same time, it's an angel fund really is, you know, we started to learn that process. How do we actually do this? How do I get lps, how do we actually go in this direction and build a fund? And I'm like every venture fund should have an associate open source research lab. There is no reason like our venture fund, the carried interest, a portion of it goes to the lab. It directly will fund the lab </s><s>[INST] that's fascinated by the so you use the power of the organic formation of teams in the open source community and then like naturally that leads to a business that can make there are so many. Yeah, it always maintains the loops back to the open [/INST] loops back to open source exactly between the natural, there's something, there's, there's absolutely a reputable pattern there. And it's also beneficial because oh, I have, I have natural connections to the open source and I have an open source research lab. They'll always be out there talking to people. And so we, we've had a chance to talk to a lot of early stage companies and we and our fund folks in the early stages, So Kwan site has the services, the lab, the fund right in that process. A lot of stuff started to happen. They're like, oh, you know, we started to recruiting and support and training and I was starting to build a bigger sales team and marketing team and people besides just developers. And one of the challenges with that is you end up with different cultural aspects, developers, you know, there's a in any company go to kind of go look, is this a business led company, developer led company? Do they kind of coexist? Are the interface between them, There's always a bit of attention. They're like we were talking about before. You know, what is the tension there with open teams? I thought wait a minute we can actually just create like this concept of quantity plus labs. It's well, well that's specific to the pi data ecosystem. The concept is general for all open source. So open teams emerges that we can create a business development company for many, many Kwan sites like thousands of coincides and it can be a marketplace to connect essentially be the enterprise software company of the future. If you look at what enterprise software wants from the customer side and during this journey I've had a chance to work and and sell to lots of companies Exxon and Shell and put David morgan Bank of America like the Fortune 100 and talked to a lot of people in procurement and see what are they buying and why are they buying? So you know, I don't know everything but I've learned a lot about what are they really looking for and they're looking for solutions. They're constantly given products from the, from enterprise software, here's open source enterprise software. Now I buy it and they have to stitch it together into a solution. Open source is fantastic for gluing those solutions together. So whereas they keep any new platforms are trying to buy but most of the world's most enterprises want is tools that they can customize that that that are as inexpensive as they can. </s> |
<s>[INST] I have to, there's a million questions I wanna ask you, but we're season season we're on season five already. But let me let me ask you. It seems like out of all the brilliant things you write about. It seems like not an important question, but it's a fascinating one to me as lawyers, you write about this. So, uh does the company need lawyers? Uh and why? [/INST] No? And </s><s>[INST] what kind? So you write about sort of the value of this game? I guess it's a game. It's it's why do we need [/INST] lawyers? Don't have a good </s><s>[INST] question, I guess. I um well, because [/INST] the </s><s>[INST] y of lawyers. Yes, exactly. Thank [/INST] you. Even do the </s><s>[INST] question we [/INST] just have to put why in front of everything you ask, and then we'll be there. </s><s>[INST] Why? [/INST] Why even mafiosos had </s><s>[INST] lawyers? Okay. [/INST] You know, Tony soprano, uh, you know, uh, scarf all of them had lawyers, right? Why? Because there are things in this world that you don't always consider in the government and laws in competitors because you're so focused on what you're doing, they have to watch out for you right now. The best kind of lawyers are the ones who try to work with you to enable what you're doing. Um, and see gray areas law is not black or white. It's how it's interpreted, right? And so they can help interpret things a certain way or help push on things a certain way to get changed happen or allow change to happen. Because if you have lawyers who are always just like you were talking about pr people, if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything because their job is to really say no, or maybe they'll never say yes? </s><s>[INST] And you also say their job was to say no and bill you by the hour. [/INST] Exactly, Exactly. Right. If you don't wanna know, don't ask him because you're gonna get a no, maybe you'll get charged for it anyways. Right? So, so to have a partner to have with them on your team, to help you see, maybe some of the things you don't see some consequences, they help to rein that in or change your your language. Like, are you going to get sued for this ad? Just change this one word and it helps, Right? So you need to have a partner most of the times, especially engineers or designers, they see lawyers as only stifling lawyers can actually, if you do it right? And you have the right type, they can actually open up a whole new world for you because of the interpretation and how we go about doing things. So, </s><s>[INST] and they help you not get bogged down in the pain of stupid little mistakes that didn't mean [/INST] exactly shot yourself in the foot and you didn't even know it. You didn't even know you were carrying the gun. </s><s>[INST] Uh, just to jump around Charles. Bukowski once wrote, find what you love and let it kill you. So the question is about work life balance. [/INST] That's like finding an idea, let it chase you. </s><s>[INST] Yes, but a little more aggressive. [/INST] Uh, </s><s>[INST] So what does uh, what does work life balance look like that maximizes success and and or happiness? Is there such a thing as work life balance is um can you speak went to your [/INST] work is your life? And I mean that in the positive sense when you're on a mission that really matters and you know that you can really affect not just yourself but other people's lives. And then that is very rewarding, right? That's not just that's not work. That's like I said, a mission, right? You you adopt that. But that said, you still need to have boundaries yourself at general magic, wonderful documentary. If no one's seen it, you got to see that it's amazing. I was physically and mentally unhealthy socially unhealthy as well because I put every waking minute into this thing, every ounce of me into it. And when it was a spectacular disaster, We were making the iPhone 15 years too early. The bottom fell out. I had nothing left. I had to get healthy socially emotionally physically after that, that trauma, I let everything go. I learned from that that you have to, even though you might put everything into your work, you need to find balance outside of it. And now that doesn't mean you're always, you know, it's three days a week working in four days a week or whatever it was. You're still working as hard as ever. But what you're doing is you're making sure when you're thinking time is during work That you're not ruminating at 3:00 AM. You use the tools that you have to put those ideas into databases or on pages or somewhere else. So you can go back and look at them. So you're not always having to remember, because what happens is most people don't write this stuff down so they just sit there and got to remember this. I gotta remember this, I gotta remember this. If you just put it into the tools and you can come back to it, you can come back fresh a lot of the time is about ruminating about what I need to get done and remembering everything instead of doing the work. </s><s>[INST] That's fascinating. So if you just put it down on paper, you can you can actually escape it, escape it for a time to have peace for a time you mentioned um General magic. Let me ask you the Russian question. Uh [/INST] what's </s> |
<s>[INST] I think there's no better place to end it. Michael, thank you so much as an honor to meet you. Thanks for talking. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael stevens and thank you to our presenting sponsor cash app, download it. Use code lex podcast. You'll get $10.10 dollars will go to first, a stem education non profit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to learn to dream of engineering our future. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on Youtube, give it five stars on apple podcast, support on Patreon or connect with me on twitter and now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, the marvel structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day, thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s> |
<s>[INST] ci the thing where I disagree a little bit is I agree with you in in the short term, but in the long term, I feel it's the responsibility of social media, not in some kind of ethical way, not just in an ethical way, but it'll actually be good for the product for the company to maximize the long term happiness and well being of the person. So not just engagement, so considerate, [/INST] but the person is not the customer. So the thing is not to make them happy, It's to keep them on. </s><s>[INST] That's the way it is currently driven [/INST] business model as you're saying, I'd be all for it. </s><s>[INST] And I think that's the way to make much more money. [/INST] So like a subscription model where the money comes from paying, </s><s>[INST] it's not, [/INST] that would work, wouldn't it? That would help. </s><s>[INST] So subscription definitely would help. But I'm not sure it's so much. I mean, a lot of people say it's about the source of money, but I just think it's about the fundamental mission of the product. If you want people to really love a thing, I think that thing should uh maximize your long term well being in [/INST] theory, in morality land, it should. </s><s>[INST] I don't think it's just morality land, I think in business land too, but that's maybe a discussion for another day. We're we're studying the reality of the way things currently are and they are as they are, as the studies are highlighting? So let us go then in from the land of mental health for young people to the land of democracy, by the way in these big umbrella areas, is there a connection, is there a correlation between the mental health of a human mind and the division [/INST] of our </s><s>[INST] political discourse. [/INST] So our brains are structured to be really good at approach and avoid. So we have circuits, the front left circuit is an oversimplification, but there's some truth to this, what's called behavioral activation system? Front left cortex, it's all about approach opportunity, you know, kidney candy store and then the front right cortex has circuits specialized for withdrawal fear threat. And of course students, you know, I'm a college professor And most of us think about our college days like, you know, yeah, we were anxious at times, but it was fun and it was like, I can take all these courses, I can do all these clubs, all these people. Um, now imagine if in 2013, all of a sudden students are coming in with their front right cortex, hyper activated, everything's a threat, everything is dangerous, there's not enough to go around. So the front right cortex puts us into what's called defend mode as opposed to discover mode. Now let's move up to adults. Imagine a large, diverse secular liberal democracy in which people are most of the time in discover mode and you know, we have a problem, let's think how to solve it. And this is what Tocqueville said about americans, like there's a problem, we get together, we figure out how to solve it and he said, whereas in England and France, people would wait for the king to do it. But here like, you know, we have to do it, that's the can do mindset that's front left cortex discover mode if you have a national shift of people spending more time in defend mode now you so everything that comes up, whatever anyone says, you're not looking like, oh is there something good about your thinking? You know, how is this dangerous, how is this a threat? How is this violence, how can I attack this? How can you know so so if you imagine you know God up there with a little lever like okay let's let's push everyone over into you know more into discover mode and it's like joy breaks out age of Aquarius. Alright let's shift them back into, let's put everyone in defend mode and I can't think of a better way to put people in defend mode than to have them spend some time on partisan or political twitter where it's just a stream of horror stories including videos about how horrible the other side is and it's not just that they're bad people, it's that if they win this election then we lose our country or then it's catastrophe. So twitter and again we're not saying all of twitter, you know, most people aren't on twitter and people that are mostly not talking about politics but the ones that are on talking about politics are flooding us with stuff, all the journalists see it all major mainstream media is hugely influenced by twitter. Um So if we put everyone, if there's more sort of anxiety sense of threat, this colors everything and then you're not, you know the great thing about about a democracy and especially you know a the legislature that has some diversity in it is that the art of politics is that you can grow the pie and then divide it. You don't just fight zero sum. You find ways that we can all get 60% of what we want and that that ends when everyone's anxious and angry. </s> |
<s>[INST] So yes, on that point from Alex. So this is 2022 polls. This is a bunch of different ways to look at the same basic effect in the United States. Democrats, younger Americans identified dealing with climate change as a top priority. U.S. adults, 42% say that dealing with climate change should be a top priority. 11% of Republicans, 65% of Democrats, and we could see this effect throughout. 46% of Americans say human activity contributes a great deal to climate change. By the way, this is a little bit different than what we were discussing. I was just looking through different polls. In the public, there seems to still be uncertainty about how much humans contribute to climate [/INST] change more than the scientific. It would only be 24% that disagree with the UN climate panel, right? </s><s>[INST] Three quarters. I would agree. [/INST] Are you uncomfortable about the 29? No, 29 is actually, it's exactly right. </s><s>[INST] I mean, the UN doesn't say it's all, well, they say that could be the border case. But anyway, this is interesting, but to me, across all these polls, if you look Republican versus Democrat, Republican say that 17% say it's a great deal, Democrats say 71% say it's a great deal. I mean, you just see this complete division. I think you probably, with the COVID pandemic, you can ask a lot of questions like this. Do masks work? Are they an effective method to slow transmission of a pandemic? You'll probably have the same kind of polls about Republicans and Democrats. While the effectiveness of masks to me is a scientific question, so there's different truths here, apparently. One is a scientific truth. One is a truth held by the scientific community, which seems to be also different than the scientific truth sometimes. And the other is the public perception that's polluted or affected by political affiliation. And then there's whatever is the narrative that's communicated by the media. They will also have a question, the answer to the question of whether masks work or not. And they will also have an answer to the question about all these climate-related things. So that's a long way of asking the question of how is politics mixed into all of this on the communication front, on the figuring out what the right policy is front, on the [/INST] friction of humanity in the face of the right policies. I've written a ton on this. After I had that conversion about the social science in 2006, I began digging in a lot more on how people hold beliefs and what they do as opposed to what they think and questions about polling. And there's two things that come to me that make me not worry about the basic literacy, like is climate change X percent of whatever? I don't really care about that. And I'll explain why. For one thing, more science literacy, more basic literacy like what is a greenhouse gas, all that stuff. Dan Cahane at K-A-H-A-N at Yale, he's actually at Yale Law School. The last decade, he did all this work on what he calls cultural cognition, and he did studies that showed how what you believe emerges based on culture, based on your background, your red, blue, where you are in the country. And one of the really disturbing findings was that the people who have the most basic science literacy, like who know the most about greenhouse effect or whatever, they're at both ends of the spectrum of views on climate, dismissives, and alarmed. Steve Kuhnen, as I mentioned, is a good example. He's a brilliant physicist, and he knows all the science, and he's completely at the end of skepticism. Will Happer, who was close to being Trump's science advisor, was even more out there, and they're both on the Jason committee that advises the government on big strategic things. And people who are really alarmed about it also have the same belief. So as a journalist, I was thinking, do I just spend my time writing more explanatory stories that explain the science better? No. Do I dig in on this work to understand what brings people together? And then these same surveys, the same science shows you, if you don't make it about climate, among other things, you don't have to worry about this anymore. If you could Google for no red, blue, divide climate, Revkin, you'll find a piece I did with some really good graphs. Essentially, it shows that in America, this is the Yale group again, their climate communication group, there's no red, blue divide on energy innovation, none. We need more climate energy, clean energy innovation. There wasn't even a divide country state by state on whether CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant. But it's all like what are the questions you ask? If you ask about innovation, if you ask about more incentives for renewable power, Oklahoma, Iowa. I did a piece when I was at ProPublica showing that the 17 states that were fighting Obama in court over his clean power plan, the majority of them were actually meeting the targets that the clean power plan had had, because they're expanding wind power already, not because of the climate, because it makes money sense and energy sense. You don't think there's a political divide in this? There is on climate, if you call it climate. If you say it's a climate, do you believe in the climate crisis? You're not asking what kind of energy future do you want in your town? And so if you ask that question, </s><s>[INST] the polarization goes away. I guess what I'm asking, is there polarization on policy? [/INST] No, well there, again, the bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed last November, that was bipartisan. All of Congress said yes, and that's a trillion dollars, several hundred billion of which are for cleaner energy and resilience. But it's not a climate bill, and it wasn't a tax. It's incentives. </s> |
<s>[INST] No, [/INST] he's great also and fun to talk to because he's just endlessly curious. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] it's [/INST] all audio. Yeah, but it's in the format of a so I'm narrating it and kind of telling the story of what questions came up for me, what I was interested in exploring and then, you know why I talked to each person I talked to </s><s>[INST] by the way, I highly recommend Sean Carroll's mindscape podcast thing, it's called. Um it's amazing. One of my favorite things. Well, when he interviews physicists is great, but any topic his aim is, but one of my favorite things is how frustrated he gets with panpsychism, but he's still like, it's like a fly towards the light. For some reason, he can't like make sense of it, but like he still struggles with it and I think that's the, that's the sign of a good scientists, really struggling struggling with these ideas, [/INST] totally agree. And yes, that's what I appreciate in him and many scientists like that, who </s><s>[INST] has the craziest, most radical ideas that you talk with. Currently you can go either direction, you can go like panpsychism consciousness permeates everything. [/INST] Yeah, </s><s>[INST] I don't know how far you can go down that direction or you could say that, you know what what would be the other direction that there's [/INST] there isn't really the problem is they're all crazy, </s><s>[INST] crazy, crazy. [/INST] And my own, I mean, my own thoughts now, I have to be um very careful about the words I choose, because I mean, it's it's just like talking about um the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, it's what, once you get deep enough, um it's so counterintuitive and it's so beyond anything. We understand that they all sound crazy. Many world sounds crazy. String theory. I mean, these are things we just cannot get our minds around really. And so that's kind of that's the realm I love to live in and love to explore in. And the realm that, to my surprise, my interesting consciousness has taken me back to </s><s>[INST] ask you a question on that. Just a side tangent. How do you prevent when you're imagining yourself to be a pea tendrils? How do you prevent from going crazy? I mean, this is kind of a Nietzsche question of like, you have to be very careful thinking outside the norms of society because you might fall off like mentally you're so connected as a human to the collective intelligence that in order to question intuitions, you have to step aside step outside of it for a brief moment. How do you prevent yourself from going crazy? [/INST] I think I used to think that was a concern. Um </s><s>[INST] I've learned [/INST] so much about the brain. No, and I've and I've had and I've had experiences of deep depression and I've struggled with anxiety my whole life. I think in order to be a good scientist and in order to be a truthfully, you know, let's say um to allow yourself to be curious and honest in your curiosity, I think it's inevitable that lots of ideas and theories and hypotheses will just sound crazy and that is always how we've advanced science and maybe, you know, nine out of 10 ideas are crazy and crazy, meaning they're actually not correct. Um but all of, I mean, it's, as I said, all of the big scientific breakthroughs, all of the truths we've uncovered that are the um earth shattering truths that we uncover. They really do sound crazy at first. So I don't think one necessarily leads to a type of mental illness. I see mental illness in a very different category. And I think some people are more susceptible to being destabilized by this type of thinking and that might be a legitimate concern for some people that kind of being grounded in everyday life is important for my psychological health. The more time I spend thinking about the bigger picture, and outside of everyday life, the more happy I am, the more expansive I feel. Um I mean, it feels it feels nourishing to me, it feels like it makes me more sane, not less. </s><s>[INST] Well that's a happiness, but in terms of your ability to see the truth that you can be happy and I [/INST] guess I don't see mental illness necessarily being linked to truth or not truth. </s><s>[INST] So we were talking about minimizing mental illness, but also truth is a different dimensions. You have to, you can go crazy in both directions, You can like, you know, you could be extremely happy and they are uh flat earthers, you can believe the earth is flat because they're actually, I mean, I'm sure there's good books on this, but somehow really comforting. It's fun and comforting to believe. You've figured out the thing that every everybody else hasn't figured out. [/INST] I think that's what conspiracy theories always provide people. </s><s>[INST] Why is it so fun? It's so fun. It's except when it's dangerous. Uh you know, but even then it's probably fun, but then you shouldn't do it because it's unethical. Uh anyway, so [/INST] not true. I'm not a fan of following </s><s>[INST] Well, that makes one of us, I don't know, there's probably a fascinating story to what why conspiracy theories are so um so compelling to us human beings as deeper than just fun internet stuff. Yeah, [/INST] I'm very interested in why they're so compelling to some people and not others. I feel like there must be some difference that at some point will be able to discover. Um </s><s>[INST] Yeah, yeah. And because [/INST] some people are just not susceptible to them and some people are </s><s>[INST] really [/INST] drawn to them because </s><s>[INST] I feel like the kind of thinking that allows for you to be open to conspiracy theories is also the kind of thinking that leads to brilliant breakthroughs in science sort of willingness to go to Crazy Land. That's interesting. [/INST] I see it the opposite </s> |
<s>[INST] do 100 podcasts in a row on COVID. It makes no sense. You think in part audience capture can explain that? [/INST] I absolutely think it can. I absolutely think it can. </s><s>[INST] For example, do you feel pressure to not admit that you made a mistake on COVID or made a mistake on Trump? I'm not saying you feel that way, but do you feel this pressure? So you've attacked audience capture within the way you do stuff, so you don't feel as much pressure from the audience, but within your own ego. [/INST] I mean, again, the people who think I'm wrong about any of these topics are going to think, okay, you're just not admitting that you're wrong, but now we're having a dispute about specific facts. There are things that I believed about COVID or worried might be true about COVID two years ago that I no longer believe or I'm not so worried about now and vice versa. I mean, things have flipped, certain things have flipped upside down. The question is, was I wrong? So here's the cartoon version of it, but this is something I said probably 18 months ago and it's still true. When I saw what Brett was doing on COVID, let's call it two years ago, I said, even if he's right, even if it turns out that ivermectin is a panacea and the mRNA vaccines kill millions of people, he's still wrong right now. His reasoning is still flawed right now. His facts still suck right now and his confidence is unjustified now. That was true then, that will always be true then and not much has changed for me to revisit any of my time points along the way. Again, I will totally concede that if I had teenage boys and their schools were demanding that they'd be vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine, I would be powerfully annoyed. I wouldn't know what I was going to do and I would be doing more research about myocarditis and I'd be badgering our doctors and I would be worried that we have a medical system and a pharmaceutical system and a healthcare system and a public health system that's not incentivized to look at any of this in a fine-grained way and they just want one blanket admonition to the entire population. Just take the shot, you idiots. I view that largely as a result, a panicked response to the misinformation explosion that happened and the public, the populist resistance animated by misinformation that just made it impossible to get anyone to cooperate. Part of it is, again, a pendulum swing in the wrong direction, somewhat analogous to the woke response to Trump and the Trumpist response to woke. A lot of people have just gotten pushed around for bad reasons, but understandable reasons. But yes, there are caveats to things have changed about my view of COVID. But the question is, if you roll back the clock 18 months, was I wrong to want to platform Eric Topol, a very well-respected cardiologist on this topic or Nicholas Christakis to talk about the network effects of whether we should close schools. He's written a book on COVID. He's network effects or his wheelhouse, both as an MD and as a sociologist. There was a lot that we believed we knew about the efficacy of closing schools during pandemics, during the Spanish flu pandemic and others. But there's a lot we didn't know about COVID. We didn't know how negligible the effects would be on kids compared to older people. </s><s>[INST] My problem, I really enjoyed your conversation with Eric Topol, but also didn't. He's one of the great communicators in many ways on Twitter, distillation of the current data. I hope I'm not overstating it, but there is a bit of an arrogance from him that I think could be explained by him being exhausted, by being constantly attacked by conspiracy theory, like anti-vaxxers. To me, the same thing happens with people that start drifting to being right-wing, is to get attacked so much by the left, they become almost irrational and arrogant in their beliefs. I felt your conversation with Eric Topol did not sufficiently empathize with people that have skepticism, but also did not sufficiently communicate uncertainty we have. Many of the decisions you made, many of the things you were talking about were saying, there's a lot of uncertainty, [/INST] but this is the best thing we could do now. Well, it was a forced choice. You're going to get COVID. Do you want to be vaccinated when you get it? That was always, in my view, an easy choice. And it's up until you start breaking apart the cohorts and you start saying, okay, wait a minute, there is this myocarditis issue in young men. Let's talk about that. Before that story emerged, it was just clear that if it's not knocking down transmission as much as we had hoped, it is still mitigating severe illness and death. And I still believe that it is the current view of most people competent to analyze the data, that we lost something like 300,000 people </s><s>[INST] unnecessarily in the US because of vaccine hesitancy. But I think there's a way to communicate with humility about the uncertainty of things that would increase the vaccination rate. [/INST] I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective to signal impatience with certain bad ideas and certain conspiracy theories and certain forms of misinformation. </s><s>[INST] I think so. I just think it makes you look like a douchebag most times. [/INST] Well, certain people are persuadable, certain people are not persuadable, but it's not enough. It's the opportunity cost. Not everything can be given a patient hearing. You can't have a physics conference and then let people in to just trumpet their pet theories about the grand unified vision of physics when they're obviously crazy or when they're obviously half crazy. You begin to get a sense for this when it is your wheelhouse, but there are people who declare their irrelevance to the conversation fairly quickly without knowing that they have done it. And the truth is, I think I'm one of those people on the topic of COVID. It's never that I felt, listen, I know exactly what's going on here. I know these mRNA vaccines are safe. I know exactly how to run a lockdown. No, this is a situation where you want the actual pilots to fly the plane. We needed experts who we could trust. And insofar as our experts got captured by all manner of things, I mean, some of them got captured by Trump. Some of them were made to look ridiculous just standing next to Trump while he was bloviating about whatever. It's just going to go away. There's just 15 people in a cruise ship and it's just going to go away. There's going to be no problem. Or it's like when he said, many of these doctors think, I understand this better than them. They're just amazed at how I understand this. And you've got doctors, real doctors, the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around just ashen faced while he's talking. All of this was deeply corrupting of the public communication of science. And then again, I've banged on about the depredations of wokeness. The woke thing was a disaster. I still is a disaster. But it doesn't mean that... But the thing is, there's a big difference between me and Brett in this case. I didn't do a hundred podcasts on COVID. I did like two podcasts on COVID. The measure of my concern about COVID can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it. It's like once we had a sense of how to live with COVID, I was just living with COVID. Like, okay, if you get vaxxed or don't get vaxxed, wear a mask or don't wear a mask, travel or don't travel. You've got a few things to decide, but my kids were stuck at home on iPads for too long. I didn't agree with that. It was obviously not functional. I criticized that on the margins, but there was not much to do about it. But the thing I didn't do is make this my life and just browbeat people with one message or another. We need a public health regime where we can trust what competent people are saying to us about what medicines are safe to take. And in the absence of that, craziness is going to put... Even in the presence of that craziness is going to proliferate given the tools we've built, but in the absence of that, it's going to proliferate for understandable reasons and that's gonna, it's not gonna be good next time when something orders of magnitude more dangerous hits us. And that's, I spent a little, insofar as I think about this issue, I think much more about next time than this time. </s> |
<s>[INST] and somehow avoiding distractions of all different forms like uh news stories, emails but also distractions from other interesting projects that you previously worked on are currently working on and so on. You just want to really focus your mind [/INST] and I mean I can take some time off for distractions and in between but I think it can't be too much uh you know most of your day is sort of like spent on that problem and then you know I drink coffee, I had my morning routine. I look at some news twitter, hacker news, Wall Street Journal etcetera so it's great. </s><s>[INST] So basically you wake up you have some coffee. Are you trying to get to work as quickly as possible? Do you do taking this diet of of like what the hell is happening in the world? 1st [/INST] I am I do find it interesting to know about the world. I don't know that it's useful or good but it's part of my routine right now. So I do read through a bunch of news articles and I want to be informed and um I'm suspicious of it. I'm suspicious of the practice but currently that's where I am. Oh </s><s>[INST] you mean suspicious about the positive effect of that practice on your productivity and your well being is [/INST] my well being psychologically and </s><s>[INST] also on your ability to deeply understand the world because there's a bunch of sources of information, you're not really focused on deeply integrating [/INST] distracting your Yeah, </s><s>[INST] in terms of perfectly productive day for how long of a stretch of time In one session, do you try to work and focus on the thing? A couple of hours? There's one hours and 30 minutes, 10 minutes. [/INST] I can probably go like a small few hours and then I need some breaks in between for like food and stuff. And yeah, but I think like it's still really hard to accumulate hours. I was using a tracker that told me exactly how much time I spent coding any one day and even on a very productive day I still spent only like six or eight hours. Yeah, and it's just because there's so much padding, commute talking to people, food etcetera, there's like the cost of life just living and sustaining and homeostasis and just maintaining yourself as a human is very high and </s><s>[INST] and that there seems to be a desire within the human mind to to participate in society that creates that pattern because I yeah, the most productive days I've ever had is just completely from start to finish, just tuning out everything and just sitting there and then and then you could do more than six and eight hours, Is there some wisdom about what gives you strength to do? Like uh tough days of long focus? [/INST] Yeah, just like whenever I get obsessed about a problem, something just needs to work, something just needs to exist. </s><s>[INST] It needs to exist. And so you're able to deal with bugs and programming issues and technical issues and uh design decisions that turned out to be the wrong ones, you're able to think through all of that given, given that you want to think to exist, [/INST] it needs to exist. And then I think to me also a big factor is, you know, our other humans are going to appreciate it. Are they going to like it? That's a big part of my motivation if I'm helping humans and they seem happy, they say nice things, they tweet about it or whatever that gives me pleasure because I'm doing something useful. </s><s>[INST] So like you do see yourself sharing it with the world, like what? Get help with the blog posts or videos? [/INST] Yeah, I was thinking about it like suppose I did all these things but did not share them. I don't think I would have the same amount of motivation that I can build up. </s><s>[INST] You enjoy the feeling of other people gaining value and happiness from the stuff you've created. What about diet is there? I saw you play with intermittent fasting you fast. Does that help [/INST] with everything </s><s>[INST] with the things you played? What's been most beneficial to the, your ability to mentally focus on the thing and just mental mental productivity and happiness. You're still fast [/INST] so fast. But I do intermittent fasting. But really what it means at the end of the day is I skip breakfast. So I do uh 18 6 roughly by default when I'm in my steady state, if I'm traveling or doing something else, I will break the rules. But in my steady state I do 18 6, so I eat only from 12 to 6. Not a hard rule and I break it often, but that's my default. And then um yeah, I've done a bunch of random experiments for the most part right now where I've been for the last year and a half I want to say is um plant based or plant forward. I heard plant forward. It sounds </s><s>[INST] better. Exactly. I [/INST] don't actually know the difference is, but it sounds better in my mind, but it just means that I prefer plant based food and uh </s><s>[INST] or cooked, I [/INST] prefer cooked and plant </s><s>[INST] based. So plant based. Forgive me, I don't actually know how why the category of plant entails [/INST] just means that you're not </s><s>[INST] about it [/INST] and you can flex and uh you just prefer to eat plants and you know, you're not making, you're not trying to influence other people and if someone is, you come to someone's house party and they serve you a steak that they're really proud of. You will eat it. It's </s><s>[INST] just not judgmental. That's beautiful. I mean that's um on the flip side of that, but I'm very sort of flexible. Have you tried doing one meal a day? [/INST] I have accidentally, not consistently, but I've accidentally had that. I don't, I don't like it. I think it makes me feel not good. It's too, it's too much, too much of a hit. And so currently I have about two meals a day, 12 and six. </s> |
<s>[INST] the world reminds us of our throne Nous for some more than others. [/INST] Yes, absolutely. And for people who have to contend on a daily basis with the fact that the social position they're thrown into is one that um negates them, or one that oppresses them, or one that sort of pushes them to the side in some way or another. I mean, the Black experience is interesting in this respect to franz Fanon, who is a contemporary of certain both Lars writes about it and it's very familiar the things that he's saying now, but you know, he writes back in the fifties about being a black man in paris and gagging on getting on an elevator with a woman alone. And how, like, you know, her reaction to him not knowing him not having any views about any reason to have any views about him, sort of puts him in a particular social position with respect to her. And that's if you don't have that experience, it's much harder to recognize the um the way in which what were thrown into something we might not have chosen. So the idea that that that that's not an aspect of our existence um which as you describe in rand's views, she sounds more like start she sounds more like it either it's not an aspect of our existence or at least we ought to sort of aim at its not being an almost </s><s>[INST] act as if it's not. Yeah, exactly, it's not. [/INST] And so I think from my point of view, I don't I don't pretend that I'm explaining the public reception of her, I'm just sort of trying to, trying to say how I understand her in this um intellectual context, from my point of view, that's not something big big to miss and the ambition to think that really what's happening is that we're all the same, we're all rational beings, we're all being. So if we just got the axioms of our existence rights and made good judgments and reasoned in an appropriate way, would um optimize ourselves. That feels to me like a kind of natural end point of the philosophical tradition. I mean, Plato starts off with a view that helps us in that direction, and the enlightenment moves us further in that direction, but from my point of view that movement has led us astray because it's missed something really important that's crucial to the kind of being that that we are. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, this is the music [/INST] system, you </s><s>[INST] let's talk about thrown nous and I think you mentioned that in the context of Heidegger. Yeah, so can we talk about Heidegger, who is this philosopher? What are some fascinating ideas that he brought to the world? [/INST] Okay, so Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher, he do know when he was born 1889, by I don't know that only by accident, it's because it's the same year that Vicki Einstein and Austrian philosopher was born and the same year that Hitler was born, so if I've remembered my dates right and someone will call in and correct me otherwise, but that's the way it, it sort of sits in my memory bank. And it's interesting that the three of them were born at the same time, uh Wittgenstein and Heidegger share some similarities, but then it's also interesting that Heidegger was um was a Nazi. I mean, this is a very disturbing fact about his personal political background. Um and so it's something that anyone who thinks that things that he said might be interesting has got a content with Heidegger </s><s>[INST] was born in Germany, Hitler in Austria, Wittgenstein is Austria also, but so you have to, when when you call Heidegger Nazi, you have to remember, I mean, there was millions of Nazis too. So, like, there are parts of their that's the history of the world, you know, there's a lot of communists, marxists and uh nazis in that part of history. [/INST] Absolutely. And, you know, one of the discussion points as well, was he just a kind of social nazi, you know, I mean, you know, he went to parties with them and stuff, or is he like, did he really believe in the ideology and that that's a Choice point? And and, you know, we could talk about it if, if you want, he he held a political position. That's one of the relevant parts in 1933, he was made rector of the University of Freiburg, that's like the president of the university, um and that was in Germany, all the universities are our state universities, and so that's a political appointment. </s><s>[INST] Can we just pause on this point from an existentialist perspective, what's the role for standing up to evil? So, I mean, I think camus probably had something to say about these things because he was a bit of a political figure. Like, do you have a responsibility not just for your decisions, but you know, if the world you see around you is um going against what you believe, somewhere deep inside is ethical. Do you have a responsibility to stand up to that, even if it costs you your life or your wellbeing? [/INST] You ask from an existential perspective, and there's lots of different positions that you could have. So let me tell you something in the area of what I think I might believe, which comes out of this tradition. Um and it's this uh if you live in a community where people are being dragged down by the norms of the community rather than elevated, then there's two things that you have to recognize. One is that you bear some responsibility for that, not necessarily because you chose it. Uh maybe you reviled it, Maybe you were against it, but there's some way in which we all act in accordance with the norms of our culture. We all give into them in some way or another. And if those norms are broken, then there's some way in which we've allowed ourselves to be responsible for for broken norms, we've become responsible for broken norms and I do think you have to face up to that. I think that um let's just take gender norms. Maybe the gender norms are broken, maybe the way men and women treat one another, the way men treat women is broken. You know, maybe there's maybe it is, maybe there's I'm not making a substantive claim, I'm just saying, you know, lots of people say it is. And if you're in a culture where uh those norms take root, you you don't get to just isolate yourself and pull yourself out of the culture and think I don't have any responsibility um that you are already a part of the culture, even if you're isolating yourself from it, that's a way of rejecting the sort of part you play in the culture. But it's not a way of getting behind it. Now, you're playing that role differently. You're saying, I I don't I don't I don't want to take responsibility for what's going on around me and that's a way of taking responsibility by refusing to do it. So I think we're implicated in whatever whatever is going on around us. And if we're going to do anything in our lives, we ought to recognize that, recognize that even in situations where you maybe didn't decide to do it, you you could be part of bringing other people down and then devote yourself to try to figure out how to act differently so that the norms up update themselves. And I think this is not a criticism of people. And to Alyosha, who we mentioned in the Brothers Karamazov, he's a character, he's a kind of saintly character um, in the brothers Karamazov, but that one crucial moment in his, in that story when he realizes how awful he's been being to someone without ever even intending to do that. It's Grishenko who is this sort of fascinating woman and she's a very erotic woman. She's sort of sexual and, and, and Alyosha, In my reading of it is kind of attracted to her. But he's a young kid, he's 20 or whatever and he's kind of embarrassed about it and he lives in the monastery and he's thinking maybe he wants to be a priest and he's kind of embarrassed by it. So what does he do every time they run across one another in the street, he averts his gaze and why is he doing that? Because he's kind of embarrassed. But how does Grishenko experience it? Well, she knows she's a fallen woman and she knows that Alyosha has this other position in society. So her read on it is he's passing judgment on me, he can see that he doesn't want to be associated with me, he can see that I'm a fallen woman, he knows that in order to maintain his purity. He's got a reason, he's got to avoid me? That's not what Alyosha intended to do? But that's the way it's experience. And so there's this way he comes to recognize, oh my God, like what I'm supposed to do is love people in Dostoyevsky's view of things. And what I'm doing instead is dragging this poor woman down, I'm making her life worse. I'm making her feel terrible about herself. And if I actually came to know her, I'd recognize her condition is difficult. She's living a difficult life. She's making hard choices. And why don't I? You know, why don't I see that in her face instead of this other thing that's making me want to avoid her. And that's a huge moment. But the idea is that we are implicated in bringing other people down whether we want to be or not. And that's our conditions. So </s> |